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WELL worth reading the complete article... One of the best things I've seen on the subject for a long time. But what else would one expect from the author of the seminal and deeply influential 'How to drive fast, etc'

Love PJ O'Rourke. One of my favourites. Sorry to hear he's sick. Best quote: "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." Structure a society around that principle, and you solve the largest percent of our problems.

I was just looking at my copy - it's hard to realise it must be 30 years since 'Republican Party Reptile' first came out and very nearly as long since I first read it - it's still one of my all time favourites. Very, very interesting to see the shift in his take on death though.

This is what he said back then:

"If only it were that simple. God, we could all go out in a blaze of flaming aluminium alloys formulated specially for the Porsche factory race effort like James Dean did! No ulcers, no haemorrhoids, no bulging waistlines, soft dicks, or false teeth... bash!! kaboom!! ... But that's not the way it goes. No. What actually happens is you fall for that teenage lovely in the next seat over, fall for her like a ton of condoms, and before you know it you're married and have teenage lovelies of your own – getting felt up in a Pontiac Trans Am this very minute, no doubt – plus a six-figure mortgage, a liver the size of the Bronx, and a Country Squire that's never seen the sweet side of sixty.

It's hard to face the truth, but I suppose you yourself realize that if you'd had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck."

It's like Seinfeld wrote the book of Job. How Jewish can you get?

Or, should I say, how Jewish can a Roman Catholic get?

We are dying PJ dying. I think the only suffering I've experienced lately is reading O'Rourke's blather. There is never lack of an audience for nonsense. So many falacies, so little time to debunk them.

"I believe in God. God created the world."

Arrogance right out of the box. Not one moment's hesistation. Even many of the most ardent Christian theologians aren't always quite so sure of God's existance. Didn't we hear more than one Christian prelate on this blog or interviewed on Sunday Sequence who said he had doubts at one time or another in his life but not this guy. You'd have to go to some Islamic Taleban cave in Afghanistan to find comparable certitude. Yes a cave. That's where this philosophy comes from.

"Obviously pain had to be included in God's plan. Otherwise we'd never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we'd never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn't be here."

Is that why we don't walk off the edges of cliffs, because of pain? Funny, I'd think you wouldn't feel the pain until you reached the bottom....if you felt anything at all. Most animals never willingly approach fire anywhere nearly close enough to be injured by the heat but they stay away. Did O'Rourke forget instinct or wasn't that part of god's plan too?

"But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit ... um ... extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson we're studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?"

Suffering is god's way of warning sanctimonious poets, philosophers, political observers, and humorists that they are violating his laws by sewing the seeds of reflection which leads to discontent and anxiety and doubt among his otherwise happy flock. Death is his punishment for those who do not heed his warning. This time the cancer was curable. Next time God might not let O'Rourke off so easily.

As I've written before, I do not trust anyone who has been an ardent anything and then had an epiphany. They admit they've been dead wrong once, there is no reason to trust that their pontificating their newly found wouldn't be wrong again. Born Again Christians, Christopher Hitchens, and anyone who suddenly swings from one political or religious extreme to another immediately come to mind. Just recall those two pathic creatures who were interviewed here recently, one a theologian who became an athiest or at least an agnostic, the other who went the other way. It was unfortunate neither of them was asked how they suddenly discovered the real truth in life.

William: I presume you already know the answer that Ken Ham (and any other YEC) will give in response to "how could a loving God allow such and such to happen ?" i.e. no illness or death (and certainly no pain) before the fall etc. This is one point the YECs definitely go on and on about.

There is only one certainty in this life, and that is that we are going to leave it.
Everything else is meaningless.

CSA
I'm sorry - death has a meaning, but nothing else does? Exactly how does death manage this? And if death is certain, shouldn't we also be certain that we're now alive? Life doesn't have a meaning, but death does? Why the asymmetry? And what has certianty got to do with meaning?

Graham Veale

Marc
I think the guy was trying to inject some humour into news that would, all other things being equal, make most of us pretty glum.
I don't think he was advancing a credo.

I still can't work out why an Irish-American Catholic sounds so Jewish.

PJ ORouke that is, not Marcus Aurelius.

Graham Veale

Take out the paragraph about the Crucifixion, and the comment about the rosary. They're not essential to the piece. This is Job (or Qoheleth) doing standup.

The following by Michael Symmons Roberts may be of interest to some.


