I can understand why many people don’t like Trump even minus the TDS. He’s crude, lacked experience in almost any policy area, will turn on people publicly over disagreements, had a reputation of not paying contractors, cheated on his wives, and has way too much PT Barnum in him. And his hyperaggressive foreign policy seems to be counterproductive; Greenland and the Canadian election come to mind.
That being said I like VDH’s analogy regarding Trump of the old western gunfighter you need to bring in to town to kill the bad guys, but once the deed is done you don’t want the gunslinger around your women and children. Walk off into the sunset. I think the country will breathe a sigh of relief when Trump finally leaves after 2028. That being said let’s hope he can finish the job and Democrats don’t win the midterms.
I won't breathe a sigh of relief. Our border will be nonexistent, and however bad the fraud seems now... it will multiply many times over completely unchecked. I don't have to "imagine" this happening. Democrats already showed they did it.
Bush's "win" would have taken "weeks to count", so it was court-ordered whitewash, instead of weeding through the "hanging chads" to get actual numbers.
You are one of the most unintelligent people in this world. You waste your time speaking. People have seen how bad the Trump has been dragged through the mud and how little has been proven. The deep state fails. Trump won not because he was a good person, but because he is not evil.
The only problem with your analogy is that the Republican Party will immediately revert right back to the way they were AND we'll be AT best be in the same mess they ALLOWED us to get into in the first place. What you can count on with the normal Republican Party is not promising anything, NO intention on delivering on the few things they promise they would deliver upon AND of course the Democrats being Bat Shit Crazy thus forcing us to vote for Republicans anyways. I'm in Georgia and been following the Instagram page of david_khait. He's been documenting the thousands of fake registered voters in Fulton County. Empty lots, churches, Marta Stations, etc., and of course the 300K+ fake mail in ballots from 2020(there's been a court order to review those ballots and don't be surprised if they're accidently "destroyed" before the order is executed). Now this is something I expect from Democrats. The real problem is the Georgia Republican Party i.e., Kemp/Raffensburger (and the Georgia Republican Party in general) have known about this for years YET have done nothing about it.
As P.J. was embraced by the GOP establishment, he ended up adopting most of their views. Remember, in 2015 - 16 National Review and the pundits on Fox News were resolutely anti-Trump.
Including, to his enduring shame, VDH. Best wishes by the way on his recovery from what I understand was a difficult operation with serious complications to remove cancerous lung tissue.
No shame in being wrong? Especially for one who has spent a lifetime sifting facts and circumstances to come up with logical conclusions which fit the data? Hmm...have to think about that one for a while.
I just watched a few short videos about recent travel in Mogadishu, and my impression is that while it’s not a place one would care to visit, it’s a lot calmer than it was in the 1990’s.
I had a personal interaction with PJ. I asked him to blurb a book, thinking, You're out of your mind. He gets a hundred requests like this every month. I've never seen an author of his stature be so gracious. He was defiant. “I owe the universe a favor,” he said. “People were good to me as a young author, I hope I do them justice.”
It’s so funny. I read this book thirty years ago and the line I remember most comes not from this passage but at the end of the book. As PJ waxes poetically that all people around are all the same and inherently good, he pauses momentarily and writes, “except for Somalis, they are all assholes”. I also remember he liked Vietnamese women.
To be fair to Somalis, the semi-independent Somililand is apparently doing well. There are other examples around the world how borders really make a difference (something our liberal friends are too full of themselves to grasp): North Korea/South Korea, Tajikistan/Afghanistan, Poland/Germany, Israel/Gaza. Any others?
Back in 2008 I pointed out that one of P.J.'s wives may have been part black, being a descendant of Lena Horne and Sidney Lumet.
And that Presidential candidate John McCain may have broken up P.J.'s marriage by having an affair with with P.J.'s wife, who was an important character in director Jonathan Demme's movie based on her sister's memoir.
But nobody else paid any attention to what struck me as Pretty Interesting.
