Indeed, money makes the world go 'round, and with his new collection of essays "Eat the Rich," the seersucker satirist is out to bring economics down to a level everyone can understand and laugh at.
Don't let the title fool you: O'Rourke still fully embraces his self-proclaimed mantra as "the only open Republican in the national media." The new tome is his first salvo since the 1994 mid-career retrospective, "Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut," which contrasted the humorous hippie rants of his college and National Lampoon days with his more recent, biting but conservative work for Rolling Stone and the American Spectator.
"Eat the Rich" addresses what O'Rourke calls the "one fundamental question about economics: Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?" To find an answer, he jets from Wall Street to Cuba, Russia to Hong Kong, ripping off the layers of hypocrisy inherent to any system whether it's capitalist, socialist, communist or in complete disarray.
As always, O'Rourke scores points for stinging attacks on cultural icons. Walking the reader through a warped version of Econ 101, he attempts to compare the societal economic benefits of John Grisham's pulp fiction versus Courtney Love's "cat calling." Each individual would be more productive, and thus more economically beneficial, if they focused on what they do best, O'Rourke argues. He bolsters his argument with handy charts to show that Grisham produces more crappy books than Courtney produces crappy albums because the Mississippi novelist isn't distracted by pathetic attempts to act and model.
By the time the lessons are over, however, it's sadly apparent that O'Rourke has begun to dull his edge a little bit. He sees parental teaching of values as the key to a good life - yawn... And he feels that we humans can never fully appreciate the blessings we have. We all have the potential to be rich and successful, he suggests, but even as these promises lie before us, we want to chew up and spit out those who have attained them.
(Carl Kozlowski)
P.J. O'Rourke appears October 1 at Borders, 830 North Michigan, (312)573-0564.
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.