PARLIAMENT OF WHORES by P. J....

PARLIAMENT OF WHORES by P. J. O’Rourke (Vintage: $12). P. J. O’Rourke, who has parlayed the cheap shot into a cottage industry, offers his supercilious reflections on the United States government in this dubious best-seller. Governmental ineptitude has provided grist for satirists’ mills for millennia, but O’Rourke fails to infuse his work with the moral outrage that has characterized real satire, from Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift to Will Rogers and Garry Trudeau, and offers only a smug arrogance about being a well-to-do, heterosexual male WASP in its place. He attempts to balance his books by insulting everyone, but his nasty biases come through in the tasteless gibes about the AIDS Quilt and the Americans with Disabilities Act and the description of “beggary” as “the most rapidly expanding sector of the American service economy.” Observing a protest march in Washington, D.C., for affordable housing, he notes among the participants, “Angry black poverty pests making a life and a living off the misfortunes of others/ Even angrier feminists doing their best to feminize poverty before the blacks use it all up.” The popularity of this compendium of sneering vulgarity reveals not only the dissatisfaction many Americans feel toward their own government, but the continuing debauchery of public taste.