I never trusted McCain after a while. Seemed like an holier than thou type. I signed up for his campaign in 2000, but eventually didn’t vote for him in the primaries.
Anyway, now you got me googling pictures of PJ Orourke’s wives. A distraction on what is supposed to be a busy morning.
I really don't think Anderson Cooper was adequately appreciative of how hot P. J. O'Rourke's wife Amy Lumet was. There's an entire movie by Jonathan Demme written by Amy's sister about
Wow! I remember reading somewhere about his wife having an affair but I never read that my longtime U.S. Senator was the other party. I must have voted for McCain’s primary opponent two or three times over the years. The quality of Republican senators in Arizona was quite low.
I remember the part in his trip to Vietnam where PJ (hippy antiwar protester during the war) visits a Vietnamese war museum and gets uncomfortable seeing how the anti-war protests were appreciated and how his efforts really were against the American side.
Also when his (American) cameraman and Vietnamese driver realized they'd been on opposite sides of the same battle during the war (both were quite pleased by this and celebrated with much drinking).
That’s also one of only two things I remember from that book. The other is the Haitian jute minister (or whoever) saying that “the environment is the cherry on the sundae.”
US immigration policy: The more awful and depraved your society, the more of you qualify as refugees from your awful culture. We want the worst and lots of them.
Maybe it's just me, itching uncomfortably (back) in the city I was born in, but his wrote-up filled with me with a yearning to visit Somalia! 😂
Anyway - - never having actually been there I can't commment other than to say that I really enjoyed reading that article. Thank you for sharing it with us.
As for PJ, I remembered him (well enough to wonder what he was doing back alive when I noticed him in my subscriptions last week) but I'd forgotten the precise joy of reading him, which you just reminded me.
One of the best observers and writers concerning the human condition, P J O’Rourke. In his hilarious book Holidays In Hell after a visit to the Soviet Union he described Soviet buildings such as workers flats looking as if the Soviets thought that the recipe for concrete was oatmeal and milk.
If you like his work you should also check out Anthony Daniels, who also writes under the nom-de-plume Theodore Dalrymple.
He’s a British doctor who spent most of his career working, as he describes it, in both a prison ward and a charity ward, which gave him quite a good look at the human condition.
He wrote a book called The Wilder Shores of Marx, in which he documents his observations of the last remaining outposts of old-style Communism after the fall of the USSR.
But he got his start as a doctor in what was then Rhodesia, and he saw how the transition to majority African rule eviscerated everything the Empire had done for them. Heartbreaking, really.
You also see that in his travel book, From Zanzibar to Timbuktu, which documents a long trip across Africa he took using only public conveyances—buses, boats, trains, and the occasional shared ride with folks pushing their carts from Point A to Point B.
Great writer. I first ran across him in the 80s in his book “Utopias Elsewhere” about his travels to various socialist paradises that the Left encouraged the West to emulate.
If a third of a century from now, somebody reminds the world that I lived once lived because they posted a chunk of something I wrote a third of a century ago and my heirs eventually get small checks, well, that's cool.
Even better, how about we have maximum copyright terms of 20 years but with perpetual moral rights (ie a right of authorship attribution)? That way we don’t have to worry about any of this crap. Would the Beatles have thrown in dreams of rock stardom in favour of a safe job on the Liverpool docks if they thought their great-great children wouldn’t be entitled to a perpetual income stream from Love Me Do and would instead have to work for a living? Doubtful…
I saw O’Rourke give a speech on my college campus the same day that Paul McCartney and Wings were doing a concert at the stadium and he joked that at least he didn’t have his wife up on stage with him playing the tambourine.
I visited Somalia and Somaliland a few times in the early 1990s. The first time was shortly after the Battle of Mogadishu, the technical term for Blackhawk Down and I would wish the place on nobody. Of the 85 countries I lived in, worked in, or spent more than a few days visiting, it is the one place I never want to return to.
