Libertarian legend, P. J. O’Rourke passed today at age 74. Not many can claim a life like his; a Sixties radical turned humor writer turned libertarian icon.

He was one of the few people on the right who could write for Rolling Stone magazine and National Review.

To get a picture, I recommend a couple of his books. The one that had me laughing inappropriately loud on busses was Holidays in Hell. His autobiography, aptly named Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut is a must-read too. You’ll love his Vietnam era hippie tale of how he lost his girlfriend to the “Balto-Kong”.

Over the next couple of days, better and more detailed eulogies will be coming out. But I’d like to share what he meant to me.

When I was a left-leaning college kid, I had a subscription to Harvard Lampoon. Immature but smart humor always resonated with me. Household names like Conan O’Brien and John Hughes as well as many whose work you’ve seen over the years but may not know such as Matty Simmons, Jack Handey and Doug Kenney were all part of the Lampoon in one way or another. Well in that crowd was a young, rough P. J. O’Rourke.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’m living in San Francisco. I half-joke that two things made me conservative; living in San Francisco and my brother in law at the time giving me a copy of P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores. Who knows, I may not even be half-joking, maybe one-eighth joking.

You know how when you read or watch something and it resonates with you? That was O’Rourke’s writing. As a young person, you have a gauze-y view of reality and you hold idealistic views that have no basis in thousands of years of the human experience. For example, how poverty could be ended with just a little more money or the absurdity of the “War on Drugs”. It was a practical awakening.

And it made me want to be Cranky.

Let me elaborate. P. J. was everything I wanted to be, smart, educated, worldly, right-leaning and damn hilarious. Yeah, the Harvard thing never happened and the funny, well that’s debatable. I started blogging with an attempt to be both funny and political and I’ve been doing that for roughly 20 years. It’s more than fair to say I’ll never approach his level of brilliance or wit but it has been a fun ride. Maybe someday, I’ll earn a couple of bucks from it.

I have only a couple of heroes in this world. Pete Townsend, Mel Brooks and P. J. O’Rourke.

Rest in Peace.