Since the passing of Auberon Waugh, there haven’t been many really successful right-wing comedians. The Mayor of London is one. Another is the American journalist and wit P.J. O’Rourke.
The alliterative title of The Baby Boom, his 20th book, essentially sums up its author’s style, his childlike boisterousness, his resonant infantilism. Its scarcely less suitable subtitle — ‘How It Got That Way, And It Wasn’t My Fault, And I’ll Never Do It Again’— is almost as revealing, indicating a man engaged in a conversation with himself and determined to have the last word.
Here his professed subject matter is the generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964: the lucky ones, in other words, who missed the horrors of the second world war but caught the high jinks of the 1960s (which as everyone knows, mainly occurred in the decade that followed). Withheld until the closing chapter, his message is that the ‘Baby Boomers’ were ‘the best generation in history — which just goes to show that history stinks’. Like Socrates’ claim to be the cleverest man alive, since he was the only one who knew he knew nothing, this is a punchline, not an argument, albeit one designed to make you think.
O’Rourke is not the go-to man for laborious analysis, but rather for riffs on a theme, switchback sentences and synonyms in rockfall. The Baby Boomer’s great gift to the world, he pronounces early, is ‘the blather, the jabber, the prattle, the natter, the gab, gas, yak, yap, baloney, blarney, bunkum, the jaw-slinging, tongue-wagging, gum-beating chin music’. Might Mr O’Rourke, just possibly, be writing about himself? And it’s at this moment — as one realises that The Baby Boom is actually a work of autobiography, as opposed to a serious socio-cultural study — that the book becomes purely enjoyable.
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