Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books By P.J. ORourke 20240713 : vima

CSPAN2 Books By P.J. ORourke July 13, 2024

A game works on parts of government. You kill the postal service, merry the armed forces, screw agriculture subsidies, mary Social Security and healthcare reform tells us. Great tools because in a free and democratic country politics is a stool balanced on a tripod of power, freedom, and responsibility. We live in a free and democratic he. A little less democratic than it was before last night. Also a great tool of political analysis because we are so passionate about our politics and how do passionate affairs end . And a passion, usually coming in a crime of passion sometimes and occasionally they turn into stable, permanent legal arrangements which is to say the endless. This quarrel known as marriage so how do we approach the Political Institutions of our free and democratic country, do we ever grow throw them with violence, do we screw around cheating on them while based cheat on us or do we try to build something lasting and boring but worthy and annoying, marvelously virtuous and at the same time dreadfully stifling, a marriage, power, freedom, responsibility. When i first began to think about politics when mastodons and nixon roamed the earth i was upset with the freedom, the screw part of kill screw mary. I had a messy idea of freedom in those days, but i had a tidy idea that freedom was the central issue of politics. I loved politics, many young people do, kids can spot a means of gain without merit. This may be the reason professional politicians retain a certain youthful zest. Ted kennedy was the boy owed john to his last aged disease moment. I was wrong about the lovable nature of politics and i was sure i was right about the preeminent place freedom should have in a political system but there are lots of definitions of free, 36 definitions of free and websters Third International dictionary, plenty of people are theoretically in favor of freedom. We are all but overrun with theoretical allies. We have got collaborators in the fight for freedom that we dont even want. The probably jerry owens have nothing to lose but their chains, sentence second to last sentence of the communist manifesto and there is a creepy echo of it in the refrain of me and bobby mcgee. Mao announced letting 100 flowers blossom and 100,000 schools of thought, half 1 Million People d not died in a definition of freedom and we should keep in mind that the original definition of the word free in english is not in bondage. The most meaningful thing about freedom is mankind has a sickening history of slavery. Here in america we have freedom because we have rights. The same way we can get mixed up about freedom we can get mixed up about our rights. There are two kinds of rights, political scientists call them positive rights and negative rights. Sometimes we call them opportunities and privileges. I call them get out of here rights and give me rights. Politicians are always telling us about our give me rights especially the politician weve got in the white house right now as in give me some healthcare insurance. Our bill of rights doesnt mention any give me rights. Our bill of rights is all about our freedom to say i have got god, guns and big damn mouth and if the jury finds the guilty the judge will blow my bail. This is a got a right to our right to be left alone, freedom of interference usually from government but also our fellow citizens when they want us to quit yelling, put the gun down and go back in the trailer. Politicians dont like give me rights, they only like give me rights, they do not like get out of here rights. They dont like get out of here rights because for one thing all legislators are being invited to get out of here. For another thing strict adherence to get out of here rights would leave little scope for legislation, something legislators dearly love to do. Give me rights much more politically alluring and that is how we find ourselves tempted with a right to education, right to housing, right to a living wage, to all youll still beach cleanup, highspeed internet access, three french and the two turtledoves at a partridge in a pear tree. Politicians show no sign of knowing the difference between get out of here and give me rights. Blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular they honestly may not be able to tell but there is evidence that a confusion of these rights was originally presented to the public with malice and forethought. President Franklin Roosevelts four freedoms appear at first glance as natural and tidy of composition as those Norman Rockwell illustrations, freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear but notice how number 3, freedom from want has slipped in among the more respectable members of the freedom family. Want what . We ask. Saying as roosevelt did that we look forward to a world founded on four eccentric human freedoms and one of these is freedom of want this was not an expression of generosity from roosevelt. Declarations like freedom from want i never expressions of generosity. There were 6 million jews in europe who wanted nothing but a safe place to go and where was roosevelt there . When rights consist of special privileges and positive benefits, rights kill freedom. Wrong rights are the source of abusive political power. It was years before i realized this. Years after i first got interested in politics before i realized the central issue of politics is power, not freedom. Kill, not screw. Only an idiot wouldnt have seen this and i was one. I wasnt alone. Liberals, moderates, even some conservatives considered the sweeping give me rights created by half a century of social welfare programs to be extensions of freedom and the opportunity rights since, people were given the opportunity to not starve to death. It is not a purely evil way of looking at things and not all the social welfare programs were bad but the electorate, the candidates him and me, failed to properly scrutinize social welfare programs. It was not that we failed to examine whether they were needed or needed a well or poorly run but we failed to look at the enormous power being taken from power and given to politics, we let freedom