Don't You Forget About Me: The John Hughes I Knew

By P.J. O'Rourke

http://www.thedailybeast.com/

March 22, 2015

Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall

To mark the 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club, P.J. O’Rourke remembers the wit, wisdom, and politics of his friend John Hughes.

Somehow—while we Senior Teens in our forties, fifties and sixties weren’t paying attention—30 years have elapsed since The Breakfast Club was released. To mark the anniversary, the movie will be screened in 430 U.S. theaters on March 26 and March 31. If you are a Judd Nelson/John Bender type who would rather not be seen crying in public, I suggest you don’t go.

The Breakfast Club is John Hughes’s masterwork. Unless Ferris Bueller’s Day Offis John Hughes’s masterwork. The latter is a shout from the peak of adolescent heights. The former is a call from the pit of adolescent depths. In the sea-level bog of middle age, they’ll both make you weep. I watched The Breakfast Club, as it were, home alone.

And I was missing John, who died of cardiac arrest six years ago at 59. I met him in the mid-1970s when he was the youngest vice president ever at Leo Burnett and—for the Ferris Bueller of it—was writing freelance articles in the National Lampoon. I was an editor there. John wrote so fast and so well that it was hard for a monthly magazine to keep up with him.

I had an idea for a “National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody.” It would be a full replica of a big fat Midwestern local paper of the kind extant back then— The Dacron, Ohio, Sunday Republican-Democrat. Dacron was an imaginary city that Doug Kenny and I had created for the “National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” published a few years before. John agreed to co-edit the newspaper parody.

A few excepts from John’s voluminous contributions:

Extended Forecast

Cold this winter. Turning warmer in the spring. Then hot and humid all summer. A period of cooling will follow in autumn. Then cold and wintery next winter.

Citizen Foils Telephone Pest

Miss Anna Gribble who called police last week to report continuing threats and abuse from an anonymous phone-caller calling her at 262-6449, has had her phone number removed from listing and changed to 261-6338.

In the “Personals” section of the Classified Ads

Karen. HAPPY VALENTINES DAY even if no boys sent you any cards.—Dad

It would be nice to think that Doug’s and my imaginary Dacron gave John Hughes the inspiration for imaginary Shermer, Illinois, where most of his Bildungsroman movies are set. But John was always making worlds in his head. John had the kind of creativity you don’t see much of outside Genesis chapters 1 and 2.

John told me he knew everyone in Shermer, not just the people in his movies. He knew where they lived and what they did for a living. He could tell you about the amities, enmities, passing acquaintanceships, extramarital relations and distant cousinhoods of assistant principal Vernon, the Benders, the Standishes, the fellow Breakfast Club families of Reynoldses, Clarks and Johnsons plus the ever-vacationing Griswolds, the always-losing-a-kid McCallisters, and Uncle Buck’s bookie.

John was the best, the easiest, the most productive and collaborative person with whom I’ve ever worked. Which sounds like a load of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, except that I, unlike John, don’t have the imagination to make up somebody like John.

When I became editor in chief of the National Lampoon at the end of 1978, the first thing I did was call John at Leo Burnett and say, “I can pay you less.” But I couldn’t get him to move his family from Chicago to New York. “New York City would be okay,” he said, “if they’d clean the place up and move everything back ten feet.”

In the aftermath of National Lampoon’s Animal House success everyone at the magazine had the opportunity to make movies. Only John had movies to make.

John created Shermer, but, per Genesis chapter 3, he gave its residents free will. About Ferris Bueller, John said, “That kid will either become President of the United State or go to prison.” I said they were not mutually exclusive.

Politics being another bond I had with John. I’m not sure he’d be happy with me talking about his politics. He was a private man. But John’s politics have been discussed before. John was identified as a Reaganite in a somewhat inchoate 2006 Slate article by Michael Weiss, the point of which seemed to be that Michael Weiss was still miffed about the Reagan era. And, the same year, in an interview on Showbiz Tonight, Ben Stein (“Economics Teacher” in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) said, “John Hughes and I are among the only Republicans in the picture business.”

I wouldn’t agree with either Weiss or Stein. I have no idea how, or if, John voted. We never bothered to talk about it. And there’s nothing very JUST SAY NO about all the kids in The Breakfast Club (except the presumably this-is-your-brain-on-drugs Ally Sheedy/Allison Reynolds) getting high as the squirrels on Miss Anna Gribble’s telephone wire.

John and I never bothered to talk much about our politics. What we did talk about was the 20th century’s dominant scrambled egghead bien pensant buttinski parlor pinko righty-tighty lefty-loosey nutfudge notion that middle-class American culture was junk, that middle-class Americans were passive dimbulbs, that America itself was a flop and that America’s suburbs were a living hell almost beyond the power of John Cheever’s words to describe.

John said, “You remember the line in The Graduate where the party guest tells the Dustin Hoffman character, ‘I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.’ That was 1967. If the Dustin Hoffman character had gotten into plastics he’d be a millionaire by now, instead of riding on a city bus with a crazy girl in a wedding dress.”

We were becoming conservatives—in the most conservational sense. There were things that others before us had achieved and these were worth conserving.

John went first. At 20, he married his high school girl friend Nancy Ludwig and stayed married to her for the rest of his life and set up housekeeping and realized he had to make a living.

“I couldn’t go looking for a job wearing what people were wearing in 1970,” he said. “But I didn’t really know where to buy clothes that people weren’t wearing in 1970. I remembered that before I became hip my mother used to take me to Brooks Brothers in the Loop. So I went there. Behind the shirt counter was the same sales lady who’d been behind the shirt counter when I was a kid. She looked at me for a moment and said, ‘I knew you’d be back.’”

In 1976 John and Nancy had a son, John Hughes III, and in 1979 they’d have another, James. Family was the most conservative thing about John. Walking across the family room in your stocking feet and stepping on a Lego (ouch!) was the fundamental building block of society.

John would do nothing (such as move to New York or, later, stay in Hollywood) to jeopardize his family. But he had a mortgage, a 3-year-old and another child on the way when he left the serious paycheck of Leo Burnett to work at the National Lampoon for birdseed. John must have thought that gambling on humor was a conservative wager.

