Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Matthew Continetti shares the wisdom of the endlessly quotable P.J. O’Rourke, the man who skewered Washington, D.C., a hundred times, in prose that’s a lesson to any aspiring journalist, and a warning to any politician.
The Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Easy Money premiered in August 1983. Thank God it flopped. Success would have tempted one of the movie’s screenwriters, former National Lampoon editor-in-chief P.J. O’Rourke, to follow the road that leads into the Hollywood Hills. Instead, failure freed him to do something invaluable.
O’Rourke turned to freelance writing. He spent the rest of the 1980s covering—or more accurately, satirizing—international hot spots for Rolling Stone. He covered elections in Manila, Philippines; democratic transition in South Korea; and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I decided to become a foreign correspondent,” O’Rourke wrote in an autobiography for his website. “Foreigners are funny and do my work for me.”
By 1988, O’Rourke needed a break from extensive travel to dangerous places. He followed the U.S. presidential race and moved to Washington, D.C. He found government’s daily operations more compelling than the political horse race. “I preferred to concentrate on systems and institutions,” he wrote later, “not because people aren’t important, but because people are important, in Washington, so briefly.”
His shift in focus was rewarded. The White House, Congress, Supreme Court, Pentagon, and other federal agencies all fell under O’Rourke’s gimlet eye. He mocked government and its follies, overreach, and pretense. But he also tried to understand how and why the system functions. Soon he accumulated enough material for a book. Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government came out in 1991. It was his first bestseller, a career-defining success.
Yet Parliament of Whores is more than a classic. It remains the only civics textbook you’ll ever need—and an excellent primer on the craft of reporting and writing. Thirty-four years later, it has lost none of its freshness, relevance, and bite.