I was at the airport in Mogadishu to check on my return flight to Nairobi one afternoon and saw ten or so aluminum shipping coffins resting on sawhorses on the apron in front of the terminal. Each coffin was covered by a Nepalese flag and were ready to ship back to Nepal with the bodies of peacekeepers who arrived on the first day of their deployment, spent the second day on patrol in city where they were ambushed and killed, and by the third day of their deployment they were packed and ready to ship home. While I was taking all this in, I overhead a mayday call on the airport p.a. system from a Cessna Caravan pilot who was on approach to the airport on a flight from Nairobi. One of his passengers, an employee of a humanitarian aid organization, was hit by a random bullet and killed. Never a need for television in Mogadishu, because they generated more than enough sex (I suspect, based on all the starving little kids I saw) and violence than they could consume locally.
While there, I visited one of the big suqs where I was assured that anything I could imagine was available there, including a human head. At the weapons section, a wide range of weapons was available without a background check, including rocket propelled grenades. I remember that Chinese produced AK-47s, used, were about $15. Although I didn’t purchase any of the guns, I was able to test fire anything I wanted by shooting it into the sky. I wondered at the time whether the properties of gravity were widely understood.
In another section of the market, I found a former passport officer who had cleaned out the former government’s passport safe and was selling a standard passport for $15 and $25 for a diplomatic passport. Being a person of humble origins, I limited myself to a standard passport. The seller required a recent photograph, my tribal lineage (“Ralph, son of Kenneth, son of Rosco, son of. . .) and completed the transaction while I waited, so technically, I am citizen of Somalia. I was one of the few people in the world who thought Trump’s travel ban on a few countries in the Middle East wasn’t a bad thing, because passports from Yemen and Libya, and several other countries whose citizens were banned, used procedures at least as dubious as what the former passport officer in the Mogadishu suq used.
During one of my visits, I watched the inauguration of Nelson Mandela when I made an r&r trip to Djibouti after spending three weeks in the northern Somalia (“Somaliland”). I went from a $3 per night “hotel” in Hargeysa to a $300 per night Intercontinental Hotel in Djibouti City. It was refreshing to have a shower and air conditioning after my humble accommodations in Hargeysa. As I watched Mandela’s inauguration, I thought of my trips to Johannesburg when the South African government promised a refund on my trips to Johannesburg if I witnessed acts of violence, which I did witness but never received a refund for, compared with trips to Somalia, where witnessing acts of violence could be guaranteed.
One evening, while dining in a Mogadishu restaurant, my colleague who was holding a glass of sparkling water had it shot out of his hand by a spent bullet. On my last trip to that city, on an early Thursday morning when I was booked to fly home to Maryland, I stepped out of our Landcruiser to open the tall steel gate on the front of our compound and felt something pushing against the gate. When I peaked through the gate, I saw one of our armed guards leaning against it, dead, with his entrails in his lap. When I opened the gate, he tipped over onto the sandy street and spilled himself onto the sand. 18 hours or so later, I was sitting in our leafy Maryland trying to reconcile myself with all that I experienced in Mogadishu with the shopping malls, the big box stores, and the busy but orderly freeways in suburban Maryland.
Perhaps this is why the fraud and corruption in Minnesota and Ilham Omar’s reputation doesn’t surprise me. You can take a Somali out of the country, but you can’t take Somalia out of a Somalian. P.J. O’Rourke had a way of perfectly capturing the essence of the countries he wrote about and his books Holidays in Hell and All the Trouble in the World captured the ambience of places such as Somalia and Haiti perfectly.
Happily, they voted with their feet (and keen eyes for welfare benefits galore) and moved to states that wanted them and now have them, good and hard. I have an astonishingly naive old friend who briefly visited the Somali in Maine and were told by schoolteachers who would of course tell him no other, that they were far better students than the Americans they displaced -- of course the consequences of saying otherwise to a national commentator wouldn't be wise, career-wise. I imagine that, as with every other human society, some decent Somali slipped in line for the refugee planes up to the big silver bird to take them to neverland. And there were shards of rich cultural heritage here, sustained by the hidden cosmopolitans and scholars who once interacted with American journalist and observer (and JBS columnist) Geroge Schuyler.