be turned into power. F off and die the politicians told us. Politicians are careless about promising give me rights, sinful about delivering them. Give me rights in turn are absurdly expandable. The government gives me the right to get married. This indicates i have a right to a good marriage otherwise why bother giving that right to me . My marriage is made a lot better by my childrens right to daycare so the brats arent in my face all day. Being deprived of their right to a nurturing development environment. Every child has the right to a happy childhood so i have the right to happy children, richard children are happier, give me some of angelina jolies. The expense of all these rights makes politicians happy they get to do the spending. Even get out of here rights arent free, they entail a military, constabulary, judiciary and considerable expenditure of haitians by our neighbors when they want us to sober up, put the gun and go back in the trailer but give me rights and require no end of money and money is the least of their costs. Every one of such rights means the transfer of goods and services from one group of citizens to another. The first group of citizens loses those goods and services but all citizens lose the power that must be given to a Political Authority to enforce that transfer. We didnt, we didnt want to understand that power and this is particularly true of people of my age, the baby boom and it was obviously the way we react when politicians attempted to use their power to limit our freedom by drafting us into the war in vietnam. We thought the establishment by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. A pathetic bunch. You are watching booktv on cspan2. We are taking a look at other programs with political satirist p. J. Orourke. A former editor in chief of national lampoon. In 2014 he offered a critique of the baby boom generation, one of the 70 million boomers and referred to relationships with his parents and children. We are the generation that changed everything. All the eras and epics of america, ours is the one that made the biggest impression on ourselves. But that is an important accomplishment because we are the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the south and c let there be self. If you were born between 1946, in 1964 you may have noticed this yourself. This is not to say we are selfish generation. Selfish means too concerned with self and we are not, self is not something were just concerned with. We are self. Before us, self was without form and void like our parents in their dumpy clothes. Then we came along and now the person is the socioeconomic, the personal is the religious and secular, the science and the arts, the personal is everything that creeps upon the earth, if the baby boom has done one thing it is to be get a personal universe and apologies to anyone who has to personally be a jerk. Self is kind of like fish proverbially speaking, give a man a fish and you feed him for their, teach him for a day and he turns into a dry fly catch and release angler fanatic. A 3 pound test line, thousand dollar graphite rod, at least his life partner is glad to have him out of the house. Here we are in the baby boom cosmos formed in our image, personally tailored to our individual needs and predetermined to be eternal he fresh and novel and we saw that it was good or pretty good. We should have had a cooler name, the lost generation did. Good luck to anyone who tells us to get lost. Too late now. We are stuck with being described as exploding and vincent. Now that we have splattered ourselves all over the place im for the baby boom to look back and think what made us who we are and what caused us to act the way we do and what the the truth is if we hadnt decided to be Young Forever we would be old. The youngest baby boomers born in the last year when anybody thought was hip to like Lyndon Johnson are turning 50, and we would be sad about getting old if we werent busy remarrying younger wives and reviving careers with glass ceilings when children arrived in renewing prescriptions to drugs that keep us from being sad and we will never retire, we cant, the mortgage is underwater, we are in debt up to the rogaine of the kids College Education and serves us right because we are the generation that insisted the passion for living should replace working for one. It is an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we have wrought and tally what we added and subtracted from existence, reached the age of accountability, the world is our fall, we are the generation that has an excuse for everything. One of our greatest contributions to modern life but the world is still our fault, a matter of power and privilege demography. When anything happens anywhere somebody over 50 signed the bill for it and the baby boom, seated as we are at lifes table, this urine generation x, generation y in the millennials all say check please. [applause] i also chose another just a couple paragraphs to ask p. J. Orourke to read you, do you need your reading glasses . Yes. They have big type of. Near the end of the book is a bit of a summing up so you can see sort of where p. J. Orourke lands with this. Turn the page, got it. And yet we are the best generation in history which goes to show three things. We are fabulous by historical standards. The baby boom was a carefully conducted scientific experiment, the empirical results are us, you take the biggest generation in the most important country and put them all into excessively happy families, given too much expansion, extravagant freedoms and responsibility, plenty of money, modicum of peace if they dodged the draft, profusion of opportunity and collapse of traditional social standards and you get better people. Not better, really. Taken one by one where is maddeningly smug and able as people of always been but we are better behaved although we are willful and careless, rash, vein, entitled but we are still swelled. Love that, thank you. So this book has an interesting structure. The chapters are essay length and you blend in some real memoir stuff about your life along with a lot of broader thinking about baby boomers and how we got this way. You start by, as we all know, the baby boom started in 1946, lasted, the