And humor was another conservative thing about John. We talked a lot about humor. It isn’t—as it’s often assumed to be—shocking, radical, transgressive or just a way to make people laugh. You can do that by farting. The root meaning of humor (Latin humorem, “fluid”) comes from medieval ideas of physiology in which personal traits were determined by the Cardinal Humours, blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy. And if you’ve ever raised that fundamental building block of society, a family, “blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy” pretty much covers it.

Here’s an almost 3,000-year-old Chinese joke about institutional corruption that John and I were fond of:

The Emperor’s cook is slicing meat and hiding half the slices in his apron. “A slice for me. A slice for the Emperor. A slice for me. A slice for the Emperor.” The cook’s wife says, “Stupid, you’re at home.”

You can search the works of Marx, Engles, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Patty Hearst when she was “Tania” in the Symbionese Liberation Army for humor, and in vain.

Like all of John’s movies, The Breakfast Club is conservative. Note that the first thing the disgruntled kids in detention do is not organize a protest, not express “class (of 1985) solidarity,” not chant “Students of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your locker combinations” and not claim it takes a Shermer to raise them.

They present themselves, like good conservatives do, as individuals and place the highest value, like this conservative does, on goofing off. Otherwise known as individual liberty.

Imagine, painfully, a 2015 remake of The Breakfast Club. Latino-American, African-American, Islamic-American, Born-Again Christian, Undocumented Alien, Feminist, Post-Feminist, Occupy Activist, Tea Party Member, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender… To cover all the bases of Identity Politics, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall would have had to double- and triple-up. And wear some strange cosmetics.

John kept his characters alike as possible, within the spectrum of high school anthropology, in order to make them as different as possible, within the spectrum of individuals. All five members of the Breakfast Club have Anglo-Saxon last names. All are attractive. They could be related (and John would have known) if five bland WASPy sisters had married two brunettes, two blonds and a redhead of varying abilities and intellects.

John worked with types but wouldn’t let them represent kinds. Claire Standish may be elected Prom Queen, but she isn’t the elected representative of the silk stocking district in the Congress of High School Detention. Nor has Shermer been gerrymandered to make sure that John Bender is the official representative of the under-employed labor force facing wage stagnation.

There’s nothing revolutionary about The Breakfast Club. On purpose. The kids don’t try to abolish authority and institutions. They elude and modify them with wit. This is a comedy. The total abolition of authority and institutions would be a tragedy. If you get rid of all authority and institutions, worse authority and institutions arise in their place. Any historical examples to the contrary since 1776 had escaped John’s (and my) notice.

That the kids’ troubles all stem from their families isn’t an accident of lazy writing. John was never lazy about back-story, or anything else. It’s that fundamental building block. The Lego that got stepped on matters more than the ugly Lego structures of authority and institutions.

To make them funny, the Breakfast Club members are subject to the Cardinal Humours—hoodlum Judd Nelson/John Bender’s blood, brianiac Anthony Michael Hall/Brian Ralph Johnson’s phlegm, jock Emilio Estevez/Andy Clark’s choler, basket case Ally Sheedy/Allison Reynolds’s melancholy and popular girl Molly Ringwald/Claire Standish’s (what I think of as the fifth Cardinal Humor) being a popular girl.

To make them conservative, they immediately start operating upon the three basic principles in The Wealth of Nations by that conservative fundamental block builder Adam Smith: Pursuit of self-interest, division of labor and freedom of trade.

No member of the Breakfast Club questions pursuit of self-interest, though it takes the five of them the whole movie to figure out where their self-interests lie. Even apparently self-destructive Allison Reynolds abjures from mind-altering substances, her mind being altered plenty enough already. And manifestly self-destructive John Bender declines to take a fatal punch at assistant principal Vernon, no matter how well-deserved.

Division of labor is the theme of the movie. Each kid discovers what’s valuable in the others. And—cue sentimental conservative favorite “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds—what’s valuable in him or her self.

Freedom of trade is the message of the movie. Albeit the trade is conducted in the coin of the adolescent realm, love.

But not just the face-suck love of Claire and Bender or Andy and Allison. A good conservative knows his Western Civ. And the only thing that’s made Civ. in the West worthwhile is love. So much so that the ancient Greeks had four names for it.

Storage—acceptance, the first thing the Breakfast Club learns.

Philia—friendship among equals, the best thing the Breakfast Club learns.

Eros—Claire and Bender, Andy and Allison.

Agape—love for the whole world, Shermer, Illinois, included. Brian Ralph Johnson triumphant with his manifesto (signed “The Breakfast Club”) to assistant principal Vernon, who may have been feeling a little agape himself, drinking beer in the school basement with the janitor.

It’s a sentimental movie—influenced more by emotion than reason. John hedges his bets with a speech by Claire about how the members of the Breakfast Club will all go back to ignoring each other at school on Monday. But I doubt John believed that. Plus I am, like many conservatives, a sentimental guy. As Finley Peter Dunne—the best Chicago humorist until John Hughes—had his Irish barkeep Mr. Dooley say, “Damp eye, dry heart.”

I didn’t cry at John’s funeral. His death was too shocking, radical, transgressive. But after his burial, when I drove out the gates of Lake Forest Cemetery, I saw something I hadn’t seen in 45 years. It was a little sign reading “Cemetery Road” above a bar across a sandy track along the cemetery’s wall.

For a couple of years in the 1960s I had, like John, gone to a suburban Chicago high school. On Friday and Saturday nights when the weather was warm kids from suburban Chicago high schools would park on Lake Forest’s residential streets, walk stealthily to Cemetery Road, slip under the bar and sneak down the sandy track to the Lake Michigan beach. It was an inversion of the Shermer High School detention experience with all sorts of assistant principal Vernon-like people such as the Lake Forest police trying to keep us out rather than in. Sometimes we had to hide in the dunes with our Budweiser and beach towels.

Maybe John and I had been there at the same time. We were only three grades apart. Anyway, Cemetery Beach was where the hoods and the jocks and the dweebs and the basket cases and the popular girls worked it out in our day. That’s where we signed our social contract.

When I saw Cemetery Road, then I began to cry.

Stupid

BY P.J. O’ROURKE

http://www.weeklystandard.com

May 27, 2013 9:01 AM

President Obama at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
(Getty Images)

“You’re stupid,” is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama. But on Friday morning I picked up the Wall Street Journal and learned that the president had given a speech about the war on terror saying, “This war, like all wars, must end.”

