It’s interesting how we can read such different things into it. I have the benefit of having the whole article in front of me. P.J. certainly agrees that Apartheid is evil and does not use the hypocrisy of critics as an excuse. Perhaps he commits the unpardonable sin of making jokes about the fundamental absurdity of it.
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It was. It still is.
On the plus side PJ is still dead too.
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So you’d be in a position to say. Does he at any point have anything positive to say about opposition to it, or your quoted passage deriding the people who fought it all he has to say on the matter?
Because for the record, saying something is evil doesn’t mean you actually oppose something. General Lee famously called slavery evil. It didn’t stop him from torturing slaves or going to war to preserve the institution. So saying apartheid is bad doesn’t impress if your main problem is with its critics.
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It’s been a long time since I read it (IIRC it was anthologised in “Holidays in Hell”) but that excerpt certainly reflects his attitude – informed by the Libertarianism he embraced – that everyone is a self-interested bigot, that it’s a saving grace to be honest about being a bigot, and that it’s pointless and ridiculous to try to change any system predicated on bigotry. It’s not so much that he approves of apartheid but that he wants the reader to accept that it’s just the way things are in this dog-ear-dog world and at least they’re open about it (unlike those silly American activists with their useless boycotts and demonstrations and songs about not playing Sun City).
It’s all there in that excerpt if you read it carefully, and based on what I know about him I doubt he says anything in the essay that would lead one to another interpretation. So yes, it is very interesting that you miss the points he’s really making.
As with many privileged white guys, especially ones who enable racists rather than put on the white sheet and pointed hat, it’s easy to joke about the absurdity of it. I recognise the absurdity of racism and laugh about it as well, but after I do that my response isn’t to just shrug it off.
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Okay, maybe my favorite typo of the day. Now all I can picture is dog-eared copies of his writings, with notes scribbled in the margins about how wrong he was about so many things.
In this dog-ear-dog world, librarians are hurling well-read books at each other!
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I’ll refrain from my usual correction just for you!
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This is a good time to remember that those “indignant demonstrations” helped end Apartheid even though the Reagan administration that O’Rourke so venerated was an ally and supporter of the racist South African regime.
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Is it really satire when you keep earnestly writing it, everyone has to explain it to people, and it isn’t funny?
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You see, @artbrau… see how far this has gone? You made us drag a poor little water bear into this.
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You don’t shrug it off and neither do I. I don’t assume P.J. did (but I can’t know). As my quote shows, he was perfectly aware of systemic racism but he did write humor pieces. He was not Upton Sinclair.
Having read more of his writing, apparently more extensively and more in context with his stated ideological worldview than his supposed fans do, I’m very comfortable doing so.
He was indeed a satirist, a very clever and often funny one, but he was also the kind of conservative one who wasn’t really interested in effecting any real change in the Swiftian mode. Even Mencken, to whom he fancied himself the literary heir and who was problematic in his own way, occasionally did try to effect real change with his work. O’Rourke was content to sit back and support neoliberalism and its twisted view of humanity as the default and profit off its spectacle as a supposedly disinterested observer.
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Yeah. I know. Without the heretics life would be so boring, eh? I’m not a big commenter but I weighed in because I have read a number of P.J.s books and I quite liked them. If it helps, the troglodytes on gettr think I’m a communist.
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But is he a heretic to the people on gttr?
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I dont think anyone here especially cares about YOU. It’s the shite you’re shoveling that matters, not the shoveler.
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Congratulations on being to the left of the Nazis you hang out with…? 
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A funny, witty, amusing, charming, charismatic asshole is still an asshole.
History owed nothing to the dead but the truth.
And I’m sure PJ’s own reaction to this sort of thing would be “why are you holding up that asshole as an example of anything?”
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It’s no great distinction to be called a Communist by fascists. They consider George W. Bush to be a pinko. That’s one of the many reasons that joining and participating in their forums is the act of a fool (at best).
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So you hang out on a Neo-Nazi propaganda site.
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