While good comedians punch up and conservative comedians punch down, P.J. O’Rourke punches himself. While he is clever and occasionally quite funny, his lack of earnestness ultimately undermines him both as a comic and as a social commentator. He criticizes everyone, including himself, for being too self-centered. But he doesn’t offer any real alternatives. He’s a self-loathing Baby Boomer who is convinced that his generation destroyed this country through their narcissism and fascination with personal betterment at the expense of any higher calling. Yet, he doesn’t have a higher calling to offer. The only thing he really succeeds in is making me doubt, again, whether Hillary Clinton will really become our next president. Could we possibly elect a “senior” Baby Boomer like Clinton…a person born in the late 1940’s “on the bow wave of the baby boom’s voyage of exploration…keelhauled by the baby-boom experience and left a bit soggy and shaken”? Can we really go back to talking about whether someone failed to inhale the marijuana they were smoking? It seems like too much of a time warp. We have gay marriages to attend.
I keep that in mind when I hear rumblings of discontent on the left. Maybe Clinton could break the deadlock and reunite the country within a solid-left consensus. But I just have the feeling that progressives have learned to walk on their own and are going to be insisting on something more to their liking.
On the other hand, I don’t think the Boomers are quite done fucking with us, yet. Clinton will probably win this thing.