That story was at the top of the front page. Immediately below was a photograph of flowers being laid at a makeshift memorial near the Woolwich Royal Arsenal where machine gunner Lee Rigby was hacked to death by terrorists.

This war, like all wars, must end when someone wins it. The president—speaking at the National Defense University, of all places—said, “the core of al Qaeda . . . is on the path to defeat.” And so it may be. But meanwhile, the core of al Qaeda, its aims and its beliefs, is also on the path to Boston and London and any number of other places.

On page 7 of Friday’s Journal was the headline, “Suicide Bombings in Niger Linked to Mali Islamist Group.” On page 9 was a report of terrorist Hezbollah militias aiding the terrorist Assad regime in attacking the rebel-held Syrian city of Qusayr where the rebels themselves are allied with yet more Islamic terrorists. And on pages 4 and 8 were more bad tidings from that perpetrator, abettor, and friend of terrorism, Iran. Iranian fundamentalists, in the chokehold they have on the country’s political system, are improving their grip. And, “according to current and former U.S. officials,” Iran has “escalated a campaign of cyberassaults against U.S. corporations. . . . The hackers were able to gain access to control-system software that could allow them to manipulate oil or gas pipelines.”

All that on a slow news day.

In 2001 Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a declaration of war on terrorists and nations that harbor them. In his speech the president said, “I look forward to engaging . . . in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal the AUMF’s mandate.”

I like the president’s use of the word “efforts” here, as though he’s merely trying to be stupid. He doesn’t need to try. Earlier in the week he signed new policy guidance for drone strikes. In the future we will use lethal drones only on terrorists who are a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people” and not on terrorists who are a “significant threat to U.S. interests.” Although, assuming tremendously stupid efforts will be made to tell the two kinds of terrorists apart, maybe I’m wrong about the president not needing to try. The policy guidance also stipulates that there “must be a near certainty” that civilians won’t be killed or injured in a drone strike. Imagine how stupid a WWII Army Air Corps briefing officer would have had to be to say that to his B-17 pilots.

Maybe we pundits don’t tell President Obama, “You’re stupid,” because we are proudly showing off our sensitivity to the negative stereotypes that hurtful language engenders in a way that we didn’t feel was necessary when we were telling Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush, “You’re stupid,” even though actors, WASPs, and Texans are burdened with their fair share of negative lamebrain stereotypes.

More likely it’s because we pundits prize signs of intelligence. We take every opportunity to display our own signs, and President Obama exhibits the same wordy, wonky, academic intelligence indicators that we do, so we don’t call him stupid.

As if the two things were mutually exclusive. I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius. And yet, if we pundits were to gather together our sons and daughters, during their teenage years, and close them for a night in a dimly lit room full of beer and drugs and comfy futons, I can assure you that evidence of stupidity would be found the next morning.

But the most likely reason that we don’t call President Obama stupid is that it’s such a cul-de-sac of a word. Stupid gives the pundit nothing to perform punditry upon. Call a man ignorant and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up. Call a man misguided and you transform your column or blog post or TV appearance into a valuable and beneficent German shepherd with a handle on its back and you lead the poor soul in his blindness. Call a man, best of all, wicked and you get to don the sacramental vestments, climb into the pulpit and thunder forth with such a sermon as to bring him weeping to the font of righteousness or cause the Lord God Almighty to strike him with a thunderbolt in his pew or something fun like that. But call a man stupid and . . . there it is.

And there it is: Dopey stimulus, obtuse bailout, noodle-headed Obamacare, half-wit Dodd-Frank, damfool IRS Tea Party crashers, AP and Fox News beset by oafish peeping Toms and the Benghazi tale told by an idiot. One could go on. Stupid is a great force in human affairs. And the great force has a commander in chief.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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BOOK REVIEW: ‘Holidays in Heck’

By Jeremy Lott - Special to The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/
January 3, 2012

HOLIDAYS IN HECK
By P.J. O’Rourke
Atlantic Monthly Press, $24, 288 pages

Patrick Jake “P.J.” O’Rourke is often called a humorist, but the term has become a stretch. I bet he’s sick of it by now. Sure, he writes many things that make you laugh, but he rarely writes just for laughs. One reason for this is his aging audience. Mr. O’Rourke used to be the managing editor of National Lampoon and foreign affairs gonzo for Rolling Stone. These days, his work lands in the Weekly Standard, World Affairs Journal and the Atlantic, outlets that prefer any humor - if one must wisecrack - to be in the service of a serious point.

That suits him fine because he does have a few things to say. Mr. O’Rourke is a journalist and a moralist with both Irish Methodist and libertarian inclinations. His most famous book is “Parliament of Whores,” published in 1991 with the subtitle, “A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government.” The light approach helped leaven the message right up to the very last sentence, with its unforgettable blast-of-bitter: “In a democracy, the whores are us.” Atlantic Monthly Press brought out a sequel of sorts in 2010 with a title that better captured his anti-democratic bile: “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.”

Mr. O’Rourke’s publisher followed up the next year with “Holidays in Heck,” another alleged sequel to an earlier book. On the cover, before we get to the subtitle, we are told this is the “follow-up to the classic ‘Holidays in Hell,’ ” a huge PR-generated stretch. In “Holidays in Hell,” the author went to geopolitical hot spots, war zones and very bad places. Then he gave that up and started traveling to “fun” places - yes, the scare quotes are necessary - with his wife and three children.

How well did that work out for him? He complains that in America today, “Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun.” Problem: “I don’t seem to have any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. ‘Halt!’ say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages. I say, ‘Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.’ ‘We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,’ they reply. This doesn’t work worth a damn with the TSA.”

So Mr. O’Rourke visits several museums, goes duck hunting with his wife Tina in South Carolina, and drags the whole O’Rourke clan to places such as Hong Kong and Disneyland. At the latter, he uses the changes that have been made to Tomorrowland over the years to say something about American cultural regression. The all-plastic House of the Future was demolished in 1967 and the “Hall of Chemistry closed that same year, just as an entire generation of me and my friends got very interested in chemicals,” he writes.