But what my friend did not see on his Topemkin tour of Maine schools were those Somali youth who weren't in school, nor the vast panapoly of special educational resources, learning centers, tutors, and refugee counselors who took money from their white and Mexican schoolmates and showered them on the refugee students and their "families" (where were the girl-children?) As said natives and temporary fieldworkers of Maine spent their time outside the classroom working on fishing boats or waiting on rich tourists or making up hotel beds before and after school.
I was shamefully in the refugee racket in the '90's as a VISTA (and what a crooked outfit that is), and my experience of the Somalis who were placed in Atlanta but fled to Minnesota and Maine the moment the bennies ran out was of literally warring tribes, extreme violence, and endless government efforts to present them as model citizens.
I'm sure they've calmed down and that there were always some good people hidden among the warlords who destroyed their own people them got first in line for refugee status. But they have now moved on to the second phase of some refugee (not all) tribes: robbing us blind, again with lots of suddenly less effective media propaganda by the naive, and by big assist from the government.
PJ was hilarious and smart and connected and lived an outrageously interesting life, but unlike some of his mega-selling, genre-defying peers -- eg Bill Bryson -- what comes through about his personality in the end is judgment. He cared about character and had a good eye for it. He called out fakes and operators and was attracted to normal decent things
I was always struck by the idea that he was an adult in so many things that mattered while still maintaining a youthful irreverence about everything else.
About 20 years ago when I was a young Democratic congressional staffer who was already drifting away from the party, a Republican colleague recommended Parliament of Whores to me - along with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas probably the books that made me laugh out loud the most. I in turn recommended it to a Democratic friend about 10 years ago, which perhaps didn't shake his allegiance to the party but did apparently shake his faith in the competence and honesty of our government.
Anyway, what an account. I had a friend whose older brother had served in Somalia and I remember him describing them as total savages. I know I have more than once shared that my MN relatives to a person cannot stand them but just last week when my wife got into a fight with one of them over the fraud/ICE situation up there, and one previously highly uncomplimentary relation wailed "they are part of our community!" Unreal - people really do treat politics like a religious or tribal loyalty and will circle the wagons around things they previously decried if it means being on the opposite side of their enemies.
P.J. is greatly missed, though I was puzzled why the author of Republican Party Reptile didn’t like Trump.
I can understand why many people don’t like Trump even minus the TDS. He’s crude, lacked experience in almost any policy area, will turn on people publicly over disagreements, had a reputation of not paying contractors, cheated on his wives, and has way too much PT Barnum in him. And his hyperaggressive foreign policy seems to be counterproductive; Greenland and the Canadian election come to mind.
That being said I like VDH’s analogy regarding Trump of the old western gunfighter you need to bring in to town to kill the bad guys, but once the deed is done you don’t want the gunslinger around your women and children. Walk off into the sunset. I think the country will breathe a sigh of relief when Trump finally leaves after 2028. That being said let’s hope he can finish the job and Democrats don’t win the midterms.
I won't breathe a sigh of relief. Our border will be nonexistent, and however bad the fraud seems now... it will multiply many times over completely unchecked. I don't have to "imagine" this happening. Democrats already showed they did it.
Republicans showed that there was no 2020 election fraud when their audits turned up empty handed
Sure. Perfectly normal to take weeks to count.
Bush's "win" would have taken "weeks to count", so it was court-ordered whitewash, instead of weeding through the "hanging chads" to get actual numbers.
Yes, that's perfectly normal. Every presidential election takes weeks to count.
You might be thinking of how soon an election is called, but that's downstream of margins.
Why did all the Republican state audits turn up empty handed?
