Discover Top Posts Tagged with #holidays in hell

Golden Glow and Quiet Truths

kyle broflovski x reader insert

(❁´◡`❁) | [A/N] hii, this is my second oneshot that's apart of my ficmas! this is also on ao3. ❤️❄️🎄

(❁´◡`❁) | Warning(s) : none

(❁´◡`❁) | Synopsis : At Kyle’s Hanukkah celebration, [y/n] learns about his traditions and shares a quiet, heartfelt moment under the warm glow of the menorah.

#south park x reader #south park x y/n #kyle broflovski #oneshot #fluff #hanukkah #holidays in hell #south park x you #south park x gn reader #kyle broflovski x reader #kyle broflovski x y/n

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

- P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell (1988)

RIP P.J. O’Rourke (1947-2022)

I was first introduced to the writings of the late American satirist and journalist, PJ O’Rourke, by a retired American diplomat friend of my father. This particular gentleman had served in various political hot zones of the world back in the 1970s and 1980s.

I was in my late teens and I was about go back packing across North Africa and into the Middle East with a couple of friends to serve my wanderlust. He gave me as a parting gift PJ O’Rourke’s book ‘Holidays in Hell’. It was a sort of travelogue of a roving war correspondent but funny as hell. The book was published way back in 1988. I stashed it away along with other dog earred books to help stave off the boring parts of the trip. I’m glad I took it as it was a funny read. In time, O’Rourke became one of my favourite American writers on satire and politics.

O’Rourke was hard to define. And that’s what I loved about him. He made fun of both the right and the left. His political writing was based on his early change of tack from 1960s lefty to what he could call the libertarian right, libertarian being the escape hatch for those ‘trapped’ within the Republican party.

His changing stance mirrored the course of his career, from the biting satire of the National Lampoon and rock n’ roll hipness of Rolling Stone to more earnest outlets such as the Atlantic Monthly and the conservative Cato Institute.

The recurrent theme in his writing was his place in his generation – the baby boomers. “My generation spoiled everything for you,” he told younger readers. “It has always been the prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grownups. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of the weird ... all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologise.” His writing moved from social satire to politics and he reported from war zones, where his knack for satirising the absurd found its true metier.

His 1988 collection, ‘Holidays in Hell’, is perhaps the best of his 20 books.

Back then in the 1980s, PJ O’Rourke worked as a foreign correspondent; or rather, he was “a trouble tourist”. This was a time when magazines and newspapers still shelled-out big money for a correspondent to provide in-depth, first-hand coverage of a major world crisis. Today, the print news media is on life-support. He visited remote places and witnessed “insurrections, stupidities, political crises, civil disturbances and other human folly”. His firsthand accounts will give you a glimpse of what life used to be like in the past.

If you happen to think that the things were better when you were younger, perhaps you will let go of that silly notion. O’Rourke visited Lebanon when it was a hotbed of strife, South Africa under Apartheid, Korea during violent election protests. He saw where various death squads dumped their bodies in Central America and The Philippines, and he was hit with pepper spray, tear gas, and - nearly - a bullet or two. In one sense his writings were a fairly original take on travel, certainly for the time, in that it challenged the myths, lies and BS that surrounded the vast majority of travel related books that were coming out at the time, according to my parents.

What O’Rourke did was infuse serious journalism with irreverent humour. He clearly has his tongue firmly in his cheek much of the time but the journalism is very real. The stories gathered here are not puff-pieces or travelogues. He toured Poland behind the Iron Curtain; Poland is free, now. He toured South Africa under Apartheid; Apartheid is no more. He describes his 1986 attempt to get to Libya after U.S. Fighters bombed there; Libya is under new management. So much of the world has changed, now. I certainly don’t mean this in an old-fartish way like, “These damn kids today don’t know what a riot is,” but as a simple observation. In 1988, there’s no way anyone could have predicted the Arab Spring revolutions, powered by Twitter. There was no Twitter. There was no email. The only mention of computer use in ‘Holidays from Hell’ is where O’Rourke laments the lack of a “brief summation” button on his Apple II.

The humour is what separates PJ O’Rourke from other journalists, then and certainly since. His prose strums with life. As impassioned as he is describing Korean student riots, he describes the Koreans predilection for spicy food hysterically (“After lunch, our breath could clean your oven”).

What I loved about PJ O’Rourke is the fact that he had absolutely no illusions about the way the world works. Most left wingers tend to believe that all of the worlds problems can be solved and that the rich are to blame for it all. O’Rourke is completely remorseless about his views and doesn't try and offer any well meaning advice about how to change things, just has fun pointing out life's shortcomings.