Tomorrowland underwent further, awful changes. It was remodeled in 1988 with a “retro” theme, which rather defeated Walt Disney’s purpose. In 2007, Disneyland decided to add a new House of the Future. The new one is fully networked - it can give you fashion and dietary advice - but is otherwise a huge yawn. Mr. O’Rourke breathes a sigh of relief for the future of his family when his preteen daughter Muffin says, with disappointment, “It looks like our hotel.”

Mr. O’Rourke went to a few places without the wife and kids in tow. He took the maiden voyage of a new class of jumbo jet, (written up in chapter 6, “On First Looking into the Airbus”; har har, and no, the Airbus does not look back into you) and he hitched a ride on a plane that landed hard on the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (“the most fun I’ve ever had with my trousers on,” he writes, though he may have needed to change them after). Along the way, he got cancer.

The cancer was, Mr. O’Rourke says, “of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that?” While considering treatment, he turned to prayer. “I can’t be the only person who feels like a jerk saying, ‘Please cure me, God. I’m underinsured. I have three little children. And my wife will cry and mourn and be inconsolable and have to get a job. P.S. Our mortgage is subprime. God knows this stuff. He’s God,” he writes. Perhaps Somebody Up There was listening. He made a full recovery.

• Jeremy Lott, editor of Real Clear Books and Real Clear Religion, is writing a book about death.

The Times Loses It

Sense and nonsense about Tucson.

By P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
January 24, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 18
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

It was a weekend of great sorrow. On Saturday, January 8, an insane young man tried to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, injuring her horribly. The man then fired his gun into a small political gathering, murdering a nine-year-old girl, a federal judge, a congressional staffer, and three of Giffords’s constituents. Thirteen other people were wounded. In the midst of life we are in death. There is, in this world, no making sense of such events.

Among the worldly, however, there is a temptation to make nonsense. Thus it was that on Sunday, January 9, the New York Times provided a further grief, much less important than the death and mutilation of innocents but shameful nonetheless.

The Times ran, as its second lead, above the fold on the front page, a story about the Tucson shootings headlined “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics.” The article, by Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike, contains almost nothing newsworthy. Nor can it be called news analysis, beginning as it does with an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords .  .  . set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.”

If self-fulfilling prophecies were wanted from reporters​—​and they are not​—​a better one would have been “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Mental Health Policies.” The person in custody for the Tucson crimes is, according to all accounts, profoundly crazy. For decades in America there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are. Perhaps a wrenching debate over this should be had.

In the article’s second paragraph we are told that the accused, Jared Loughner, had an Internet site that “contained antigovernment ramblings.” The same may be said​—​at least in respect to ramblings against the newly sworn-in House of Representatives​—​about Internet sites posting speeches by President Obama.

But antigovernment ramblings coming from outside the government are so sinister that they are sinister whether they are sinister or not. “And regardless of what led to the episode,” Hulse and Zernike say, “it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.”

To maintain that there’s a lack of evidence for such a sweeping statement would be inaccurate since Hulse and Zernike themselves are doing what they claim is being done. And given the tight deadlines of a Sunday edition they have focused their attention quickly indeed.

They make an interesting choice of verb tense in “have become.” Maybe Hulse and Zernike are very young and, what with the way American history is taught these days, are unaware of riots, bombings, lynchings, exterminations of native peoples, assassinations, assassination attempts, gun fights, and the Civil War, not to mention the inflammatory language, threats, and implicit instigations to violence in the writings of Tom Paine.

Or maybe Hulse and Zernike are old hacks in the pocket of certain political interests that feel threatened by populism. A member of the populace​—​however deranged​—​has shot a liberal​—​albeit one who is independent and selective in her liberalism. Even this most pathetic of excuses will serve. Ordinary Americans skeptical about the powers, prerogatives, and expense of certain political interests shall be execrated.

Hulse and Zernike do say, “In the hours immediately after the shooting .  .  . top Republicans including Speaker John A. Boehner and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona quickly condemned the violence.” There’s that word “quickly” again, a superfluous modifier, this time implying that slow, reluctant condemnation might have been expected.

The sheriff of Pima County is quoted: “He said it was time for the country to ‘do a little soul-searching.’ ” Hulse and Zernike don’t take his advice and recommence arguing beside the point about health care legislation that “ignited opposition from the Tea Party movement” and “stirred strong feelings that flared at angry town hall meeting held by many Democratic lawmakers.” This, it seems, is part of a “broader anger and suspicion rising about the government, its finances and its goals, with the discourse partially fueled by talk shows and websites.”

Hulse and Zernike pause and duly note, “Tea Party activists also condemned the shooting.” Nice use of also.

Then they’re off again, into the jump, for a total of more than 18 column inches of “protesters outside the House hurling insults and slurs .  .  . ” “Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs .  .  . ” “Republican candidates seemed to raise the prospect of armed revolt .  .  . ” and “other Tea Party activists said it would be hard to separate the shooting in Tucson from the current ideological clash.”

Hulse and Zernike have the nerve to end with a quote from one of the “other Tea Party activists,” Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation: “Violence of this nature should be decried by everyone and not used for political gain.” Left unprinted are descriptions of Hulse and Zernike smirking.

A great deal of other ugly and offensive writing went off on a tangent from the crime scene and wound up published in the Sunday New York Times.

Some was in the guise of commentary, such as Matt Bai’s dredging up of a quip by Sharron Angle, “I hope we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies.” Gabrielle Giffords is a gun rights advocate.

Some was in the news coverage: “Democrats denounced the fierce partisan atmosphere in Ms. Giffords’s district.” Voters in that conservative locale chose Giffords over a GOP candidate backed by Tea Party supporters.

Worse came in Monday’s Times. News analyst Jennifer Steinhauer wrote, “Arizona has shifted from a place on the political fringe to a symbol of a nation whose political discourse has lost its way.” It’s worth remembering that another place the Times considers to be on the political fringe is Staten Island.

Editorialized the Times: “It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats.” Interesting how a few small changes would make that sentence appall the Times as much as the Times appalls me: “It is legitimate to hold Muslims and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced 9/11.”

The most cringe-inducing article was titled “In the Shock of the Moment, the Politicking Stops .  .  . Until It Doesn’t.” Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg wrote, “Some Democrats were urging [President Obama] to look back to recent history, when President Bill Clinton seized the political high ground after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.”

