What were your politics in 1971 . I think a martian left would be the easiest way to sum it up. I was a leftwinger, but i didnt make enough sense to actually be a communist or a trotskyite or anything. When did the transformation occur . It was gradual. I just wrote about this. There is a book coming out from the huber institution is backing this. Edited by Mary Eberstadt called why i turned right and its the story of a bunch of us and why we became right and it is a long story and i wont tell it but ill give the shortversion. I was a radical leftist. Very much in favor of some sort of marcus socialist thing in america. I got a job. I got a job paying hundred 50 a week. I was a messenger in new york , hundred 50 in new york a week was a lot of money as far as i wasconcerned, i was on the Lower East Side and i was very broke. We got paid every two weeks and i was lookingforward to that 300 bucks. And so was my landlord i may say. And my drug dealer. And a number of other people and i got my first paycheck and i netted out 178 or something. It was supposed to be 300 but after federal taxes and estate taxes, city tax, socialsecurity , care, Retirement Fund which i cared a lot about in those days and i said wait a minute. Ive been advocating socialism. Marxism. Communism for years, screaming and yelling and demonstrating and we already have it. They just took half my pay. Whats going on here . Im not rockefeller, they just took half my pay. We have socialism and i started to snap out of it for a while. Somebody else who madea switch in their politics was Christopher Hitchens. Much more recently. But back in 1993 i believe heres what he had to say about you. Orourke is a guide to get away with murder. Hes another exleftist, 60 radical dropout, wrote fondly about what it was like being permanently stoned and paranoid in the60s. Then sort of like any republican and hes been cashing in this chapter percent and has aterrific following as a humorous. For his books and essays, the first one quite funny. Its called Republican Party reptile. And the next one was called, its called holidays in hell and a more recent one is called give war a chance and its much better than any of my books ever happened it gets me down so theres my revenge on him. Ive met him, sure and hes a funny guy to hang out within a bar. I reckon he was running on empty with this joke about i know ive been there, ive been a radical, now i see how wonderful it would be to be a completely buttoned up, buttoned down 40. And the joke basically depends on satire and political correctness. People try not to make jokes about age, pj will make a joke about age. Its not funny to laugh about criminals and i said in the words of the movies, thats quite funnybut its not funny enough. Christopher, getting away with murder. I might get away with slander , and verbal assault. I dont think ive ever gotten away with, im just a little guy and cowardly. Ive never gotten away with physical assault. I think he overstates the case. And also of course im long past the point where i can claim to be a young republican buttondown or not. Im an old republican, now im like most middleaged white guys. Were all republicans even if we sometimes call ourselves Something Else like democrats. Didnt know you were going to come over here this afternoon and get attack. Holidays in hell is another pj orourke book. All the trouble in the world. Modern manners and an elegant book for rudepeople. First book, when was this put out . The original edition was 1983. Eats the rich, what was this about . Eat the rich was what got me started on adam smith which was i was simply puzzled. I didnt understand why some countries are rich and other countries are poor. So i started poking around going to rich countries and poor countries and trying to see if i can figure out why this country was rich and other countries were poor and it was from that experience that toby monday, the editor of Grove Atlantic in england who came up with this idea of a series of books that changed the world of which my book on adam smith is one and Christopher Hitchens as one also on thomas paine, rights of man and very good it is. It was because of some adam smith, some poking around at adam smith that toby askedme to write on adam smith. Your own with pj orourke, go ahead. Are you with us . Come in nesbitt. Go ahead. I am not sure why mister orourke deserves to be taken seriously given all this time on your show when a man who i suspect never wore the uniform and i suspect from hearing about his politics in the vietnam era would have done his darndest to avoid wearing a uniform and so utterly flippant about war. We have a more now that we should not have been in and i happen to have been a republican for 50 years, boating three times for Richard Nixon and twice for ronald reagan. Thousands of americans killed, kansas not thousands of iraqis have been killed. No useful purpose is served by this war and its abominable that mister orourke can make fun of where war and find something amusing about the question i wanted to ask if he talks about the imperative of free markets. Does mister orourke have any conception about why we have things like an minimum wage law, maximumhour laws and osha laws . Does he remember the condition that existed in america before we had those laws and the way laborers were obliged to work 12 hour days, sixday weeks . Is that what mister orourke exists freedom . We will get to the free market question that he had in just a question of second. Thats one on republican. It was on the democratic line. Im glad he came in on the democratic line. In your dedication to give war a chance heres what you write. Like many men of my generation i had an opportunity to give war a chance on it chickened out area i went to my draft with a doctors letter about my drugabuse. It was four pages long with 3 and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs i had abused. I was shunted in the into the office of a psychiatrist at the end of an interview, pounding his desk and shouting