Comfort me with Buicks.(The CEO of the Sofa)

The CEO of the Sofa, by P.J. O'Rourke; Picador, 2001, $28.

HAVING BEEN CALLED a "P.J. O'Rourke wannabe" more times than I can count, I couldn't resist asking the great man himself, "How does someone get to be P.J. O'Rourke?" when Tim Blair and I interviewed him on Radio National in August 2001.

"That's not something you really want to be," laughed O'Rourke, before going on to say, very kindly, that any cultural renegade who dares to make fun of the left, rather than of those nasty narrow-minded conservatives, is bound to face that style of dismissive criticism.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind being P.J. O'Rourke. For one thing, he's got enough skill to make a book of only slightly reworked columns a pleasure to read, and we all know there's nothing more dated than last week's column. (As for the Australian's habit of reprinting Phillip Adams's old pieces when he takes his summer break: there's probably a "crimes against humanity" case to be made at The Hague against that practice.)

For another thing, everyone seems to like P.J. O'Rourke, even a lot of the people he sends up. And for that reason, I'm not sure you can be P.J. O'Rourke in Australia, where cultural and intellectual life is dominated by a group far, far, to the left of anything O'Rourke has to confront in the United States, and where any non,conformity, even in the form of humour, is greeted with universal moral condemnation. O'Rourke's worst nightmares come in the form of slightly drippy social democrats like Hillary Clinton and Rosslyn Carter--people who would be considered far too conservative for regular spots on the ABC.

The state of our own intellectual life, and the difficulties involved in treating it with the kind of goodnatured humour O'Rourke employs against his targets, were never clearer than after the events of September 11. There was something heartless and bloody-minded about the way Australia's intellectuals resumed their favourite sport of "Yank"-bashing (the one form of officially sanctioned racism) following September 11. Indeed, in case anyone is interested, it was the appalling behaviour following September 11 of the citizens of the place I used to call "Wetworld" that convinced me to give up trying to be P.J. O'Rourke, or even to be Imre Salusinszky.

The conceit by which O'Rourke has refashioned a year's worth of columns and articles into The CEO of the Sofa is to frame his comments in the form of domestic disquisitions addressed to those in his immediate vicinity: his wife, his young daughter, his assistant, his godson, and the "Political Nut" (an amusing neighbour who makes P.J. sound like Noam Chomsky).