In the matter of self-serving, bitter, calculated cynicism, there wouldn’t seem to be much left to prove against the Times. Judging by what I’ve heard from my fellow conservatives, the issue is decided. The New York Times is a worthless, truthless, vicious institution. But I disagree. I think things are worse than that.

A reaction so disproportionate and immaterial to a news story by a news organization is indicative of trouble in the body politic​—​trouble almost as severe as that which the Times claims the Giffords shooting indicates. I worry that in the tremors and hysteria of the Times we’re seeing the sad end of liberalism.

Its passing is to be mourned, perhaps most by true conservatives. -Civilization owes a debt to liberal politics. From the Reform Act and the religious emancipation fight of the British Whigs to the American civil rights movement, liberals have in fact held positions on political high ground (though not during Clinton’s exploitation of the Oklahoma City bombing). Liberals have seen government as a force for good, and sometimes it can be. World War II comes to mind. While conservatives have delighted in the free market, liberals have been there to remind us that all freedoms, including market freedoms, entail responsibilities. At the very least it can be said that we conservatives would not be so upright in our ideals if we hadn’t been pushing against liberals.

But liberalism, as personified by the New York Times, became a dotty old aunt sometime during the Johnson administration. She’s provincial, eccentric, and holds dull, peculiar views about the world. Still, she has our fond regard, and we visit her regularly in her nursing home otherwise known as Arts and Leisure and the Book Review. Or we did until Sunday, January 9, when she began spouting obscenities and exposing herself.

We observe in the Times a bizarre overreaction to people and things that can be construed as “antigovernment.” (And all people and most things often can be so construed, e.g., the man who just got a speeding ticket.) The Times has become delusional, going from advocating big government to believing that it is the big government. Americans being somewhat disgruntled with big government, the Times imagines itself under attack from every side, even, no doubt, from within.

Ross Douthat wrote a calm, well-reasoned Monday Times opinion column about how most contemporary attacks on American politicians have been of greater interest to psychiatrists than ideologues. “From the Republican leadership to the Tea Party grass roots, all of Gabrielle Giffords’s political opponents were united in horror at the weekend’s events.” The newspaper probably heard this as a hallucinatory voice in its head urging self-destruction. If we’re going to discuss dark, paranoid corners of the Internet that have an unwholesome influence on our national life, there’s the New York Times online.

- P.J. O’Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

They Hate Our Guts

And they’re drunk on power.

By P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
November 1, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 07
http://www.weeklystandard.com

Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.

I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

Whence all this hate? Is it the usual story of love gone wrong? Do Democrats have a mad infatuation with the political system, an unhealthy obsession with an idealized body politic? Do they dream of capturing and ravishing representational democracy? Are they crazed stalkers of our constitutional republic?

No. It’s worse than that. Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.

Armed with the panoply of lawmaking, these moonstruck fools for power go about in a jealous rage. They fear power’s charms may be lavished elsewhere, even for a moment.

Democrats hate success. Success could supply the funds for a power elopement. Fire up the Learjet. Flight plan: Grand Cayman. Democrats hate failure too. The true American loser laughs at legal monopoly on force. He’s got his own gun.

Democrats hate productivity, lest production be outsourced to someplace their beloved power can’t go. And Democrats also hate us none-too-productive drones in our cubicles or behind the counters of our service economy jobs. Tax us as hard as they will, we modest earners don’t generate enough government revenue to dress and adorn the power that Democrats worship.

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference. Democratic advocacy for feminism, gay marriage, children’s rights, and “reproductive choice” is simply a way to invade -power’s little realm of domestic private life and bring it under the domination of Democrats.

Democrats hate immigrants. Immigrants can’t stay illegal because illegality puts immigrants outside the legal monopoly on force. But immigrants can’t become legal either. They’d prosper and vote Republican.

Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.

And Democrats hate the military, of course. Soldiers set a bad example. Here are men and women who possess what, if they chose, could be complete control over power. Yet they treat power with honor and respect. Members of the armed forces fight not to seize power for themselves but to ensure that power can bestow its favors upon all Americans.

This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.

P. J. O’Rourke, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of a new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Photo Credit: Jason Seiler

A conversation with P.J. O’Rourke

"I’ve been shot toward, not shot at," says a modest P.J. O’Rourke about his decades as a war heckler. He’s been to some dicey places — Afghanistan, Iraq, LaGuardia Airport. It was at the latter that he was most nearly blown to bits.

By KYLE SMITH
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
October 3, 2010

"Long before I was ever a war correspondent, my first experience with pieces of dead bodies — was at LaGuardia. It was Christmas 1975, and I was upstairs when the bomb went off in the locker on the level below. Killed 11 people. The presumption was that it was Puerto Rican nationalists. They were the bombers of the day.

"So I’m sitting at the bar at LaGuardia, waiting for my plane. Ka-WAMMMM! I had just ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Bartender turns to me, says, ‘You want to make that a double?’ Swear to God."

So O’Rourke, whose cousin lived a couple of blocks from the West 11th Street townhouse where several members of the Weather Underground accidentally blew themselves up in 1970 and whose girlfriend was in the crowd when National Guardsmen killed five student protesters at Kent State two months later, is amused by chatter about "polarization" today. "Bull - - - -," he says. "Anyone who lived through the Civil Rights era knows this is nothing compared to the polarization — anger, hatred, murder — that went on then. Or to take a better example, 1860. That’s polarized. This is arguing."

O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the "Animal House" era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls "ass cancer," continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, "Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards" (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose "Wealth of Nations" he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. Among his best one-liners:

* "The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can."

* "We’re individuals — unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a household of little individuals knows. And not one of those children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, ‘Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don’t know a pony and we’ll share.’ "

* "The most sensible request of government we make is not, ‘Do something!’ But ‘Quit it!’ "

* "Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ ‘What’s the big idea?’ and ‘Whose idea was that?’ "

O’Rourke, 62, is a cool Republican. It’s a lonely job. What can the rest of the party do to join him?

"I don’t think Republicans have ever been cool," he says. "Abraham Lincoln tried growing a beard."

Yes, and look what happened to him.

"It’s always going to be cooler to have wild visionary ideas for society and the future. All we can really do is see that we’ve got a society where as many people grow out of cool as fast as they possibly can."