you are f up, you dont belong in the army. He was right on the first count and possibly right on the second. I didnt have to gobut that meant the one else had to go in my place. I would like to dedicate this book to him. I hope you got back in one piece and i hope you are more used your platoon mates than i would have been had i hope youre rich and happy now and in 1971 when somebody punched me in the face for being a long hair, i hope that was you. I got a couple nice letters because of that dedication from people who thought maybe they had punched me in the face and said they appreciated it. To begin with thebeginning of what the fellow on the phone said , ive never asked anybody to take me seriously. Aftermaking fun of war , lets put it this way. Bad situation and war is a rotten situation, like a bad disease, like death itself. Isnt changed by whether you make fun of it or you dont. We make fun of things not because we approve of them or love them. Not because they are cuddly and cute. We make fun of things in order to cope with our own terror, our own unease, our own existential horror, our anger at that. Our disappointment with ourselves, etc. And so forth. Humor is a defense mechanism. You can drink, you can make a joke. You can take drugs. You can make yourself all pompous and pious. Or you can do all of those things at once. So what do i make fun of war or dont make fun of war is unfortunately not going to make war better. Nor is it going to make war worse. As to free market and a minimum wage and people working in coal mines and working 49 hours a day, nine days a week and so on and so forth, its interesting when you say youre in favor of freemarkets, you immediately get that response from lots of people. Its not a course at all what adam smith met. What adam smith was talking about was keeping coercion out of life. And keeping coercion out of marketplaces is only one aspect of keeping coercion out of life. Adam smiths whole know you of the wealth of nations and an important book that he wrote that no one reads anymore call the theory of moral sentiments which is about morality was all about making people rely upon persuasion and to give up brute force. That is the core of morality. Its the core of a free society. Its the core of democracy even though adam smith in some ways didnt know that area you live in. And he didnt understand democracy could work but he understood that freedom could work. He was a moral and a practical and just a plain sympathetic advocate of freedom. And at the root of freedom is persuasion. The idea that you want free markets does not mean that you want markets ruled by force and it does not mean that you want markets ruled by anarchy. It implies the rule of law and it implies that we are all equal before the law. It is not prescriptive. It doesnt tell us how to conduct the free market or give us exact rules. It tells us there should be rules and we should all obey the rules but it doesnt say quite exactly what those rules are. In book 5 of the wealth of nations adam smith tries to lay down some rules. He tries to take his theories and make them prescriptive, give us political policy. He becomes a policy walk. And its interesting. Its the one failed book in the wealth, five books in the wealth of nations. When adam smith turned into a policy wonks he becomes as foolish as the rest of us who when we become policywonks. He becomes like theyve had in this white house and like they will have in this congress. So to the very angry collar, i would just like to saythis. Although i have no idea why three hours should be wasted on me and im not going to say that there is any good reason for it. But because you have certain ideas about how freedom should be conducted and you may well be right and i respect those ideas and those ideas are worth arguing about area they may not be the same ideas i have but dont just because you want to limit certain freedoms in the market, you may be wise and it may be the correct thing to do to limit those freedoms but dont be smug about your desire to limit freedom. Everybody who wants to limit freedom from those who desire that there be human slavery to the callahan to people who are in favor of minimum wage laws, everybody is smug about their desire to limit human freedoms. Some human freedoms really do need to be limited but that doesnt make you a good person for recognizing that. Or make you a wise person or a sensible person assuming your arguments are good but youre not a good person and you deserve no smugness and you dont deserve to vent your anger on foolish innocent humorists just because you have some desire to limit, so there. P. J. Orourke has appeared on book tv to 20 times over the past 20 years he provided tribute to the american automobile while discussing his book driving like crazy. This event was held at the Peterson Automotive Museum in los angeles in june 2009. It is im afraid last time to say how shall we put it . Sayonara to the american car. American automobile companies, ford, gm or chrysler, they will live on in some kind of form, a kind of marleys ghost dragging their chains attaxpayers expense. The fools in the corner offices of detroit and the fool officials of detroit unions will retire to their vacation homes in palm beach and st. Petersburg respectively and deserve our sympathy, they dont deserve our sympathy any more than the malevolent trolls under the capitol dome in washington but pity the poor american car when congress and the white house get through with it. A lightweight vehicle with a small Carbon Footprint using alternative energy and Renewable Resources tooperate in a Sustainable Way , when i was a kid we called it a schwinn. And i guess its been a great hundred 10 years. Its been a great run. Hundred 10 years since the jury a brothers the First American automobile in Springfield Massachusetts and if it had been a success, Springfield Massachusetts might be todays motor city. A row of abandoned houses, unemployment, drug dealing, Violent Crime and racial tensions which have