Week 4: Peace Kills
I get the not-so-cute joke in the title of P.J. O’Rourke’s little book Peace Kills. It didn’t take long to get O’Rourke’s point. He made some astute observations about wartime culture and the absurdity of conflict, but nothing warranting so many pages of sarcasm and poorly-executed jokes. Some of his rants are funny, but more often than not O’Rourke ends up beating a dead horse.
O’Rourke does not hide his criticism of politicians, particularly liberals, and especially Bill Clinton. His openness about his political affiliations—and in more cases than not his hatred of all things political—makes Peace Kills a slightly much more palatable read. But not by much.
It’s not all bad though. Every once in a while O’Rourke manages a nice turn of phrase. (A lot of the book reads like a collection of one-liners.) One in particularly struck me, but maybe only because of my own journalistic ambitions: “Reporters would rather be interested than comfortable. Put that way, it sounds noble enough. Put another way, we would rather be interested than well paid, worth-while, responsible, or smart.” It’s a sloppily constructed and, hopefully, totally off-base. This week’s book, while an interesting tangent from other other reads, has proved fairly worthless. Oh well, on to the next book.