Even O’Rourke admits "I thought it was pretty cool myself" to be part of an America that elected a black president. But if his new book barely mentions President Obama, Sarah Palin or any other topical punchline, it’s because "I wanted to write something that, 20 years from now, people don’t need footnotes for."

Dressed like a CEO in a sober suit, he looks unscathed by the colon cancer that attacked him a couple of years ago.

"Touch Formica, things are going well," he says. "I spent about six months being treated. It was early stage, it was not particularly invasive. I got my two-year checkup a couple of months ago. They said I was good to go."

Some friends have been less fortunate. O’Rourke reeled when his friend of 30 years, "The Breakfast Club" director John Hughes, dropped dead of a heart attack while walking on West 55th Street last year.

O’Rourke, who in the book cops to being "a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh," says Hughes was "quite conservative."

Hughes, once a hot creative at a Chicago ad firm was O’Rourke’s first hire when he took over editing National Lampon around the start of 1978. "One of the things John and I saw alike was a larval conservatism. We disliked [Jimmy] Carter. We weren’t upset when Reagan was elected."

Later, O’Rourke says, he and Hughes didn’t see the need to talk politics much because they agreed on everything. Is conservatism in Hughes’ films, though? "It’s there for those who care to see it," says O’Rourke. " ‘Home Alone’ is all about self sufficiency, freedom and responsibility, basically. The kid eats all the junk food in the house then watches all the terrible movies and then he has to bring himself together."

O’Rourke was once an irresponsible brat too, a semi-pro rioter who ranted about the fascist pigs "in stints between the water bed and the water pipe." Then "I became a Republican when I had to pay taxes. I became a conservative when I had kids. Everybody is a conservative with their kids.

"Obama very much absorbed the lessons that we in the ’60s were trying to put forth," O’Rourke says. "While most of us who actually tried the ’60s got over this, he didn’t, because part of it went on that long march through the institutions that he was obviously influenced by — without, perhaps, the hedonism. He’s like a fun-free ’60s."

The progressive mindset, O’Rourke thinks, amounts to a faith that "if you could just get the smartest people in the world together in a room, then by golly you can figure out a health care program. It’s this kind of contempt for the ordinary person’s expertise and what is best for him or her — contempt for the fundamental principle interest of self-interest that the world rests on — that [Obama] took away from the 1960s in large bags and cartons."

But the ’60s ultimately gave us Reagan. Obama has already given us the Tea Party and useful instruction on just how little can be accomplished by even the most eloquent and appealing of leaders. "We don’t vote to elect good people," O’Rourke says. "Certainly not great people, because they aren’t too great. We hold elections to throw the bums out."

As for another ex-communist who took a deep breath and re-evaluated, O’Rourke says he sent Christopher Hitchens a long e-mail about cancer treatment.

"This should probably be off the record," O’Rourke says. "I said, just make sure your doctor is generous with the painkillers. I said doctors must know this, but don’t tell you, that Scotch and Percocet happen to go together perfectly."

Off the record? Really?

O’Rourke considers. "Oh, go ahead."

Innocence Abroad: The Tea Party's Search for Foreign Policy

By P. J. O’Rourke
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/
September/October 2010

What is the Tea Party’s foreign policy? It’s a difficult question on two counts. There is no Tea Party foreign policy as far as I can tell, and, on inspection, there is no Tea Party. There are, of course, any number of Tea Party Coalition groups across the country. But these mix and mingle, cooperate, compete, debate, merge, and overlap with countless other groups grouped together as the “Tea Party movement” in the public mind (or the public commentator mind).

Some of these organizations have staffs and salaries and offices, and some—according to the time left over for blogging after job and children—have memberships numbering between one and none. Various domestic policy foundations such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and the Independence Institute have had their influence, as have associations of people with a frame of mind about policy that’s more antinomian, such as FedUpUSA. Then there is the 9/12 Project, promoted by Glenn Beck, which seeks a return to the best of what Americans thought and felt after 9/11 and which is more concerned with values than policy per se. A variety of social conservatives with similar concerns about values—if diverse ideas of what those values are—also have been lumped with the Tea Party movement. Sometimes they’ve lumped themselves.

Disaggregation and multifariousness make it hard to take any policy measure of the Tea Party. But the tougher problem is definitional. “Movement” implies a destination. When you move you’re headed somewhere. Political movements have a place they want government to go. The Tea Party movement has a place it wants government to go—and rot. That’s different. The Tea Party has a political attitude rather than a political ideology.

Nonetheless, every political concept has foreign policy implications. George Washington warned against foreign entanglements. But the friends, enemies, and neighbors of that new concept, the United States, soon found themselves entangled in American foreign policy, even before America knew it had one.

Specific, concrete political policy goals were disavowed by almost all of the people I talked to in the Tea Party movement (I use the term in the overly broad public commentator way). Instead, what I heard were arguments against the kind of centralized government power that concocts political policy goals—arguments of the Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman kind, that individuals are the best judges of how to employ their individual energies and resources. Whatever else the Tea Party movement believes, it espouses (and evidences) a firm belief in the self-organizing capacities of free individuals.

Unfortunately, we individuals are rarely free in the face of foreign policy. Foreign policy is highly centralized. And the political power that centralizes foreign policy is—when wielded by foreigners—outside the realm of our political influence no matter how popular the Tea Party becomes.

Nor is the past record of decentralization in foreign policy reassuring. It went well when the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe’s foreign policy. It did not go so well when the European colonial powers lost control of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. And total decentralization of foreign policy meant a nightmare in the former Yugoslavia.

I take the Tea Party point that, politically speaking, control is scary. Out-of-control is also scary. And what’s most scary about foreign policy is how often it’s simply beyond our control.

I talked to a Tea Party supporter with strong libertarian inclinations. “I’m for staying out of other people’s business,” she said, and told me she was surprised by Barack Obama’s continuation of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. I’ll bet Barack Obama was surprised too.

I met the libertarian—a young mother who homeschools her three kids—at the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers (CNHT) annual picnic on July 10 in Hillsborough.

CNHT is a twelve-year-old umbrella operation, friendly to Tea Party movement notions. The chairman, Ed Naile, made the crowd laugh by showing off a certificate that the Heritage Foundation had awarded to the New Hampshire Tea Party. Because the Heritage Foundation couldn’t figure out who ran the New Hampshire Tea Party, the award had to be sent to the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers.

