guile or gall

I am in the middle of some pretty heavy reading, so I thought I might shoot the breeze with you about something I read a few weeks back…

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut

It is a collection of 25 years of random crap from P.J. O’Rourke, that lefty gone right.

P.J. is big on promoting his whole lefty gone right bit. I can’t blame him. It’s a good story. It’ll get you your own radio show, or whatever the hell it has gotten Mr. O’Rourke.
I don’t read his press clippings, so anyway.[…]
It has gotten him far enough to get some publisher to put out a collection of his ramblings – and presumably pay him for it.

By all reasoning, I should like it. There are stories of shooting shit in southern Ohio’s farm country. There are hippy head-bashings and bits about shagging minors. There are tales of driving fossil fuel swilling rampages, in the dumbest cars you can get your hands on. All things I would, normally, go entirely in support of…

To me, it reads like a boomer collection of self importance.

I hope to God that in twenty years I do not feel the need to make people sit down and soak up two and one half decades worth of my best bullshit. I also hope that in twenty years my collection of bullshit tells a better story.

At the end of the book, I feel like ol’ P.J. was a bit of a poseur back in the day and he grew up to be like every junk bond trading, coke snorting owner of a stainless steel sports car. For all of his linguistic finesse, O’Rourke reads like a sixty year old Beatles fan, sitting next to me at some hotel bar, enjoying retirement in spite of two or three ugly divorces and as many bankruptcies.

I don’t buy that he is or was left or right. He was and is a greedy shit, playing the system for pussy or payola. His idealism, to either side of the aisle, is the reward of people who have the cushion to dwell on jive (myself included).

But, I am not one of those boomer Beemer drivers.
After a few weeks of thinking, that sort of smarm just pisses me off.