Reviewed by Sheilla Jones
Winnipeg Free Press, D18, April 1, 2017
How the Hell Did This Happen? The election of 2016
Atlantic Monthly Press, 216 pages
The current gang of 14 candidates running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada may have its fringe dwellers, loudmouths and pot-stirrers, but they’re all Sunday school teachers compared to the rowdies who sought the American presidency in last year’s bizarre election campaign.
Author and satirist P.J. O’Rourke’s opinion of the 20 Republicans and three Democrats running to be president in 2016 sets the tone for How the Hell Did This Happen?, his latest book on the absurdity that is American politics.
"Who are these jacklegs, highbinders, wire-pullers, mountebanks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four flushers and animated spittoons offering themselves as worthy of the nation’s highest office?"
For those not fluent in 19th-century pejoratives, a translation: he’s describing corrupt politicians, incompetents, puppeteers, swindlers, spewers of bunk, phony-money passers, card cheats and lively repositories for phlegm.
O’Rourke drops the gloves right from the start. It’s no holds barred as he eviscerates the electoral circus that ended on Nov. 8, 2016, with a reality TV host and real estate developer with no political experience being elected as the 45th American president.
How exactly that happened is, of course, the question O’Rourke attempts to answer in this, his 19th book, as he observed the election from the cosy confines of his farm in rural New Hampshire.
The result is decidedly mixed. The book is a collection of his writings over the 15 months of the campaign, and he admits it lacks a cohesive narrative. Some sections, such as a review of each of the early Republican contenders in the primaries, already seem like tilling up ancient history.
However, the author does offer some insights into how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton ended up as the chosen candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties.
The two parties, he writes, "think they are integral parts of the U.S. government, but in fact they are private organizations with no more constitutional standing than motorcycle gangs."
Gangs would likely have more sense than to choose their leaders through the convoluted process of survival-of-the-richest contests called primaries, where states all select candidates using different rules. To add to the confusion, the primaries are also held in places like Guam and the Virgin Islands, where residents cannot even vote in a presidential election. They might just as well hold a primary in Brandon, for all the sense that makes.
"It’s a baseball game," says O’Rourke, "where if you’re on first base you’re supposed to dunk the ball through the net. If you’re on second base you’re supposed to knock the puck past the goalie, and if you’re on third base you’re supposed to kick a field goal."
Does that help? Probably not, but it might explain why the 14 per cent of Americans who were delegates and superdelegates to the primaries ended up selecting Donald and Hillary, on behalf of the entire country, as rival gang leaders facing off in a giant turf war.
O’Rourke’s take on how people choose leaders is an interesting commentary on the very modern world of over-sharing.
"We used to vote for people we admire. (But) on closer inspection, they all had feet of clay." It is, says O’Rourke, the "24-hour cable news, the Internet, [and] Twitter" that is to blame for making our leaders far too familiar and, in the process, hard to like.
"Admirable leaders may not display the virtues we expected. Amiable leaders may not be the friendly guides we sought. But now we seem intent on electing a leader we neither look up to nor like. Therefore we will elect someone with no means to lead us. And we did."
Answering the big question of how the hell this happened is more complex than O’Rourke’s ruminations in this short book. The author, who gave us Eat the Rich, Give War a Chance and Parliament of Whores during his long career, still displays a biting wit, delivers laugh-out-loud quips and stings with political zingers.
Here’s hoping good sense will prevail in Canadian politics, that the Conservatives choose an adult who can form complete sentences in both official languages, and that we never need look at our political leaders and wonder how the hell that happened.
Sheilla Jones is a Winnipeg author and political junkie who tries not to take politics too seriously.
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