Excerpt: 'Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards,' By P.J. O'Rourke

Oct. 22, 2010 — -- In P.J. O'Rourke's new book, "Don't Vote -- It Just Encourages the Bastards, " the satirist takes a look at national politics through the venerable lens of a teenage party game to find an unsettling, and humorous, side of the political machine.

Read an excerpt of the book below, and head to the "GMA" Library for more good reads.

When I first began to think about politics -- when mastodons and Nixon roamed the earth -- I was obsessed with freedom. I had a messy idea of freedom at the time, but I had the tidy idea that freedom was the central issue of politics.

I loved politics. Many young people do -- kids can spot a means of gain without merit. (This may be the reason professional politicians retain a certain youthful zest; Strom Thurmond was the boyo right down to his last senile moment.) I was wrong about the lovable nature of politics, and even at twenty-three I probably suspected I was wrong. But I was sure I was right about the preeminent place of freedom in a political system.

Freedom is a personal ideal. Because politics is an arrangement among persons, we can plausibly assume that freedom is a political ideal. Our favorite political idealists think so. They've been unanimous on the subject since Jean-Jacques Rousseau convinced polite society that human bondage was in bad taste and John Locke showed the divine right of kings to be a royal pain.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence declared us to be residents of "Free and Independent States." John Adams demanded, "Let me have a country, and that a free country." Tom Paine warned that "Freedom hath been hunted round the globe." And he exhorted us to "receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind." Calling America an asylum may have been a poor choice of words, or not. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, preached "Freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person." Jefferson was quite free with the person of Sally Hemings. And a dinner toast from Revolutionary War general John Stark bestowed upon New Hampshire a license plate motto that must puzzle advocates of highway safety: "Live Free or Die."

With Bartlett's Familiar Quotations as a useful gauge of what we think we think, we find that Emerson poetized, "For what avail the plow or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?" Hegel weighed in, "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." As unlikely a character as the crackpot Nietzsche had something to say: "Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions." The UN Commission on Human Rights comes to mind.

We can survey the arts, where mankind is most blatant in its truths, and find artists taking the broadest liberties. (They are especially free with the use of fate as a plot device.) We can peruse philosophy, where mankind is less truthful, and not hear freedom denied by anything except free thinking. Theology makes sporadic arguments against free will, with which the devout are freely willing to concur. Science is deterministic and its special needs stepsister social science is more so. But people are free to pick and choose among the determinations of science until they find something they like. I give you Al Gore and you can have him. Perhaps there are scientists who make a sound case for the inevitabilities of biology and such. But we don't know what these geniuses are talking about and very likely neither do they. For example, the important biologist Richard Dawkins has written a book, The God Delusion, in which he uses predestinarian atheism to argue that Richard Dawkins is the closest thing to a superior being in the known universe.

The theoretical (as opposed to practical) enemies of freedom are feeble opponents. And we are all but overrun by theoretical allies in freedom's cause. We've got collaborators in the fight for freedom that we don't even want. "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains" is the penultimate sentence of the Communist Manifesto. And a creepy echo of it can be heard in the refrain of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee." Mao announced, "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy ..." Half a million people died in those ellipses.

If we were to give out the proverbial "a word to the wise," the sagacity-testing utterance with which to provide the sages would be "freedom." In the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary the noun has fifteen definitions and the adjective "free" has thirty-six. These definitions, along with their usage citations, occupy 189¼ column inches of small and smaller type.

Peter Roget (1779-1869), of Roget's Thesaurus, was a physician, a scientist, the secretary of the Royal Society for more than twenty years, and an exhaustingly systematic thinker. He designed his thesaurus (Greek for "treasury") as a reverse dictionary. Instead of listing words and giving their meanings, he listed meanings and gave words for them. Under the heading "freedom" there are more than four hundred entries in twenty-one categories. And "freedom" is only one of the twenty-three headings in Roget's "Section I, General Intersocial Volition" of "Division II, Intersocial Volition" of "Class Five, Volition." It's hard to know whether or not to be thankful that Peter Roget's obsessive-compulsive disorder meds hadn't been invented.

Among the various types and kinds of general intersocial volition, about ten have something to do with political freedom.

freedom in the abstract
autonomy
enfranchisement
toleration
frankness
leisure
laxity
abandon
opportunity
privilege

Several of these may seem beside the point. But "frank," for instance, is from the Old French franc, meaning free. We can be frank with the president of the United States. We can honestly and openly say what we think to him. And what we think of him. But in all our name-calling the name we call our president that sticks is "Mr." He's not "Your Excellency" or "Your Highness," nor do we kowtow, genuflect, or curtsy to him. Callisthenes, the great-nephew of Aristotle, plotted to kill Alexander the Great rather than prostrate himself in the Persian manner to the conqueror of the known world. It's probably just as well that our current president forgoes even a handshake with Fox News.

Then there are the freedoms of leisure, laxity, and wild abandon. Anyone who thinks these have nothing to do with democracy hasn't met the demos. Also, it was not so long ago, during the great political demonstrations of the 1960s, that I was risking my neck -- well, risking a conk on the head and a snootful of tear gas -- in the battle to create a utopian society where I could lie around all day, utterly heedless and high as a kite. 2. 2. Freedom of religion

3. 3. Freedom from want

4. 4. Freedom from fear