Politics & Power Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

P. J. O'Rourke draws a sharp analogy between civic optimism and disaster management. Looking on the bright side does not mend the broken levee, put out the fire, or rebuild the town; it merely makes the sight more bearable. By yoking government to the image of catastrophe, he suggests that feel-good rhetoric, slogans, and partisan cheerleading cannot substitute for competence, accountability, or results. The point is not that government is always a calamity, but that treating it as something to be believed in, rather than scrutinized, invites denial of stubborn facts.

O'Rourke came out of a libertarian-leaning tradition of satire that skewered power wherever it nested. He delighted in puncturing pieties of both left and right, arguing that political enthusiasm often functions as a mood management system for citizens and a marketing plan for officials. The bright side is spin, a balm for anxiety. The catastrophe is bloat, inertia, perverse incentives, and the inevitable unintended consequences of large systems run by humans. Feeling good about the machinery offers no rescue from those structural issues.

There is a psychological bite here too. Optimism bias and motivated reasoning tempt people to reinterpret failures as successes in progress. O'Rourke warns that this coping strategy trades clarity for comfort. Public life, he implies, demands the opposite: dispassion, measurement, and the willingness to admit when policies do not work. Cheerfulness may be admirable in private life, but in politics it can become a narcotic.

Yet his dark humor is not a call to despair. It is a call to sobriety. The proper response to a continuing catastrophe is not a sunnier attitude but better engineering, clearer rules, and firmer oversight. Admire what works, distrust what does not, and resist the urge to let good feelings do the work of reform. The joke lands because it is a civic ethic, wrapped in a laugh: reality does not bend to our mood, so fix the reality.