Day: June 20, 2025

One recent morning, I was sitting by the window, reading a book with my first cup of coffee of the day, when something flickered on the edge of my eyesight and swiftly disappeared. “A mouse!” my panicked brain registered, but doubt immediately set in. In broad daylight? In my city house? But then, early the following morning, upon coming downstairs, my husband met the mouse in flagrante delicto—nonchalantly running along on our kitchen counter. Horror of horrors. 

The children were thrilled by the hubbub. I proposed that we burn down the house and move. But my husband wanted to try a less drastic solution first, and a visit to the hardware store combined with some peanut butter remedied the situation forthwith. It was all over in one sense. And yet, none of us are isolated beings—neither we ourselves nor the mice we meet along the way. 

I was affronted by an encounter with wildlife in my city house, but in fact, this episode is but a blip in the longer story of the coexistence of mice and men (and women, to be sure). We’ve all been city-dwellers for millennia now, regularly living in close quarters even if most people over 10 would prefer not to think about that fact. The city has been good to us, and yet it exacts its price. My furry friend and I are fellow travelers in more ways than one.  

Plagues and Pizzerias

A city mouse once came to visit a country mouse. So opens one of the most famous of Aesop’s Fables. Disappointed by the decidedly unimpressive dinner that the country mouse serves, the city mouse invites his friend to come to a fancy banquet at his place instead. The food there proves amazing, utterly unlike anything the country mouse has ever experienced before. But then the cats show up, and the mice barely make it out alive.  

The moral of the story is to be content with little, as the country mouse concludes at the end. Sure, the city mouse has much better food than the country mouse. But the city mouse also has to live with constant danger, with harrowing threats to life and limb. There are, it seems, tradeoffs to moving to the big city; the benefits come at a potentially high cost. And yet, whenever we casually reference this story, which has entered English idiom, we forget a crucial historical fact: There was a time when the city mouse didn’t exist. 

Rodents like mice and rats have become a commensal species relatively recently, historian Kyle Harper remarks in his book Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Historians, of course, pay attention to people. But perhaps now that we’ve experienced a pandemic in recent memory, we shouldn’t too easily forget the non-human agents of historical change, the ones who wreak havoc on man-made empires through the dissemination of deadly pathogens. There are four categories of parasites that can get us sick: helminths (fancy word for worms, who are definitely not fancy), protozoa, bacteria, and viruses. SARS-CoV-2 (aka Covid-19) is a virus. Malaria, one of the top killers in all human history, is caused by protozoa, whereas the Bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium. This brings us to another important point: collaboration is key to success, and not only for people.

Many of these parasites, invisible to the naked eye, hitch a ride on other, larger carriers—protozoa on mosquitoes, ticks on deer and moose, and of course, fleas on rats. Which brings us right back to those country rats and mice, who historically did not reach the same conclusion as Aesop’s protagonist, who was so content to go back home and never return to the city. Instead, once historical rodents discovered cities, they could never go back. The real-life country mouse that visits a city, in other words, tends to stay in the city. Its country-dwelling cousins can stay where they are, and plenty of them do, if they’ve never experienced the alternative. But the city mouse is here to stay. 

Perhaps mice are not very different in this regard from humans, whose migration patterns also tend to go only one way. And that is precisely the point in the original fable. While using animals as protagonists, after all, Aesop’s fables reflected on human socio-cultural developments. It’s just that in this particular case, perhaps even more than in some others, humans and animals are remarkably alike. Once we discover cities, with their rich culture, restaurants, coffeeshops, and all the other trappings of civilization, we too become converts to the city life, expressly naming those bakeries and pizzerias as one of our motivating reasons—and turning a blind eye to the cat-sized rats that patrol the alleyways behind our favorite eateries. 

In fact, Harper offers a heartening tale about one of the ways the mouse’s larger cousin, the country rat, first discovered cities. He places responsibility with the Romans, whose mobility across vast swaths of land and sea in ancient Eurasia brought along certain species of rats from their native Asia to Rome and other cities as an unintended memento of their travels and works of conquest. (A worthy updated answer to the question: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”) The results have been, of course, nothing short of devastating. Harper reminds: “Although many a textbook still claims that the Black Death carried off a third of the continent, in reality, the best estimates are closer to half.”

Patriotic Rodents

It appears that our commensality with rats and mice is not benefiting us, humans. And yet, here we are, still city dwellers, right along with the rats and mice we ignore or, sometimes, accidentally ingest unawares. Because, as it turns out, we have the same tastes—culinarily speaking. In the film Ratatouille, a highly refined Parisian city rat turns his love of complex tastes into a career as a chef. Makes sense—and data shows, furthermore, that rats, like people, love their local cuisine best. But city rats are not just exquisite gourmands with a remarkably sophisticated palate—they, like people, adapt to their city and become a part of it. 