last year of the baby boom 1964 so you were born on one end of the spectrum, i on the other although it is a defining characteristic of baby boomers that we all look the same age. Guest about 18 by rough estimation. Host you describe the baby boom experience as seniors, high school, seniors, juniors, sophomores and freshmen, you were in the senior class. Guest it is me, share, hillary clinton, bill, cheech. Seniors are like we read the bow wave of this voyage of exploration but also tethered very closely behind our parents, the greatest generation. We got dragged under the boat. If we wound up a little foggy as Financial Advisors with tongue studs or trying to start tea party protests we are to be forgiven. Host your senior class was on a guard of so many things including vietnam and drug taking and by the time the freshman class came along, in my case, the youngest of four, i watched my three older siblings do all these things and it scared me witless and i did none of those things. I grew up in the 50s. Host younger baby boomers are more cautious, they embrace sex, drugs and rock n roll in a deep philosophical underpinning thereof but they have seen us in action, theyve seen the older baby boomers in action and know what works in general doesnt always work when the bomb sets fire to the beanbag chair. Baby boom gets better behaved as it goes along. Host one delightful aspect of this book is you start by describing what sounds like a very early memory in toledo, ohio, where you are watching the world through the picture window of your familys brandnew house. Guest standing there, too young to go to school and watching kids go to school, one of my first memories. This is the silent generation was a moment of silence out there. It just seemed at this moment all generationss kids wanted to be grownups except us. We wanted to be bigger kids. That is a vowel we kind of kept. Host you make an observation about childhood that struck me. Children of baby boom children were in control of their own childhood. Our parents worked as children, our children worked like maniacs and yet we were a generation, are a generation of people with childhoods. Host get out of the house, it is a beautiful day, it is raining, said it was a beautiful day. I never quite figured out the parenting style. We take a lot of grief as parenting, our parents were strange, they could be so cautious and so fearful, dont get to know people who are not from europe, that would be scary, for the fourth of july would come around and there are some explosives that should take a license. Everybody uncle mikey mike, this was more my businessman and uncle did this was he would give us firecrackers on the fourth of july. He give us a lit cigarette. Not to smoke, it is a safe way. They drank, real strict all day long. And helps to 6 30. I know im only 10 but can i take the car . Host in 2017 p. J. Orourke published a book on the 2016 election entitled how the hell did this happen . the election of 2016. In march of this year he spoke of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco to provide his thoughts on donald trump and the reasons for his victory. Here is a portion. How can a person like donald trump possibly become a president. Maybe it is a matter of what the great political satirist hl mencken said. Democracy is the theory the Common People know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. More likely part of something larger. We are not alone in having a political awkward moment. We are in the midst of a global revolt against the political elites who created the postworld war Ii International order and for the past few years have been running everything, running everything into the ground as far as a lot of ordinary voters are concerned. Internationally we are seeing a rise in the xena phobia, jingoism and authoritarianism, it ranges from the comic spectacle of the European Union to the deeply sinister activities of Vladimir Putin and xi jinping, taking measurements for a new you think this would seem worse than a mere standard issue, of jim busch or hillary clinton. The political elites in part create their own problem. Over the past four generations, political power is expanded. The politicians and government around the world, one of the things you make is grabbed by government. If your cat has three kittens, one of them is a government agent. Political power is expanded in scope. Politics cast its net over every aspect of life. It isnt tangled, politics is crap, now we find out where we take one is a political issue. I have to say to the political elites where you going to realize politics is a 2 way street. The elite politicians create a powerful, huge heavy unstoppable monster truck of a government in the same elite politicians when a horrible politician who they detest gets behind the wheel, and runs them over. They need to make the truck smaller, yank the engine and install foot pedals. And being us in the chins. We are sick of the elites. What we have, grabbing everything weve got, we see this revolt against the elites in the brexit vote. We see it in the rise of alternative Political Parties in europe on both ends of the political spectrum, greens on elected nationalists on the right, we see it in brazil, left, right, middle of the road, has been charged with corruption for the simple reason they are guilty of. In the case of brexit, Business Elite and trade union elite, they were all opposed to brexit, the people who supported the iraq war plus the people who caused the 2000 the Global Financial crisis and people who nationalize the British Automobile industry, they were all in unprecedented agreement on one issue and voters felt it couldnt go wrong voting against this trifecta. Columbias elites spent five years negotiating a peace treaty with a starving rabble of communist guerrillas, the plea besides, ratified that agreement, to ask what . After 52 years of murder, kidnapping, pillage, theft and trafficking in narcotics. Even politics of australia, the name of the conservative party is the liberal party but australia had five prime ministers and six years. In this last election nearly resulted in a hung parliament. And probably illegal to acc

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