You are one of the most unintelligent people in this world. You waste your time speaking. People have seen how bad the Trump has been dragged through the mud and how little has been proven. The deep state fails. Trump won not because he was a good person, but because he is not evil.
The only problem with your analogy is that the Republican Party will immediately revert right back to the way they were AND we'll be AT best be in the same mess they ALLOWED us to get into in the first place. What you can count on with the normal Republican Party is not promising anything, NO intention on delivering on the few things they promise they would deliver upon AND of course the Democrats being Bat Shit Crazy thus forcing us to vote for Republicans anyways. I'm in Georgia and been following the Instagram page of david_khait. He's been documenting the thousands of fake registered voters in Fulton County. Empty lots, churches, Marta Stations, etc., and of course the 300K+ fake mail in ballots from 2020(there's been a court order to review those ballots and don't be surprised if they're accidently "destroyed" before the order is executed). Now this is something I expect from Democrats. The real problem is the Georgia Republican Party i.e., Kemp/Raffensburger (and the Georgia Republican Party in general) have known about this for years YET have done nothing about it.
They've done nothing about it because it's a hoax.
Steve you need to add a laugh emoji to your threads...
It's hilarious that every AG who once agreed with you and then investigated it turned out to be a traitor
Well aren't you charming. Have you stormed any churches lately?
He needs to actually *do* the things he says he's going to do.
Don't just keep gassing about invoking the Insurrection Act, just do it already FFS! Shit or get off the pot!
As P.J. was embraced by the GOP establishment, he ended up adopting most of their views. Remember, in 2015 - 16 National Review and the pundits on Fox News were resolutely anti-Trump.
Including, to his enduring shame, VDH. Best wishes by the way on his recovery from what I understand was a difficult operation with serious complications to remove cancerous lung tissue.
There's nothing shameful in being wrong. And VDH certainly now appreciates the positive in what Pres. Trump is doing.
No shame in being wrong? Especially for one who has spent a lifetime sifting facts and circumstances to come up with logical conclusions which fit the data? Hmm...have to think about that one for a while.
I just watched a few short videos about recent travel in Mogadishu, and my impression is that while it’s not a place one would care to visit, it’s a lot calmer than it was in the 1990’s.
I understand significant funds from some source abroad are flowing into the country...
…Kind of a low bar, don’t you think? :-)
That man can sure turn a phrase.
I had a personal interaction with PJ. I asked him to blurb a book, thinking, You're out of your mind. He gets a hundred requests like this every month. I've never seen an author of his stature be so gracious. He was defiant. “I owe the universe a favor,” he said. “People were good to me as a young author, I hope I do them justice.”
This was a great pull from the O'Rourke archives. Nicely done.
It’s so funny. I read this book thirty years ago and the line I remember most comes not from this passage but at the end of the book. As PJ waxes poetically that all people around are all the same and inherently good, he pauses momentarily and writes, “except for Somalis, they are all assholes”. I also remember he liked Vietnamese women.
To be fair to Somalis, the semi-independent Somililand is apparently doing well. There are other examples around the world how borders really make a difference (something our liberal friends are too full of themselves to grasp): North Korea/South Korea, Tajikistan/Afghanistan, Poland/Germany, Israel/Gaza. Any others?
Back in 2008 I pointed out that one of P.J.'s wives may have been part black, being a descendant of Lena Horne and Sidney Lumet.
And that Presidential candidate John McCain may have broken up P.J.'s marriage by having an affair with with P.J.'s wife, who was an important character in director Jonathan Demme's movie based on her sister's memoir.
But nobody else paid any attention to what struck me as Pretty Interesting.
I never trusted McCain after a while. Seemed like an holier than thou type. I signed up for his campaign in 2000, but eventually didn’t vote for him in the primaries.
Anyway, now you got me googling pictures of PJ Orourke’s wives. A distraction on what is supposed to be a busy morning.