Hosea's Body

The day Gomer left, she got up before him.
The windows were open. It was high June.
As she swept the front door shut behind her,
all the air in the house rushed out
through the narrowing crack in terror
of hanging around to go stale with Hosea.
The curtains billowed like full sails
on their way somewhere, then sighed flat.

Since then he has never really got up.
His body has. And walked, fed itself,
shopped, even bathed. In the damp footsteps
of Archimedes, Marat, all the greats,
he keeps his seminal events for the bath -
prayers, tuneless whistling, and a look
in bewilderment along his mutineering body,
which while he considers whether
sickness is a part of health,
is telling him under the running taps that
cold water feels like the taste of sugar,
hot water feels like the taste of salt.

I am one of the some Peter.

What came into my own mind were Eliot's lines:

"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker".

O'Rourke has just had that experience but he is saying "Hey mate, I'm going to join in the joke..." I am sure I saw in his article that he too, like Eliot, is afraid but humour, like whiskey, and indeed like God, is a tried and tested way of dealing with fear.

Eric Idle may, however, have been a bigger influence than Eliot - I don't think anyone could say of O'Rourke that he didn't "Always look on the right side of life".

portwyne, was he looking on the right side of life when he was on the political left or now when he is on the political right? The thing about some people is that it doesn't really matter to them what they preach to other people about how to see the world, what to think, how to act, it is the fact that they must preach to them at all because they see themselves as smarter and better while the rest of us are blind fools who must be shown the light. I don't walk away from such people....I run.

Marcus

Maybe it's just my European liberalism but he always seemed pretty much on the Right to me - the reference I made in post # 13 was certainly to my perception of him as an outspoken apologist for essentially Right-wing ideas. While sharing my cultural and social liberalism, hearrived at that stance through a rigorous attachment to individualism wherever the concept might be applied.

I have never had any difficulty finding people and ideas I disagree with funny - indeed the greater difficulty is usually to take them seriously. I have always found O'Rourke, even when deprecating his sentiments, both hilarious and thought-provoking.

I love the bumptious enthusiasm of those so taken with what they have in life that they want to share it with others - I almost invariably pass if the offering isn't to my liking but there is usually a little sneaking admiration for the offerer. I am with you though in beating a swift retreat if I catch the merest sniff of greed or self-interest lurking in the background.

Portwyine;

"I am with you though in beating a swift retreat if I catch the merest sniff of greed or self-interest lurking in the background."

Is that what I said? That's not what I meant. Greed and sefl-interest are emotions I understand, accept, and expect. When they are absent, what is there in its place? Megalomania? Or worse lunacy? Maybe megalomania is lunacy. It means he actually believes what he says. Now that really is scary.

Self-interest is the most vital and beneficial human trait there is. If only we had even more of it, many of our societal problems wouldn't exist.

Marcus

Not only did you not mean it, you did not say it, my apologies. I allowed an undoubtedly imperfect recollection of an earlier posting where I thought you had felt preachers were after your wallet rather than your soul to distort the very plain facts of what you actually said.

You ask what might fill the place left by an absence of greed and self-interest and suggest lunacy and/or megalomania as possibilities; I would suggest love is also a contender.

Self-interest is an absolutely basic human trait which lies just beneath the skin (if that deep) in each and every one of us. It helps us function, it helps society function, but ultimately it destroys both. When we overfeed the self we nourish a monster which will consume us.

The more we concentrate on our own needs and desires the more barriers we erect between ourselves and the needs and desires of others. The process of self-advancement leads inexorably to isolation. The human mind, however, finds nothing so desolate, so unnatural as isolation. Sound mental health is impossible for the socially and emotionally isolated: show me a megalomaniac and I will show you someone whom self-interest has made profoundly alone. One can be alone in busy social whirl, in an active vibrant church, in the traditional nuclear family, one can even be alone as half of a couple.

Anne Michaels said "we're never ourselves until we contain two souls" - we need not to be alone. We search for a soul-mate - I defy anyone to tell me that they have never longed for one, we crave acceptance in society, we look for validation in the eyes of others - these traits are as natural as self-interest but their achievement requires us seriously to curb self-interest.

For some love may start by admitting just one other soul, by putting the interests of one other before self; if, say, a family comes along they add a few others; for some, maybe naturally warm and sympathetic people, there is a preparedness to put themselves out for a higher number of people and they will be happier for it. Now I know you have no time for mystical cr4p but, let's be selfish - I do, the experience of divine love is to participate in the undifferentiated soul of all humanity, it is the ultimate self-surrender, the ultimate connection.

Hope I've responded to you too there JW.