Rational Lampoon; finally, P.J. O'Rourke breaks from the right-wing bad boys.

• Author: Fallows, James
• Position: Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

This is a much better book* than I would ever have expected. Its strengths reflect well on the author himself Its weaknesses are mainly those of a genre O'Rourke has let himself fall into, one he should begin crawling out of as soon as he can.

The genre in question, that of the Right-Wing Outlaw, didn't even exist 15 years ago. During the generation or two before that, to be a cultural outlaw was to be a left-winger. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, John Lennon and Mick Jagger and the music world in general, they all implied that to be sexy and clever you also had to be on the left. The Young Republicans of those days were the overearnest strivers who wore neckties to college classes and later got hauled up before the Watergate committees. Right-wing activists tended to resemble Ayn Rand or Pat Buchanan or Jeane Kirkpatrick or Jack Kemp. That is, they were forceful and tireless but not exactly blessed with the light touch.

Hollywood still seems to operate on the liberalismequals-sex-appeal principle. Warren Beatty, Madonna, Spike Lee, and Jack Nicholson are all flashy. Charlton Heston, he of the NRA ads, is not. But things have certainly changed in the journalistic and political worlds. Tom Wolfe came out of the closet as a right-winger in the early eighties to become the first flashy conservative. The American Spectator made fun of, rather than moralized about, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. College newspapers like the Dartmouth Review and overaged collegians like the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal specialized in being wiseguys. Lee Atwater playing blues guitar represented Right-Wing Outlaw style at its peak. Buffalo soldier

P. J. O'Rourke, who started out being a general-purpose outlaw as editor of the National Lampoon, has positioned himself as a right-winger for the past few years. He uses drugs but is against welfare. He loves it when the Republicans win but loves to make fun of them. (He says in this book that at the 1989 inaugural ball, Marilyn Quayle's chignon hairdo made her "look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual.... I have an idea that-like the Cape buffalo-if Marilyn gets furious and charges, you've got only one shot at the skull. You wouldn't want to just wound her.") The notion behind Parliament of Whores, apart from the idea that O'Rourke might combine some of his old magazine pieces with new reporting, is that the book will give a tour of the government and public policy that is conservative and funny at the same time.

The book is, indeed, very funny. What's more surprising is that so much of it is smart. Perhaps I'm overreacting, as with Samuel Johnson and the talking dog. It is so amazing to find that O'Rourke is serious and sophisticated about any governmental issue that it's tempting to forget the countless other issues about which he makes cheap-shot jokes. Still, the half or so of this book that is very strong shows that O'Rourke's main literary virtue is like Tom Wolfe's. That virtue is not showy writing nor glee in ridiculing leftist poseurs but a willingness to go out and look at things rather than sit home and work out bons mots. The most annoying trait of Right-Wing Outlaws in...