This book was written in 1986, which is half a lifetime ago in dog years and that’s certainly the kind of years we’re having now. When I look at these photographs of a younger (and, darn it, slimmer) self, I am suffused with nostalgia. Weren’t the eighties grand? Cash grew on trees or, anyway, coca bushes. The rich roamed the land in vast herds hunted by proud, free tribes of investment brokers who lived a simple life in tune with money. Every wristwatch was a Rolex. Every car was a Mercedes-Benz. A fellow could romance a gal without shrink-wrapping his privates and negotiating the Treaty of Ghent. Communist dictators were losing their jobs, not presidents of America and General Motors. Women wore Adolfo gowns instead of dumpy federal circuit court judge robes. The Malcolm who mattered was Forbes. Bill Clinton was only a microscopic polyp in the colon of national politics, and Hillary was still in flight school, hadn’t even soloed on her broom. What a blast we were having. The suburbs had just discovered Martha Stewart, the cities had just discovered crack. So many parties and none of them Democratic.
Those were halcyon (and Valium and Lithium and Prozac) days. Think of all we owe to that glorious past. And the bank. Back then health care was a tummy tuck, not an unalienable right. If you wanted a better environment, you went to Laura Ashley. Sleeping with the President meant you’d attended a Cabinet meeting. And I actually was a bachelor. Why didn’t I listen to myself? Here is an entire treatise on the joys of the unmarried state. I not only read it, I wrote the damn book. Then I got married anyway. It’s not my fault. These are the nineties, the dumb decade—dumb and complaining and sad. Fin de siécle. Fin de fun. I’m a victim, a victim of the tragic American I.Q. die-off which happened halfway through the Bush administration. I need a federal program.
There are things in this book which I wouldn’t be allowed to say nowadays. The way I’m not allowed to say “gimpy,” “fatso,” “Mongoloid idiot” or “drunken bum.” And I’m not allowed to say “ginzo,” “nickel-nose,” “zipper-eye,” “bog trotter,” “jungle bunny,” “buckethead,” “herring-choker,” or “get a job.” I’m especially not allowed to say “chick,” “dame,” “broad,” “babe,” and “okay in the hooter department.” I tell you, we’re going to see our sons sent home from school for writing “girl” on the bathroom wall. It’s a whole new era, an era of caring and empowerment, an era devoted to concern for the disadvantaged and for the earth, which all of us share. Has anyone noticed the correlation between the hole in the ozone layer and the ever-increasing size of the bald spot on the back of Al Gore’s head? In brief, it is an era characterized by some caring, empowered chick with a heinie the size of an Isuzu Trooper shrieking, “You just don’t get it!” on national TV. Come on, honey, I’m pro-abortion, too. As long as it’s retroactive.
Did I hear someone whimper “Men’s Movement”? This book was never written to give blubbering pantywaists advice on achieving manhood. If you’re skimming these pages in search of self-help tips, your mother dresses you funny. And you, Robert Bly, you mythpiddling dolt of posy, you are the worst versifier since the librettist for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. You’re not fit to use No. 1 pencils on Big Chief tablets. You couldn’t rhyme punt with Sinead O’Connor. (But one nice thing about having paint-covered flabby guys running around the woods with bongo drums: they’re much easier to find and shoot than deer.)
A big vote of thanks to you, too, Magic Johnson. Sure, if you’re getting laid eight or ten million times, you’re bound to encounter “the crack of doom.” For us regular guys who get lucky about once each time the planet Neptune revolves around the sun, however, Magic, you pissed in the soup. Not that we’re missing much since sex became a registered trademark of the Madonna Corporation.
Welcome to these 1990s. Let us all salute (and be sensitive to the needs of) the shiftless, the feckless, the senseless, the worthwhileness-impaired, the decencychallenged and the differently moraled. And hello to their leaders—progressive, committed and filled to the bunghole with enormous esteem for themselves. We know the type from childhood. They had their Monday’s homework done by nine on Friday night. What shall their symbol be? Fasces, perhaps, though not—secular humans forbid—the old-fashioned Fascist kind. Something, nonetheless, to represent multicultural diversity’s strength in the unity of P.C. thought, like, you know, whoa, “E Pluribus Unum.” (Better make that bilingual.) New Age fasces—I propose a bundle of limp weenies all wound up in a “Donohue” show.
Reader, look upon this book as a relic, an antique, a souvenir of better times. Or, if you voted with your butt instead of your wallet, call it recycled. Anyway, herewith a memento of that glad epoch when we knew the proper order of words in our language—“free alcohol” not “alcohol-free”—when we preferred a shining city on a hill to a whining Hill all over Clarence Thomas, when entitlement meant being a count, when tax cuts were in bloom and Clinton was in Flowers.
I’d tell you more but suddenly I remember I was molested as a child.
—P. J. O’R.
In a backwoods cabin with four years’ worth of canned good and a whole bunch of guns, 1993