The more things change...

P.J. O'Rourke is the honored author of one of the few books my parents would not allow us to read as kids, MODERN MANNERS. Now I'm a putative adult and I do what I want, which is why I read this book in a flurry the weekend before the 2012 presidential election. It was worth it, and I don't think I got any more corrupted from it.

The book is a loose collection of essays examining different aspects of the federal government, from the president to military spending, written and published around the time of the 1988 election. (Yes, there is a random Joe Biden mention, thank goodness.) O'Rourke re-balances the federal budget, sits in on a session of Congress and analyzes the workload of the Supreme Court, as well as joining the reporter "pool" during the 1988 election to cover the people covering the candidates. (O'Rourke's biography in the back of my edition, which bears this cover at left, lists him at the time as a correspondent for Rolling Stone -- still a surprisingly rich source of political reporting and analysis -- so I'm assuming some of this book began life in its pages.)

I knew from his odd appearances on Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me that O'Rourke leans conservative, so he naturally approaches the government with suspicion, even the parts that conservatives have traditionally held up. In the last essay, he moves from national to local level and describes sitting through a city function in his New England hometown and feeling himself bubbling over with rage as the deliberations stretched on without end or point. But he doesn't hate it completely; he shows a lot of respect to the congressperson who lets O'Rourke shadow him for a day (and some restraint in withholding his name), and stands duly impressed in front of a military installation.

His anger at government as an organism is one I think even people on my side of the political spectrum might have felt at one time. To paraphrase Avril Lavigne: why did our nation, framers and elected representatives have to go and make things so complicated? One layer below the eighth-grade-U.S.-history "three branches"  explanation of government and the head swims. (This week, for instance, we learned about the part of the CIA that might read your emails in case you are highly classified, yet suspected of a security breach, and guess from that what kind of breach you have committed, of which there are many. Did I make that explanation dry enough? Cool.) I thought most of O'Rourke's non-governmental vitriol was misplaced, but there were moments when I agreed with him -- a good frame of mind to enter at the end of the election cycle after all.