OʼRourke - All the trouble in the world: the lighter side of overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty

ALL THE TROUBLE
IN THE WORLD

ALSO BY P. J. OROURKE

Modern Manners

The Bachelor Home Companion

Republican Party Reptile

Holidays in Hell

Parliament of Whores

Give War a Chance

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence,
and a Bad Haircut

The American Spectators Enemies List

Eat the Rich

The CEO of the Sofa

The Lighter Side of Overpopulation,

Famine, Ecological Disaster,

Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty

P. J. OROURKE

Copyright 1994 by P. J. ORourke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ORourke, P. J.

All the trouble in the world: the lighter side of overpopulation, famine, ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty / by P. J. ORourke.

I. Title.

PN6162.O73 1994 818.5402dc20 94-21547

ISBN 0-87113-611-2 (pbk.)

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Atlantic Monthly Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

03 04 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

For Ed and Myra Downer

Who went to a lot of trouble

Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. Ill take the money. Writing this book also required an enormous amount of help from enemies. Particularly, Id like to thank Vice President Al Gore for being the perfect straw man on such subjects as the environment, ecology, and population. Sorry, Al, for repeatedly calling you a fascist twinkie and intellectual dolt. Its nothing personal. I just think you have repulsive totalitarian inclinations and the brains of a King Charles spaniel.

As always I owe a huge debt (and, pay advances considered, I mean that literally) to Rolling Stone magazine. Jann Wenner, friend and boss, has allowed me the latitude to rave and vociferate, although he disagrees with almost all my opinions. (Ill make a Republican of you yet, Jann. Just wait until you do your estate planning for the kids.)

Rolling Stone underwrote my trips to Somalia, the Amazon, Rio, ex-Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Vietnam. The field work in the chapters about famine, the environment, saving the earth, multiculturalism, plague, and poverty first appeared, in somewhat different forms, in Rolling Stone. Editor Eric Etheridge gave shape and sense to these stories, carefully applying large dabs of Gibberish Remover to my manuscripts. And Tobias Perse and Corey Seymour did the real workphoning military juntas to see if they take the Visa card, making sure my war-zone hotel rooms had color TV and a heated pool, and scouring encyclopedias to find out if King Charles spaniels really do have lower IQs than U.S. vice presidents.

A number of other individuals and organizations deserve special thanks for their assistance and succor. Tina Mallon, Nick and Mary Eberstadt, Andy and Denise Ferguson, and Chris and Lucy Buckley listened to me prate about this book for two years and none of them surrendered to the temptation to stuff an oven mitt in my mouth or hit me over the head with a bottle. Instead they gave me ideas, encouragement, and help in my legwork. Nick Eberstadt used his expertise in population studies, economics, and statistics to aid me (and the reader) in making some sense of the numbers in this book (though I am sole author of all errors in same). And Nick explained to me the mysteries of the Georgetown University Library stacks and showed me where they keep the books with the good parts. (Fourth floor. Ovid. But youd better be able to read Latin.)

The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., made all its very considerable resources available to me and named me H. L. Mencken Research Fellow, in case I needed a business card to upset liberals. Cato President Ed Crane also found the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote which prefaces this book. My thanks to him and to Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz and, especially, to Catos Director of Natural Resource Studies Jerry Taylor. To Jerry I owe not only much of the information but most of the thinking and many of the jokes in my chapters about the environment and ecology. Jerry is to the idiot environmentalists what well, what pollution is to the environment.

Wisdom, enlightenment, and inside poop were also provided by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, John A. Baden of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, Daniel S. Peters of Procter & Gamble and by the writers, scholars, and staff members at the American Spectator, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Hillsdale College.

Id like to thank Amy Kaplan Lamb for the extraordinary job she did fact-checking this book. Any facts found to be nonfactual are that way because of pigheaded author insistence, not because Amy didnt know better. And Id like to thank Larry Gray for providing the author with Caribbean R&R after Christmases spent, successively, in Somalia and Haiti.

Thanks are also due to people for their written works: to the late Warren Brookes for his newspaper columns about bad public policy thinking; to the late Friedrich Hayek for his seminal condemnation of government planning, The Road to Serfdom; and to the unlate, fully extant, Peter W. Huber for Galileos Revenge, his analysis of the evil effects of junk science on systems of law.

I have tried to make a list, as best I could, of people who helped me with individual chapters. Some names have been left out to save careers or protect reputations; other names are missing because of the amnesia of ingratitude. My apologies for any untoward exclusions (or inclusions, as the case may be).

Photojournalist John Giannini traveled with me to both Bangladesh and Vietnam. Not only was he a boon companion and a great picture taker but he also did extensive fact-finding about both countries and made all the labyrinthine tour arrangements with the Vietnamese government. Plus, in Bangkok, John took me to a bar full of the most amazingly beautiful half-naked caring and sensitive individuals of the female gender, whom I respected as persons, honest.

In Somalia ABC Radios John Lyons once again hired me as Correspondent-Without-a-Clue. The broadcast professionals in Mogadishu were patient with my useless presence. Special thanks to Carlos Mavroleon, one of the few people (Somalis included) who know something about Somalia, and to Neil Patterson and Nasser Al Ibrahim, two of the original combat accountants, who were always ready with a huge pile of dirty Somali banknotes when we needed them.