A report on New York City rats’ eating preferences used citation reports of NYC eateries to make some conclusions on “exactly where man and rodent break bread.” Leading the pack was American food. Out of the cited restaurants, “232 served American cuisine, 153 of them were Chinese-based, 71 served Japanese and 65 were Latin. Pizza spots were also near the top of the list, with 60 different restaurants showing evidence of rats. In the middle of the pack were Spanish and Thai restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops and delicatessens. Bringing up the rear were Kosher and Tex-Mex, which only had 8 eateries cited for rats.” 

New York City rats, in other words, are unabashedly American patriots down to their pizza-loving core. And while NYC is now really trying to crack down on its murine populace, the official Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi, has her work cut out for her, with “several million furry problems to eliminate and no direct staff.” At least, it appears that the new requirement for the human city-dwellers to put their trash in containers, instead of setting it out in bags directly on the curb, has been fairly successful so far in reducing rat sightings. But will the rats ever fully move out? I expect that the success of the war on rats will, at some point, plateau. Perhaps the city rats will have to adjust their tastes in the meantime, settling for what’s available rather than living the high life of selecting their preferred takeout each night. 

And yet, there’s another option: City mice (and rats) could become country mice yet again. And the same goes for city people, who bear the burden of skyrocketing rent costs in New York City and some other large cities, instead of moving somewhere where the cost of living would be significantly more affordable. Wendell Berry has spent his entire writing career, now extending over six decades, bemoaning this pull of the city from the countryside time and again in his nonfiction and fiction. It doesn’t have to be this way, he repeatedly reminds. City life is the one we choose for ourselves, and all for what? For that stressful rat race of a life that Aesop’s original country mouse sensibly saw for what it was—not worth the constant danger and stress. 

But here’s the paradox: Somehow, without even realizing that it happened, we’re all city mice now, as far as the availability of luxuries and amenities in our lives goes. Yes, there are very traditional Old Order Amish who farm on the outskirts of my small Ohio town—these are the very people whom Berry repeatedly brings up in his nonfiction and fiction as examples of choosing the right priorities, treasuring the simpler life, and avoiding the worst of modernity. And yet, they drive their horse and buggy to the local Aldi, where I show up in my typical mom minivan. As we both stock up on produce and more, the contents of their shopping carts at times appear indistinguishable from mine, minus the frozen pizza. Uncanny. 

Sure, cities have enthralled humans and pests alike with their glamorous promises and offerings for millennia, and yet they also encourage our covetousness and often don’t deliver on the promise of happiness anyway. But then, idealizing the “trad” life is likewise pointless in this age of ubiquitous small luxuries, readily available to all, including my rural Amish neighbors. At least, I can say, after living much of our early lives in larger cities, both my husband and I have found it a comfort and delight to spend over a decade in a small town in Georgia, and now to call a small town in Ohio our home. Turns out that finding happiness by reverse migration—from city mice back to country-adjacent mice—is not just the stuff of Hallmark channel romances.

The End of the Line

At the zoo, the same week as Mousegate, we took a leisurely stroll through the Australia section, where my children were delighted to see a caged kookaburra. In his beak was a mouse, whole and readily recognizable, its long tail hanging limp to one side. For a few minutes, the bird primly sat on its perch, ignoring the onlookers. And then, shaking his head back in one abrupt swoop … reader, he ate it. 

Though P. J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology—and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.

Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”

The hippie student he was in the ‘60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy—until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut”—think John Lennon’s worst style—he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat.”

O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ‘60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ‘60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”

From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ‘70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon.” The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack.” As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history.” His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.

The turning point for O’Rourke came during 2003 with the death of his friend and colleague Michael Kelly in Baghdad. They’d traveled together to the Iraq War. Kelly, former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic when O’Rourke wrote there, was “embedded” with the Third Infantry Division, while O’Rourke covered the war “unilaterally.” The last time they spoke, Mike joked that he’d get stuck on the way to Baghdad, while P. J. would be “driving a rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abaya contests.” Instead, O’Rourke wrote, “I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed.” That’s when he decided the war party was over.

In 2015, when the Daily Beast offered me the chance to cover Spain and its surroundings, what thrilled me most was that I would occasionally share a corner of the front page with P. J. O’Rourke. He had just joined as a columnist a couple of weeks earlier. The Toledo-born writer had a knack for navigating both left and right-leaning outlets because he’d mastered the art of humor’s universality—he was too funny to spark grudges and too free to stay confined to one column. That’s a rare gift.

