I’ve been a big P.J. O’Rourke fan for years, ever since I first discovered him on the pages of Car & Driver magazine back in the ‘70s. For Christmas, my daughter, who is also a P.J. aficionado, got me a copy of his 1998 tome on economics, “Eat the Rich. “ P.J. is an advocate of free markets, as am I, so I enjoyed the substance of his economic analysis, but this is a guy who could make writing about soybean irrigation or rain gutter maintenance interesting and funny. Perhaps he already has.
Observations like: “The Chinese had an ancient and sophisticated civilization when my relatives were hunkering naked in the trees. (Admittedly that was last week, but they’d been drinking.)” keep you reading and chuckling no matter what your political and economic ideologies are.
Anyway, I’d never given a lot of thought to what sort of computer P.J. might use, and indeed I doubt that he is an intensive computer user at all, as evidenced by his admission in the Acknowledgments that his wife entered the entire manuscript of the book into a word processor for him.
However, it also seems that P.J. is something of an admirer of the Macintosh. In a discussion of the principles of economics, under a heading “The Market Is Never Wrong” P.J. writes:
“A thing is worth what people will give for it, and it isn’t worth anything else. If you have some shares of Apple Computer and you go into the NASDAQ market offering those shares for $1,000 apiece, you may be brilliant. Apple stock may be worth $1,000, easy. And all the NASDAQ customers may be idiots for buying Apple at a mere thirty dollars. A Macintosh is a much better computer than an IBM PC. But, smart as you are and dumb as everybody else is, the market says your shares didn’t sell. And the market is right.
“Also, a thing may be “priceless.” You’d rather die than trade your Macintosh for an IBM. But that’s still a price, albeit a very high one.”
More evidence of P.J. O’Rourke’s eminent good sense. You can find other samples of his writing and wit in The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone magazine, Automobile magazine from time to time, and sundry other publications, or on these Websites:
Most of P.J. O’Rourke’s books, including Eat The Rich, The Ceo of the Sofa, Give War A Chance, Parliament of Whores; Holidays in Hell; and All the Trouble in the World, are available from Amazon.com here.
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