In O’ Rourke’s telling, “each American embassy comes with two permanent features – a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.”

Lebanon’s economy is based on “everyone selling cartons of smuggled Marlboros to each other” and Beirut is “a city of three million people with three stoplights and these aren’t working… all driving is at top speed, much of it on the sidewalks since most parking is done in the middle of the streets” but “fortunately, the Lebanese are a clean people, even the very poor ones. It wasn’t like being packed into a bus on a sweltering day with a bunch of French or anything.” When in doubt, bash the French for guaranteed Anglo-Saxon laughs.

O’Rourke is impressed and amazed by the sheer orderliness of South Korean protestors and, in the next chapter, the excitability of the Panamanians “who have absolutely no immunity to theatrics.” And again, amongst all the jokes, he makes some excellent, and deeply serious points about both countries at pivotal moments in their modern history.

O’ Rourke spends just thirty six hours in Nicaragua but comes up with interesting insights and his theory about how the absence of chickens in Managua correlates with the country’s poverty is both jokey and convincing. This chapter also includes the best quote of the entire book, although it’s not from O’Rourke’s typewriter, it’s from the New York Times:

“They (La Prensa) accused of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.” – Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, 1984.

Classic.

PJ O’Rourke observations and opinions will probably be offensive to many of modern social justice warriors. O’Rourke helped me break free from dishonest constraints of the current mass media narrative and to remind me what good old fashioned journalism used to be like. This book was a breath of fresh air back when I read it as a teen on her own ‘holiday in hell’ trip around North Africa and the Middle East (though our wonderful trip was a fun and involved no flying bullets) and even more so today as a more seasoned traveller. Oh and I laughed my arse off too.

‘Holidays in Hell’ is neither a book of explanations, nor a book of recipes. O’Rourke just observes and often laughs, but he doesn’t have a hateful bone in his body nor did does he have any intention to sermonise. Still, I would not dismiss him as an idle joker. I can only agree when he says, “Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof. We are fools when we fail to defend civilization”. I can fault him for being uncivilised for using ‘z’ in civilisation but I can never fault him for his wry humour, wisdom, and pathos.

If you're looking for a genuine, insightful and funny book about how messed up the world was and still is, then this is the book for you. And I hope it’s a gateway to his other 19 books and various articles which are also laced with the same self-deprecating Irish-American wit and wisdom.

RIP PJ O’ Rourke, you magnificent bastard.

#o'rourke #pj o'rourke #quote #author #writer #death #obituary #wit #comic #politics #satire #man of letters #culture #icon #book #reading #holidays in hell #american #satirist #journalist #media #war

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) by Sharon Maguire

Book title: Holidays in Hell (1988) by P. J. O’Rourke

#american literature #books in movies #holidays in hell #p. j. o'rourke #bridget jones's diary #renee zellweger #Sharon Maguire

Meteor Whispers

craig tucker x reader insert

(❁´◡`❁) | [A/N] hii, this is my tenth and final oneshot that's apart of my ficmas! i wanted craig to be my final oneshot, because I don't really know how to write Craig at all, but I love his character sm ❤️❄️🎄 this is also on ao3!

(❁´◡`❁) | Warning(s) : none

(❁´◡`❁) | Synopsis : Craig takes you stargazing to escape the holiday chaos, and under the meteor shower, you share an intimate moment.

#south park x reader #south park x y/n #south park oneshot #sp oneshot #craig tucker #craig tucker x reader #craig tucker x y/n #holidays in hell

Streetlamps

kenny mccormick x reader insert

(❁´◡`❁) | [A/N] hii, this is my sixth oneshot that's apart of my ficmas! this is also on ao3. ❤️❄️🎄

(❁´◡`❁) | Warning(s) : nothing

(❁´◡`❁) | Synopsis : [y/n] and Kenny share a simple yet magical Christmas Eve, with handmade gifts and a kiss under falling snow.

#south park x reader #south park x y/n #kenny mccormick x y/n #holidays in hell #kenny mccormick x reader #south park oneshot

Kisses in Frosted Light

stan marsh x reader insert

(❁´◡`❁) | [A/N] hii, this is my fourth oneshot that's apart of my ficmas! this is also on ao3. ❤️❄️🎄

(❁´◡`❁) | Warning(s) : drinking and typical cartman behavior lol

(❁´◡`❁) | Synopsis : [y/n] and Stan find themselves under the mistletoe at a holiday party, turning a playful kiss into something far more meaningful.