Republican Party Reptile
Essays and Outrages
by P. J. O'Rourke
ISBN: 0-87113-622-8 / ISBN-13: 978-0-87113-622-0
US $14.00 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 240 pp - Sep. 1995
|
Excerpt:
As once anything was excusable in the name of patriotism, now anything is excusable in the name of safety. We will kiss some low place on every dishtowel-head in the Levant rather than have a single breeder reactor on our shores. We will make every lube artist in America learn Japanese rather than produce an enjoyable automobile . . . This is treason. America was founded on danger. How many lifeboat drills were held on the Mayflower? Where were the smoke detectors in the Lincoln family cabin? Who checked to see whether Indian war paint was made with Red Dye No. 2? It was the thrilling, vast, wonderful danger of America which drew people here from all over the world—spacious skies filled with blizzards and tornadoes, purpled mountain majesties to fall off, and fruited plains full of snarling animals and armed aborigines. America is a dangerous country. Safety has no place here.
In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that’s fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters). And everything that isn’t fun is dangerous too. . . . Death was invented so we could have evolution. The process of Darwinian selection does not work on things that don’t die. If it weren’t for death we would all still be amoebas and would have to eat by surrounding things with our butts.
Copyright © 1987 by P. J. O’Rourke. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
|
