Globetrotting for his new book Eat the Rich, America’s favourite rightwing iconoclast found laughter in squalor and corruption everywhere. PJO’Rourke speaks to the Mail & Guardian
Eat the Rich contrasts different economic systems around the world. What gave you the idea?
I wanted to find out why some countries are so rich and others are so poor. I’d spent 15 years travelling around places that had very different levels of wealth, and I couldn’t figure out why the Philippines is so wretchedly poor, or why Japan, which was in a virtually medieval state of economy by the time we bombed them flat in 1945, was so very rich.
And what was your conclusion?
Painfully simple, I’m afraid, and it wasn’t the answer I expected. Being a free-market guy, my guess was that economic freedom made one place rich and another poor, but it seems not to be the case. There are enormous restraints on economic freedom in Sweden, yet it’s undeniably a very prosperous place. It turns out to be law and order, property rights and democracy. Or something that approaches democracy.
In the book, you’ve travelled around these countries laughing at people …
You bet. Foreigners are always funny.
Did you find it hard to write humorously about places like Cuba or Albania where the political system inflicts suffering on its people?
Not at all, because humour is primarily the study of human folly. It would be impossible to laugh at a place where the suffering was caused by an act of God – making fun of the results of a mud-slide would not be very funny. On the other hand, if the aid coming into the country to help the victims was subject to terrible corruption, then you could make fun of that, but you can’t make fun of the disaster itself. I didn’t have any difficulty because the problems of Albania or China are so clearly caused by human folly, which is always a fair target.
Yet you do mock the people who are victims of that folly, like the homeless Albanian family you observe from your hotel window.
I may make a bit of black humour out of their situation, but I wasn’t making fun of the poor little floppy kid who’s doubtless dead by now. Humour requires malice, and I certainly felt no malice towards them. I did feel impotent though, and one of the uses of humour is to cope with situations when you simply are rendered impotent by events – the clich “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry” is not without its deeper truth [laughs].
Is humour a way of distancing yourself from tragic situations; is it easier than straight reporting?
It’s simply the way that I look at the world. Some people’s defence mechanism is to get terribly earnest; mine is to stand back and look at things from a distance and to laugh when I don’t know what else to do. The important thing is to disseminate information about these situations, and one can do that whatever one’s tone. I do my best to be factual, so the information people will get will be, to the best of my ability, true information just as it would be if I went over with a bleeding heart.
Were you always a satirist?
No, I started out very serious, as young people tend to be, and I found that I had a knack for making people laugh – not always intentionally – so I went with the thing that I was better at.
When you were younger, you were famed for your drink- and drug-fuelled lifestyle. Now you’re married and you’re a father. Are the wild days over?
Yes, but that probably has more to do with my being 51, though people who are 51 have been known to do remarkably horrible things – there’s our president for instance. Lust can attack you at 51, but it doesn’t move as quickly as it used to, so you can sidestep it!
You once said that the United States was the best place to be at the end of the millennium. Do you still believe that?
For me, certainly, but then I’m an American. I’d be hard-put to find a better place for an average person in the world. If you picked someone at random, which would mean they’d be Indian or Chinese, and plonked them down someplace, they’d stand the best chance in the US.
And in terms of your economic explorations, do you think the US has come closest to having it figured out?
I don’t think the US has it figured out, but we have a pretty good balance of the things that make a successful economy. I don’t think this was achieved through the virtue of the American people though, it was probably just a historical accident.
What’s your view of Tony Blair’s Britain?
I don’t have a handle on it yet. I can’t figure out what New Labour is supposed to be for and what they’re against. Of course, like all politicians, they’re for good things and against bad things, but we knew that. I have a hard time telling Tony Blair’s administration from John Major’s; from a distance they look the same. They’re all of my generation, and they share this self- righteousness left over from the Sixties but, like members of the Clinton administration and most members of my generation, myself included, what the self is being so righteous about and what this fervour is for seems to have been lost in the haze of middle age.
Which of the countries you visited for Eat the Rich did you enjoy most?
Oh, Hong Kong. It’s got that kind of energy to it that New York had back in the Sixties, or the way downtown Chicago was. There’s this bustle, like everything’s going on, and you see every kind of person imaginable on earth. Whether one would want to live there is another question – for one thing, the weather is unbelievably bad.
What do you predict will happen to Hong Kong?
It will slowly be absorbed into the fascist corruption that is mainland China. Actually, I think the Asia crisis has largely saved Hong Kong from interference by the mainland Chinese because they need the money and they don’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
Are you going to stop travelling now and write about something closer to home?
Yes. I’ve been travelling constantly since 1982 and I’m tired of it. The working title for the next book is The History of Toledo, Ohio, from the Dawn of Time Until the End of the Universe. That’s where I’m from.
Eat the Rich is published by Picador