I really don't think Anderson Cooper was adequately appreciative of how hot P. J. O'Rourke's wife Amy Lumet was. There's an entire movie by Jonathan Demme written by Amy's sister about
https://x.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1494667130444267524
ISWYDT
Did Cindy McCain stay in Arizona so she wouldn't have bimbos in her face, knowing he'd met her while married? What about Michelle O?
Wow! I remember reading somewhere about his wife having an affair but I never read that my longtime U.S. Senator was the other party. I must have voted for McCain’s primary opponent two or three times over the years. The quality of Republican senators in Arizona was quite low.
Wait, there are people who voluntarily sleep with John McCain?!? wtf
I remember the part in his trip to Vietnam where PJ (hippy antiwar protester during the war) visits a Vietnamese war museum and gets uncomfortable seeing how the anti-war protests were appreciated and how his efforts really were against the American side.
Also when his (American) cameraman and Vietnamese driver realized they'd been on opposite sides of the same battle during the war (both were quite pleased by this and celebrated with much drinking).
The first and third examples, at least, are due to who is/was kept in, not who is/was kept out.
That’s also one of only two things I remember from that book. The other is the Haitian jute minister (or whoever) saying that “the environment is the cherry on the sundae.”
My favorite chapter was "In Whitest Africa."
US immigration policy: The more awful and depraved your society, the more of you qualify as refugees from your awful culture. We want the worst and lots of them.
That man can write!
Maybe it's just me, itching uncomfortably (back) in the city I was born in, but his wrote-up filled with me with a yearning to visit Somalia! 😂
Anyway - - never having actually been there I can't commment other than to say that I really enjoyed reading that article. Thank you for sharing it with us.
As for PJ, I remembered him (well enough to wonder what he was doing back alive when I noticed him in my subscriptions last week) but I'd forgotten the precise joy of reading him, which you just reminded me.
Thanks
Wow is it ten years since David Bowie died? Hard to believe.
If I live long enough, I ought to be able to make a living off writing RIPs for all the amazing personalities of my lifetime.
One of the best observers and writers concerning the human condition, P J O’Rourke. In his hilarious book Holidays In Hell after a visit to the Soviet Union he described Soviet buildings such as workers flats looking as if the Soviets thought that the recipe for concrete was oatmeal and milk.
If you like his work you should also check out Anthony Daniels, who also writes under the nom-de-plume Theodore Dalrymple.
He’s a British doctor who spent most of his career working, as he describes it, in both a prison ward and a charity ward, which gave him quite a good look at the human condition.
He wrote a book called The Wilder Shores of Marx, in which he documents his observations of the last remaining outposts of old-style Communism after the fall of the USSR.
But he got his start as a doctor in what was then Rhodesia, and he saw how the transition to majority African rule eviscerated everything the Empire had done for them. Heartbreaking, really.
You also see that in his travel book, From Zanzibar to Timbuktu, which documents a long trip across Africa he took using only public conveyances—buses, boats, trains, and the occasional shared ride with folks pushing their carts from Point A to Point B.
Great writer. I first ran across him in the 80s in his book “Utopias Elsewhere” about his travels to various socialist paradises that the Left encouraged the West to emulate.
Putting aside any issues of fair use and copyright infringement, this was wonderful remembrance of PJ’s inimitable style. Thanks Steve!
I am concerned about violating P.J.'s copyright. but I also want to remind people in 2026 of how good he was.
You shouldn’t be. I just ordered a copy of that book based entirely on this Substack post. It’s all fair use, Steve.
If a third of a century from now, somebody reminds the world that I lived once lived because they posted a chunk of something I wrote a third of a century ago and my heirs eventually get small checks, well, that's cool.