About five hundred people were at the picnic. Thirty interest groups, political organizations, and state and federal candidates had booths, tables, or, at the least, literature to hand out. That was 16½ people per cause. Assuming that many of the picnickers were picnicking in an unaffiliated way, some CNHT self-organizers were self-organizing at the most basic level of just the self.

The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance was there and the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, Granite State Taxpayers, the New Hampshire House Republican Alliance, and New Hampshire Families for Education. A pro-life group and a pro-gun group were present but so was the New England Organ Bank, promoting organ donations. (And maybe the last two should get together—there’s a bumper sticker in there somewhere.)

I did not see any sidearms being worn or anyone acting more oddly than we residents of New Hampshire usually do. The crowd looked randomly New Hampshire–like, minus perhaps the sandal-and-candle types (although several mandala tattoos were visible).

The political candidates who spoke at the picnic had a hard time making themselves heard over the voice of the people—which, from a Tea Party point of view, is as it should be. A thousand hamburgers and hot dogs were being eaten by cheerful, chatty folks vigorously agreeing with each other that the government has gotten out from under us.

“We’re a very broad-based association, like a big family,” said one of the picnic’s organizers. “Of course,” she added, “we have our family spats.”

None were apparent. Ed Naile introduced the speakers, saying, “We want small, effective government with low taxes and free enterprise. It’s simple.”

The politicians were given polite, if not attentive, receptions. One grizzled veteran of the fight against taxes in the New Hampshire legislature went on at length about the dictionary definition of socialism. Some shushing was heard in deference to his political battle scars. A fellow running for I’m-not-sure-what worried that the gold standard wasn’t standard anymore. Even a member of the political “establishment” was treated with courtesy. Charlie Bass (who happens to be my friend and neighbor) was the longtime Republican congressman from New Hampshire’s 2nd District. He’s hoping to be elected again. Bass, although a fiscal conservative, gets Tea Party grief for the amount of money that the Republicans managed to spend while in control of Congress. He told the crowd that right down the road there was an old stone bridge to nowhere over nothing being restored with our stimulus funds and was applauded.

But no one had much to say about foreign policy. Bob Giuda, also running for the Republican nomination in the 2nd District, did mention the cost of the war on terrorism. Considering that the TSA line at O’Hare cost me two hours of my life last week, I’m sure Giuda has a point. But he didn’t elaborate. Another candidate, whose name I didn’t catch, said we should remember the POWs and MIAs. That’s true. But memory isn’t a sure guide to foreign policy. The people who started World War II must have remembered what happened in World War I.

I gathered campaign literature from the candidates who thought a CNHT presence was worth their while—twelve of them (none Democrats). Seven made no reference to foreign policy in their handouts. This was understandable with the two gubernatorial hopefuls. (New Hampshire is not a state that aspires to its own foreign policy—except to deport citizens of Massachusetts who run their boats too fast on Lake Winnipesaukee.)

I suppose some of the campaign material contains implied messages about foreign policy. Jim Bender, vying for the Republican Senate nomination, describes himself as “a turnaround specialist with a proven track record of creating jobs and fixing complex broken organizations.” Creating jobs in foreign policy sounds as uninviting as war or the Peace Corps. But fixing complex broken organizations is more like it, starting with the United Nations.

Frank Guinta, running for Congress in the Republican 1st District primary, wants to “open up and develop existing American energy resources . . . on our soil and off our shores.” This could have foreign policy effects, though I gather from the last phrase that his brochure went to press before BP went to hell. Guinta also wants to “apply a constitutionality test to each and every bill brought before Congress.” One can imagine some ugly arguments about international trade agreements and the interstate commerce clause—with labor unions on the wrong side of the fight.

Peter Bearse, another Republican running in the 1st District, was handing out business cards. He is an economist. And, after all, Adam Smith was right about British foreign policy during the Revolutionary War.

And Karen Testerman, who wants the Republican nomination for governor, is married to a retired Air Force pilot and has had three children in the military, although whether this inclines or disinclines her to interventionalism she doesn’t say.

Perhaps it’s contrary to the Tea Party spirit that I’m reporting first on the views of political candidates rather than on the views of their grassroots auditors. But the purpose of the Tea Party movement, as I understand it, is to change the nature of the people elected to political office and to make that change at a local level. These are the people running for political office, and some of them, frankly, are so local that they may never be heard from again outside their own backyards.

Among the candidates who do address foreign policy, Bill Binnie—like Jim Bender, seeking the Republican Senate nomination—says, “We need to stand up to countries like India and China that punish American business and industry with unfair trading practices and shut off aid to foreign countries that pay lip service to being America’s friends.” Adam Smith wouldn’t think much of the first proposal, but there’s no denying the visceral appeal of the second.

Binnie supports defense spending: “Government can protect our way of life through a strong military.” The same is true of Richard Ashooh, in the 1st District Republican race, who promises to “ensure our men and women in uniform have the resources they need to defend our nation.” And Sean Mahoney—Ashooh’s, Guinta’s, and Bearse’s competitor in the 1st District—supports “our service men and women around the world” and is “dedicated to winning the war on terror.” Indeed, Mahoney goes on to say that he “supports the president’s decision to commit additional troops to the war in Afghanistan.”

Ashooh and Mahoney also vow to work for better veterans’ benefits. The military veteran being, alas, what remains after the dust of foreign policy settles.

Ovide Lamontagne, running against Binnie and Bender in the Republican Senate primary, promises better treatment for veterans too, and he takes an even more aggressive international stance than Mahoney. Lamontagne says he will “continue support for our operations against terrorists abroad” and “stand firm against allowing a nuclear Iran to emerge, while supporting our proven allies throughout the world, including our staunch friend Israel.”

In the CNHT picnic’s straw poll, Lamontagne won with one hundred and nine votes, almost half the votes cast. (In case anyone thinks Tea Party movement members are knee-jerk isolationists.)

Chris Booth was also on the straw poll Senate ballot, as an Independent. His brochure emphasizes his Quaker faith: “Quakers are best known for their beliefs in equality and pacifism.” He got two votes.

I interviewed some New Hampshire Tea Party supporters. (Again, I use the term too broadly.) They were as perplexed as I am about the relationship between an efficiently minimal government and a foreign policy of maximum effectiveness.

