It's the birthday of political satirist P.J. O'Rourke (books by this author), born in Toledo, Ohio (1947). After a conservative upbringing, he started his writing life in the 1960s as a "left-leaning hippie," but claims that he was never ever a Democrat. He said, "I went from being a Republican to being a Maoist, then back to being a Republican again."
He went to college, and said: "I thought being a college student was so dull, so bourgeois, so predictable. I wanted to be a race car driver, a soldier of fortune or a rock and roll star. But I didn't have a race car. Soldier of fortune, I guess I could have done, but they wanted me to serve a stint in Vietnam first." He got out of the draft in 1970 by making a list of the drugs he had abused and giving that list to the Army. He chose to be a writer because "it was the '60s — there was no quality control on anything. If I wrote, who's to say that I wasn't a writer?"
He's published more than a dozen books, including Republican Party Reptile (1987), Give War a Chance (1992), and most recently Holidays in Heck (2011), a sequel to 1989's Holidays in Hell, a collection of travel writing in which O'Rourke visited war zones and other trouble spots around the world. This time around, he traveled to places like Galapagos and Disneyland.
O'Rourke, who said: "One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling."
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