Even better, how about we have maximum copyright terms of 20 years but with perpetual moral rights (ie a right of authorship attribution)? That way we don’t have to worry about any of this crap. Would the Beatles have thrown in dreams of rock stardom in favour of a safe job on the Liverpool docks if they thought their great-great children wouldn’t be entitled to a perpetual income stream from Love Me Do and would instead have to work for a living? Doubtful…
I saw O’Rourke give a speech on my college campus the same day that Paul McCartney and Wings were doing a concert at the stadium and he joked that at least he didn’t have his wife up on stage with him playing the tambourine.
Ah! Someone who hates the serial Mickey Mouse Perpetual Copyright Acts almost as much as I do!
Very much worth reading, if for no other reason than appreciation of what we have here.
I visited Somalia and Somaliland a few times in the early 1990s. The first time was shortly after the Battle of Mogadishu, the technical term for Blackhawk Down and I would wish the place on nobody. Of the 85 countries I lived in, worked in, or spent more than a few days visiting, it is the one place I never want to return to.
I was at the airport in Mogadishu to check on my return flight to Nairobi one afternoon and saw ten or so aluminum shipping coffins resting on sawhorses on the apron in front of the terminal. Each coffin was covered by a Nepalese flag and were ready to ship back to Nepal with the bodies of peacekeepers who arrived on the first day of their deployment, spent the second day on patrol in city where they were ambushed and killed, and by the third day of their deployment they were packed and ready to ship home. While I was taking all this in, I overhead a mayday call on the airport p.a. system from a Cessna Caravan pilot who was on approach to the airport on a flight from Nairobi. One of his passengers, an employee of a humanitarian aid organization, was hit by a random bullet and killed. Never a need for television in Mogadishu, because they generated more than enough sex (I suspect, based on all the starving little kids I saw) and violence than they could consume locally.
While there, I visited one of the big suqs where I was assured that anything I could imagine was available there, including a human head. At the weapons section, a wide range of weapons was available without a background check, including rocket propelled grenades. I remember that Chinese produced AK-47s, used, were about $15. Although I didn’t purchase any of the guns, I was able to test fire anything I wanted by shooting it into the sky. I wondered at the time whether the properties of gravity were widely understood.
In another section of the market, I found a former passport officer who had cleaned out the former government’s passport safe and was selling a standard passport for $15 and $25 for a diplomatic passport. Being a person of humble origins, I limited myself to a standard passport. The seller required a recent photograph, my tribal lineage (“Ralph, son of Kenneth, son of Rosco, son of. . .) and completed the transaction while I waited, so technically, I am citizen of Somalia. I was one of the few people in the world who thought Trump’s travel ban on a few countries in the Middle East wasn’t a bad thing, because passports from Yemen and Libya, and several other countries whose citizens were banned, used procedures at least as dubious as what the former passport officer in the Mogadishu suq used.
During one of my visits, I watched the inauguration of Nelson Mandela when I made an r&r trip to Djibouti after spending three weeks in the northern Somalia (“Somaliland”). I went from a $3 per night “hotel” in Hargeysa to a $300 per night Intercontinental Hotel in Djibouti City. It was refreshing to have a shower and air conditioning after my humble accommodations in Hargeysa. As I watched Mandela’s inauguration, I thought of my trips to Johannesburg when the South African government promised a refund on my trips to Johannesburg if I witnessed acts of violence, which I did witness but never received a refund for, compared with trips to Somalia, where witnessing acts of violence could be guaranteed.
One evening, while dining in a Mogadishu restaurant, my colleague who was holding a glass of sparkling water had it shot out of his hand by a spent bullet. On my last trip to that city, on an early Thursday morning when I was booked to fly home to Maryland, I stepped out of our Landcruiser to open the tall steel gate on the front of our compound and felt something pushing against the gate. When I peaked through the gate, I saw one of our armed guards leaning against it, dead, with his entrails in his lap. When I opened the gate, he tipped over onto the sandy street and spilled himself onto the sand. 18 hours or so later, I was sitting in our leafy Maryland trying to reconcile myself with all that I experienced in Mogadishu with the shopping malls, the big box stores, and the busy but orderly freeways in suburban Maryland.