“We’re working from the bottom up,” said one of the state’s popular pro–small government bloggers. “Foreign policy comes from the top down.” He said I’d asked a good question about Tea Party foreign policy “because foreign policy has to do with the president. The Tea Party doesn’t influence foreign policy, we influence the people who represent us.” One of whom, he seemed to feel, was not the president.

A Web site designer who volunteers with the CNHT and other organizations pointed out that, in the matter of foreign policy being top-down, even the president isn’t at the top. “The president isn’t the sole person who runs foreign policy,” she said. She mentioned the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, but she didn’t make them out to be part of some dark conspiracy. She was giving them as examples of the fact that there is such a thing as a foreign policy establishment. The State Department is the example I’d use. The blogger cited the mainstream media and George Soros.

One of the founders of the New Hampshire Tea Party Coalition has two sons on active duty in the military. When asked about foreign policy, he said there’s “no easy way to answer.” He said he “didn’t want to use the word ‘rational.’” He realized that foreign policy has to deal with irrational people and things. “It really will depend on elections,” he said. “If the country swings to a constitutional/libertarian government there’ll be a move toward congressional control of foreign policy.” He wondered if we wouldn’t be better off to “let the people decide, instead of the experts.” But he didn’t venture a guess as to what decision the people would make.

Foreign policy opinions in the Tea Party are “wide, wide-ranging,” said the Web designer, “everything from ‘nuke Iran’ to the Ron Paul people who want to pull everyone out of everywhere to Rand Paul who’s more in the middle ground and wants an active foreign policy but says it’s a question of money.”

What it doesn’t appear to be is a question of America’s founding principles. No one told me that current American foreign policy violates the Constitution. And I was talking to people who are keenly alert to violations of the Constitution.

A supporter of the 9/12 Project said, “To me ‘small government’ means the federal government shrinking to the size necessary to execute only the enumerated, authorized powers. . . . Included in these enumerated powers is the authority to raise an army, conduct foreign diplomacy, and to establish treaties.” He went on to say, “I often wonder what our economic condition would be if we focused more on securing our borders and less on expensive foreign engagements.” But he added, “I don’t believe we should be isolationist. Protection of America would still involve some foreign military presence, which is authorized by the Constitution. If we completely retract our military from the world stage, and only focus on our borders . . . we may see a reprise of the pre–World War Two growth of fascism.”

President Obama, as the man in charge of U.S. foreign policy, seems to be regarded as not so much wrong, exactly, as feeble and silly. The blogger said, “Obama is a joke with foreigners. Obviously he doesn’t have the
experience.”

The Tea Party founder decried Obama’s “slamming of America” and called the president’s foreign policy “determined weakness.” He didn’t care for Obama’s international equilateralism. “If America’s not going to be the economic engine of the world, then who will be?” And he asked, “Why not us as the number one superpower?”

The blogger said almost exactly the same: “Obama is suggesting that America step back from being number one. Well, who will be number one?”

A weak America is a bad idea. And there’s one other area of general Tea Party agreement on foreign policy, albeit a very domestic part of foreign policy—illegal immigration. After I’d had a long phone conversation with the blogger, mostly about philosophy of government, he called back to say that opposition to illegal immigration was the one Tea Party foreign policy position that he could definitely specify. “Get the border sealed,” he said. “No amnesty for illegals. Make sure the criminals are sent back and stay there.”

The 9/12er noted that the Constitution “includes the power to protect our borders from invasion” and “illegal immigration is an invasion, in my opinion.”

No one used any words of prejudice, however, or hurtful, insensitive language. When your preferred senatorial candidate is named Ovide Lamontagne, there’s not much room for xenophobia.

Lamontagne himself condemns illegal emigration. His brochure says, “I pledge that I will work tirelessly to end illegal immigration.” Fellow Senate candidate Bill Binnie promises to “secure our border—that’s just common sense. No driver’s licenses for illegals. No granting of amnesty.” Then his flyer goes on to announce that Binnie is “the proud son of immigrants.”

Congressional candidate Sean Mahoney claims he “will fight to ensure the federal government funds and finishes the fence along the border to keep illegal aliens out.” But Mahoney prefaces this by saying that he “is a strong supporter of legal immigration and views a legal, orderly immigration system as essential to the growth and development of our nation’s economy.”

Slightly angry about immigration, slightly conflicted about immigration—this sounds more like America in general than the Tea Party specifically. The governor of Arizona is not a member.

Foreign policy is full of conundrums. In particular there is a conundrum in finding solutions to foreign policy problems when it’s not clear what the problems are. About this Tea Party supporters show a clarity of thought separate from a lack of consensus.

The blogger held out hope that the Tea Party is going global. He and the Tea Party founder both noted the irony, at the G-20 summit, of the president of free-market America telling European socialists to spend more while the European socialists were telling America to cut its deficit.

“We have a long way to go,” said the blogger. “Until we can fix the problems in our own backyard we can’t fix things over the pond. How can we have a foreign policy when we don’t have a policy that works for ourselves? It’s not going to happen in one election. It’s not going to happen in two elections. We’re looking at a hundred-year project. It’s going to take fifty years to get back to Reagan.”

“What we’re losing,” said the Tea Party founder, “is the idea that our rights come from God. If we went back to that our foreign policy would be different—because of our duty for stewardship of those rights.” His hope is that there will be a “group of people coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan that knows—knows what the military can do and can’t do.” One of his sons had been in Afghanistan. When the son came home and saw the Tea Party protests he said, “Here we are fighting a huge central government. And what are we trying to impose on Afghanistan?”

In our foreign policy, “balance needs to be achieved,” said the 9/12er. And he didn’t mean “balance of power” in the Nixon/Kissinger/Carter sense.

The Web designer said, “If we cannot win—get out. If we can win—do it.”

“When it’s necessary, do it right,” said the Tea Party founder. “We may argue or bicker among ourselves. But if we’re attacked, watch out.”

Simplistic, by the standards of the State Department (or the Trilateral Commission), but there are simple aspects to the biggest complexities. If the Tea Party movement, so-called, achieves “small, effective government with low taxes and free enterprise,” America will be a much richer nation. A much richer nation will have a much more powerful foreign policy, whether it means to or wants to or not.

- P. J. O’Rourke is a political satirist, author, and correspondent for The Weekly Standard.