WHEN I was very young and very leftist, I read the works of right-wing writers through gritted teeth. Except ex-hippie P.J. O’Rourke. (“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”)
He wrote for National Lampoon, Rolling Stone and Playboy, and unlike H.L. Mencken, O’Rourke didn’t detest humanity; he simply considered all of us ridiculous, himself included.
O’Rourke passed away a day after Valentine’s Day. He was 74. He had survived a “malignant hemorrhoid” in 2008. (“I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy’s. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass…well, I’ll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me.”)
But O’Rourke also had lung cancer, and it was merciless.
Well, I thought, if God wanted O’Rourke in heaven already, then I’m glad He summoned him just before (according to the polls) a significant majority of Filipino voters elect the son and namesake of a dictator whose ouster was celebrated 36 years ago by freedom-loving people all over the world, O’Rourke among them.
“I was nine years old when I fell in love with the Philippines,” he wrote in 1987. “My father had been there during World War II, practically the only place he’d ever been outside Ohio.” His old man was a chief petty officer in the Navy Construction battalions. They built docks, warehouses and barracks in the P.I. “When my father died in 1956, I found his photo albums from the war…. [T]o me in Toledo, Ohio, the Philippines represented everything I could hope for in the way of romance.” (Romance as in adventure.)
Three decades later, O’Rourke was sent to the Philippine capital by Rolling Stone to write about the “snap” presidential election which President Ferdinand Marcos announced on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.” Marcos told his American audience that he was supported by the Filipino people and he would prove it in an election set for Feb. 7, 1986. The opposition candidate was Cory Aquino, the widow of former Sen. Ninoy Aquino. While escorted by Marcos’s soldiers, Ninoy was shot in the head at the Manila airport on Aug. 21, 1983.
Back to O’Rourke.
The P.I., he said, did not disappoint. “The country was as exotic and the people were as attractive as I’d known they would be…. And the society, culture and politics…were unfathomable, desperate, violent and strange, which is a large part of what romance is all about.”
In his scintillating article about the events leading to the Philippine “people power” revolution in 1986, O’Rourke wrote:
“Reporters who do duty in the third world spend a lot of time saying, ‘It’s not that simple.’ We say, ‘It’s not that simple about the Israelis and the PLO,’ or ‘It’s not that simple about the contras and the Sandinistas.’ But in the Philippines it was that simple. It was simpler than that. Ferdinand Marcos is human sewage, an evil old power-addled flaming Glad Bag, a vicious lying dirtball who ought to have been dragged through the streets of Manila with his ears nailed to a truck bumper.”
That wasn’t an opinion. Every single word of that statement was true, including “to” and “ought.”
Today, Marcos (according to the polls) is considered by many voters in the P.I. as a “great” but “flawed” leader, “misled” by his own officials, and “misunderstood” by his opponents. His son, if (when) elected in May, would (will) finally set things right.
Right.
In February 1986, when the ballots were still being counted manually in the P.I., and when it was already clear that the Marcosian regime was blatantly and shamelessly committing election fraud despite the presence of the international media and a U.S. congressional delegation, O’Rourke attended a protest Mass at Baclaran church in Manila to hear the opposition candidate, Cory Aquino, speak.
“The crowd began singing ‘Bayan Ko’ (‘My Country’), the anthem of the campaign, written in the 1930s, during American rule. They sang in the clear, harmonious voice that seems to be given to all the world’s put-upon people…. Standing there by the altar with the rest of the press corps, looking out at these nice, determined faces, feeling this appetite for hope, I began to cry. I was standing there like a big fool with tears running down my face. I remember it all from twenty years ago when I was in a crowd like this — the meetings, the marches, the joy of moral certitude, romance amidst the tear gas. I remember the wonderful fight against prejudice, poverty, injustice, a new day dawning…. And I remember how it all slipped away and came to s**t.”
In 2008, after being diagnosed with rectal cancer, O’Rourke said he would like to thank God, “with all my heart, for whiskey.”
God, thank you for Mr. Patrick Jake O’Rourke.
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He’s right.