Perhaps this is why the fraud and corruption in Minnesota and Ilham Omar’s reputation doesn’t surprise me. You can take a Somali out of the country, but you can’t take Somalia out of a Somalian. P.J. O’Rourke had a way of perfectly capturing the essence of the countries he wrote about and his books Holidays in Hell and All the Trouble in the World captured the ambience of places such as Somalia and Haiti perfectly.
P.J., rest in peace.
One of the best ever
It would almost seem that some people are simply better off under a brutal dictator than being "free".
A lesson we are learning far too late.
AND WE BROUGHT THEM HERE!!!!!!
Happily, they voted with their feet (and keen eyes for welfare benefits galore) and moved to states that wanted them and now have them, good and hard. I have an astonishingly naive old friend who briefly visited the Somali in Maine and were told by schoolteachers who would of course tell him no other, that they were far better students than the Americans they displaced -- of course the consequences of saying otherwise to a national commentator wouldn't be wise, career-wise. I imagine that, as with every other human society, some decent Somali slipped in line for the refugee planes up to the big silver bird to take them to neverland. And there were shards of rich cultural heritage here, sustained by the hidden cosmopolitans and scholars who once interacted with American journalist and observer (and JBS columnist) Geroge Schuyler.
But what my friend did not see on his Topemkin tour of Maine schools were those Somali youth who weren't in school, nor the vast panapoly of special educational resources, learning centers, tutors, and refugee counselors who took money from their white and Mexican schoolmates and showered them on the refugee students and their "families" (where were the girl-children?) As said natives and temporary fieldworkers of Maine spent their time outside the classroom working on fishing boats or waiting on rich tourists or making up hotel beds before and after school.
I was shamefully in the refugee racket in the '90's as a VISTA (and what a crooked outfit that is), and my experience of the Somalis who were placed in Atlanta but fled to Minnesota and Maine the moment the bennies ran out was of literally warring tribes, extreme violence, and endless government efforts to present them as model citizens.
I'm sure they've calmed down and that there were always some good people hidden among the warlords who destroyed their own people them got first in line for refugee status. But they have now moved on to the second phase of some refugee (not all) tribes: robbing us blind, again with lots of suddenly less effective media propaganda by the naive, and by big assist from the government.
No, Obama did!
PJ was hilarious and smart and connected and lived an outrageously interesting life, but unlike some of his mega-selling, genre-defying peers -- eg Bill Bryson -- what comes through about his personality in the end is judgment. He cared about character and had a good eye for it. He called out fakes and operators and was attracted to normal decent things
But he always presented himself as a lustful drunkard who never grew up. Is that sort really trustworthy?
He was a great writer and made me laugh, but I realize now that he never had much to offer the world. Oh well.
I was always struck by the idea that he was an adult in so many things that mattered while still maintaining a youthful irreverence about everything else.
About 20 years ago when I was a young Democratic congressional staffer who was already drifting away from the party, a Republican colleague recommended Parliament of Whores to me - along with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas probably the books that made me laugh out loud the most. I in turn recommended it to a Democratic friend about 10 years ago, which perhaps didn't shake his allegiance to the party but did apparently shake his faith in the competence and honesty of our government.
Anyway, what an account. I had a friend whose older brother had served in Somalia and I remember him describing them as total savages. I know I have more than once shared that my MN relatives to a person cannot stand them but just last week when my wife got into a fight with one of them over the fraud/ICE situation up there, and one previously highly uncomplimentary relation wailed "they are part of our community!" Unreal - people really do treat politics like a religious or tribal loyalty and will circle the wagons around things they previously decried if it means being on the opposite side of their enemies.
>"they are part of our community!"
Magic Dirt theory: set one foot within our borders and any illiterate, dim-witted savage can call himself an American.
The Mad Mullah had a way with words.
I like that he slipped "Perverts" in the middle.
And it was Capitalized.