Abbie Hoffman printing “FUCK” on his forehead to keep TV news cameras at bay. In fact, I was Don’s second or third client, Abbie being his first. And it was David who acted as the shadchen or matchmaker between Stansberry Research and myself. (I know, I know, “O’Rourke” doesn’t sound like somebody who knows Yiddish, but . . . ) A shadchen arranges for a young man to meet a prospective bride, praising the young woman to the skies. The young man returns from the meeting and says to the shadchen , “You left out one thing—she limps.” “Only when she walks!” says the shadchen. (Now let me hobble back to work at Stansberry.) Furthest thanks of all go to the people who actually make books happen. In this case that would be, first, Julia Berner-Tobin, Managing Editor of Grove Atlantic Publishing. She received all the random threads, strands, strings, and fibers of my manuscript changes and pulled them together into a new edition. Caroline Trefler did the proofreading and readers will be relieved to find that she has advanced my spelling from the haphazard carelessness of the eighteenth century to the conventional order of the twenty-first while turning my murky grammar into clear English. And last and most and very greatly and very humbly I thank that best of friends, best of editors, and best of publishers Morgan Entrekin. POSTSCRIPT I finally figured out from whom I stole the title. It was that idiot philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, advocate of a return to “the state of nature” (the Arkansas of human conditions). I learned this thanks to the sharp eye of my old friend David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute. David came across a web publication called “Vanderbilt Hustler” produced by students at Vanderbilt University. One of those students, Claire Rich, wrote a cutely named column, “Eat the Rich,” explaining that she got the idea for the name from a quotation “commonly attributed to Jean Jacques Rousseau.” When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich. (The column was the usual undergraduate stuff about inequality being . . . you know . . . unequal.) A little digging revealed that this wasn’t something Rousseau had written but something he was said to have said to have said.
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