O’Rourke was a pioneer in spotting the clash between contemporary progressivism and humor. Today, that clash has worsened with “cancel culture.” “I couldn’t stay a Maoist forever,” he wrote in Republican Party Reptile. “I got too fat to wear bell-bottoms. And I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire. Plus, I couldn’t stand the left’s oppressive, dreadful seriousness.” He knew liberals seemed obsessed with stuffing their jokes full of political messages—making the message bigger than the laugh. Add to that their bad habit of taking themselves way too seriously, and you’ve got comedy that’s more likely to put people to sleep than make them laugh. Much of left-wing humor feels more about changing the world than cracking a smile. Real laughter, by contrast, is light, spontaneous, and wonderfully absurd.

O’Rourke was a free man in the most heroic sense. His defense of liberty wasn’t just an ideological stance; it was a way of life. He loved America but didn’t shy away from mocking its worst characteristics: “Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening,” he wrote.

As a disciple of H. L. Mencken, O’Rourke’s great calling was spotting idiots—left, right, past, present, and even future ones. With Parliament of Whores, he tore apart the world of professional politics, not lingering too long on whether the targets of his skewering were “his people” or not. Though his stance was that of an underground—or punk—Republican, for O’Rourke, there was no single enemy. He had no problem taking shots at all politicians and parties alike when defending his ideas: “Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.” “Every government is a parliament of whores,” he declared. “The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”

He ridiculed the left’s environmentalism long before it began shaping our lives. After writing his essay “Ship of Fools,” he never missed a chance to mock those who use environmentalism as a position of moral superiority from which to take potshots at capitalism. There’s no difference between the anti-war, Beatles-and-Vietnam-era environmentalism and today’s climate fanaticism—O’Rourke understood full well that they’re just different faces of an ideology far more interested in dismantling capitalism than cleaning oceans.

His satirical style led some to dismiss him as an economic expert, but it made him one of the most effective champions of capitalism, Adam Smith—he even humorously reimagined The Wealth of Nations—and libertarian conservative thought. Until the rise of rockstar Javier Milei, no one had quite matched his ability to reach such a broad audience with that mission. “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators,” he wrote. And in Eat the Rich, he observed that: “Microeconomics is about money you don’t have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.” Through humor, he found ways to express serious truths.

In his later years, he remained the living satirist with the most quotes in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, but no publication championed his presence as they once did. Today, no newspaper would fund a comedic correspondent to Kyiv in the middle of a war; we live in strange times: now the comedian, Zelensky, leads one side of the conflict, while on the other, the leader seems to be losing his sense of humor. And in these thin-skinned times, no one would dare publish a poverty analysis with lines like, “Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.”

Poverty, freedom, good manners, stupidity, technological invasion, or the automobile—nothing escaped O’Rourke’s sharp eye. Everything remains relevant. Although, thanks to capitalism, poverty has decreased, the left still clings to the belief—almost like a ritual act—that it’s not capitalism but socialism that’s worked miracles. Freedom is always under threat, and our privacy is invaded. Good manners are definitely out of fashion among Twitter/X addicts. Stupidity is enjoying a global boom. The technological invasion is making our brains short-circuit. And now, they’re forcing us to trade in our cars for four-wheeled electric scooters.

The problem of freedom—the central theme of O’Rourke’s work and thought—has been humanity’s problem since its very first day on Earth. And so has the problem of the economy. Adam and Eve had to make a choice. They got it wrong, sure—but at least they taught us a key idea of capitalism: economics is the science of choices; if the choices are bad, the economy goes straight to hell.

Now that much of the West is experiencing a revival of libertarian and conservative ideas—with increasingly younger supporters—O’Rourke could serve as the perfect gateway drug. His sarcastic, provocative tone is always cheerful, and it’s also the best weapon against a left that seems more and more detached from reality, furious even with biology and science, while growing steadily more humorless and unbearably self-important. Let’s not forget that Judith Butler—the mother of progressive postmodern theories from the waist down—somehow managed to turn grotesque ideas, the kind that would’ve made us burst out laughing just a decade ago, into painfully boring books. You can’t respond to Butler with Blaise Pascal or Thomas Aquinas. Unless you want to lose your mind like her followers, there’s only one answer: with P. J. Take a look at the West and who’s currently in charge, and tell me if there’s a more relevant and timely warning than the classic from the author of Parliament of Whores: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”