it happens bring field massachusetts is full of anyway. But the wheel of the american car, we owing a lot more than the entertaining spectacle of detroit various allen mayors. In fact many people my age we all our very existence to the car or to the cars backseat. Where if you check our parents wedding anniversary with our birthdates and find them a little too close to comfort, thats probably where we were conceived. There was no premarital sex in america before the invention of the internal combustion engine. You couldnt sneak a girl into the rec room after farmhouse because her mom and dad didnt have a car because they couldnt commute so they were stuck home working on the farm. And your farmhouse didnt have a rec room is recreation and not been discovered due to all the farm work. On the on saturday night you could take a girl out in a buggy but it was hard to get her into the mood to let you bust into her corset because you two were facingbehind and it just spoiled the atmosphere. So the car let us out of the barn and while the car was added the car destroyed the American Nuclear family and anyone who had an American Nuclear family and tell you that was a relief to all concerned. And the cars cost cost america to be paid. There are much worse things you do to a country then pay the as the sudanese have been proven in darfur and one of the things ive wondered is we never hear a thank you, never a word of thanks for getting all of america paved from those kids in the body casts to skateboard all the time not a word of thanks. Cars provided america with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and well and Retirement Benefits working on the general Livestock Corporation assemblyline others on cars it just couldnt be done and i think that the american car was a source of intellectual stimulation. You could think of the innovation, the invention, the sheer genius that transformed the 1908 model t ford into the 1968 shelby cobra gt500. In the course of one single human lifetime for speeding tickets. Compare this to the progress in the previous mode of transportation. Horse reduction, horse design, unchanged for thousands of years and when it comes to creativity with a horse, i did a Little Research on this when i was writing. You know, nobody thought to put, nobody thought to hang the store of from a saddle until about 580. The startup was invented. People have been riding horses for thousands of years and it took them until 580 two invent this. Where were they putting their feet . If automobile design and engineering and proceeded at the same pace as worst design and engineering we would be powering ourselves down the road running with both of our feet stuck through a hole in the floor like Fred Flintstone although it may come to that with the 2010 obama mobile. But most important of all, most important of all was the cars fulfilled the ideal of americas founding fathers. Of all the troops that we hold to be selfevident, of all the inalienable rights with which we are endowed, which one is most important to the American Dream . It is right there front and center, flat in the name of the declaration of independence read freedom to leave. Freedom to get out of town read freedom to get the hell out of here. King george, can i have the keys . Thats what the declaration of independence says. And ive got to tell you, the saga of the american car. This is not an abstract matter to me. This is no subject of fanciful theories. Nancy pelosi, she may think he was boarded home from the Maternity Ward on the clouds supported by seraphim. Low carbon seraphim. But i know it was the car that got me to where i am. My grandfather, jacob orourke, he was born in 1877. He was born on a farm about the size of this podium. In line city ohio which was not a city and didnt even have any line. He was one of 10 kids, grandpa was one of 10 kidsand they grew up in an unpaid check , i have a photograph of them lined up by age tearing at the photographer amazed to see someone in shoes. My greatgrandfather barney, he was a woodcutter. In the midwest, where there are no trees. Unemployed quite a lot. Also drunk, also illiterate. Ive got a copy of barneys marriage certificatewith barneys x right there. Barneys only accomplishment aside from the 10 prizes he won on the corn shop stopping of the poor mans roulette wheel, the only thing barney ever accomplished in his life as he trained a pair of old nags to haul him home get drunk. He would fall out of the tavern, passed out in the wagon and the horses would bring him home and that is what he accomplished. Grandpa jake left home armed with a fifth grade education heading for the bright lights of toledo ohio. And he went to work as a buggy mechanic. A buggy mechanic and one day horseless buggy pulled up at the shop. Grandpa saw that and he saw the future. He fixed back to. And it didnt take grandpa long to realize cleaner hands were to be had and more money was to be made telling the things instead of repairing them and also my uncle arches birthday and grandma and grandpas anniversary were a little too close for comfort. So anyway he got in the car business and by the time my dad came along in the 40s we had orourke buick and grandpa and my uncle archie owned the dealership and my father was a Sales Manager and dads younger brother randy used car lot and baby brother jack was a salesman and cousin ike ran the Parts Department and all the ants and the girls cousins worked in the office and all the boy cousins and me worked on the car lot cleaning and waxing the cars and arches done in law would go on to run the Ohio Car Dealers Association and i would go on to new whatever it is that i do. In this book, write about cars and stuff but ill tell you, even in these dark days for the american automobile there are times i wish id stayed in toledo and taken over that car agency because just to be on those local car dealership adds. I got this whole idea i wanted to do pirate Treasure Island buick. I come out with aparent on my shoulder and one of those big cat