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P.J. O’Rourke is a 70-year-old, pasty-white Irish Catholic political satirist who basically refuses—at least while the topic is so exhaustively annoying—to write about the president of the United States. In other words, he’s now on the outside of the mainstream media’s cocktail parties and self-congratulatory social media circle-jerks.
O’Rourke has written 20 books about everything from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to the 2016 election; that book, How the Hell Did This Happen?, marked his last foray into the political theater. In his latest, *None of My Business, *released in September, he takes on the role of what he describes as an economics professor at a “really unprestigious, small junior college that’s probably not going to be accredited for a long time.” The book (which is quite good) finds O’Rourke translating for the millennial generation what he finds so annoying, pointless, prescient and hilariously entertaining about 21st century innovations and economic fads.
For the uninitiated, O’Rourke is a conservative-libertarian who cut his teeth making fun of more successful people at National Lampoon in the 1970s and early 1980s (ahem, when boys were allowed to be boys). He writes in a style that can be understood today, for those who never discovered his wisecracking genius in 1991’s Parliament of Whores, as the intellectual dark web for adolescent boys from the Midwest. Before I begin my interview with him, just days before the release of *None of My Business, *he tells me that his last long-form interview was with Cigar Aficionado some 20 years ago.
That sounds about right; P.J. O’Rourke, who turns 71 this year, hasn’t tweeted since 2014. Instead, he’s going through his semi-retired wilderness years, living on a tree farm in rural New Hampshire, hunting in Canada and editing a tiny economics magazine titled American Consequences. The old man is still funny, even in a world where being funny about politics is a criminal offense.
Let’s start with the 2016 election, the subject of your last book before None of My Business. You basically disappeared after Election Day 2016.
I swore off politics for a while. I’ve been writing about politics in one form or another since 1972. My first experience with politics was the Nixon McGovern conventions in Miami. Given the “Luke, I am your father” nature of one candidate and the flakiness of the other, at least I was starting at the bottom. I thought it couldn’t get much worse. Spoke to soon! 2016 was a miserable election on every front.
How have these two presidents affected the state of satire in this country?
Partly it may be the effect of humor as a form of entertainment getting a little out of hand, becoming a little too popular, to point where The New York Times published this whole thing about the new seriousness in humor. It was about some Australian woman who’s supposedly a stand up comedian [Hannah Gadsby] who has a one woman show, which I gather is agonizing; it’s all about her own personal problems and it sounds less funny than the average Irish wake. What I do for a living is provide a little ray of sunshine around the house or to get people to laugh through their tears, but humor now carries freight that it has no business carrying.
I want to talk about National Lampoon; specifically, Molly Ringwald’s essay in The New Yorker from April, where she criticized John Hughes and the male-focused humor National Lampoon produced in the 1970s. Did you read her piece?
I didn’t read it, but the whole idea of National Lampoon was to say aloud what everyone was thinking privately. And nothing causes more shock than having your public thoughts announced publicly: It was by adolescent boys for adolescent boys. You know, boys, when they are in their youth—from the onset of puberty until someone smacks them over the head with a hammer—are a destructive force. And if you can find a way to channel that force, even if its with dirty jokes, you have done the world a favor.
If Michael O’Donoghue had been serious, he would have been dangerous. John Hughes was a much kinder soul. I don’t know what gets into Molly. But we are headed back to another Victorian-era of sanctimoniousness, where people are always trying to out-sanctify each other and show that they are holier than everybody else. But the only way I can respond to Molly Ringwald’s comments—I did see something she wrote about John, who was a very close friend of mine and whom I truly loved dearly, one of the best people in the entire world—is with a great story about her that John told me, which I’ve never told in public.
After Molly’s success in John’s movies, which she was really good in, she was just snowed with all sorts of offers. She comes into John’s office one day and says, “John! John! I have a production company now.” And she starts going off about all the projects she’s going to do, for what John said was 15 or 20 minutes. She finally gets done and John looks at her and goes: “Molly, finish high school first.” (laughs) So whatever she wrote about him may be in vengeance for that conversation (laughs).
“With all freedom comes responsibility and individual human responsibility, and the problem is twofold: Facebook belongs to Zuckerberg, and it’s his property, and he’s got a right to run whatever he wants on it. “
It sounds like when somebody feels the need to go back in time and find things to try to correct.
Yeah, honestly, you can’t go back and fix peoples beliefs and attitudes. One thing that intrigues me about the bad behavior from the past is how often people made a scientific appeal to justify their bad behavior. It was believed by many intelligent and educated people in the 18th and 19th centuries that the different races of human beings were fundamentally different from each other. Which is just not true. DNA will prove to anybody willing to listen that if we were dogs, we’d all be the same breed.
We’re still plagued with that argument in The Bell Curve about the connection between race and IQ.
Oh, God, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book. What a lot of damage that did. Murray was a well-respected social scientist who had a major effect, but we had huge arguments about it. I’m sorry, but IQ is social. It does have to do with background, early experiences and culture. It’s a construct. IQ is also a very poor way to measure intelligence because there are lots of different kinds of it. Murray had a big argument with a guy at a think tank this one time, who said to him, “Even if this were true, why would I want to know? What earthly use would that knowledge be to me?”
That brings me back to the bad things people did to women, to people of color, foreigners, etc., which was based upon knowledge they thought they had. Let it always stand as a reminder about the knowledge we think we have, to be humble with it, and not too proud of what we know.
In your latest book, you create the analogy of the strict mother as it relates to the surveillance state, which can easily be applied to satire and one problem with the United States’s “mommy state”: From where can the next P.J. O’Rourke emerge? There doesn’t seem to be a platform for people like you in their twenties and thirties.
If we were really to work at this, we could explain school shootings.
How so?
What sensitive child hasn’t wanted to destroy their school? (laughs). You need to channel it.
Well, then let’s talk about guns. You have a lot to say about them in None of My Business. There’s a metaphor you use, which you picked up along the way as a foreign correspondent, that the gun is the “VISA card of the future.” Explain your view of guns as currency.
That was a wisecrack attributed to a friend of mine. As a foreign correspondent, you spend a lot of time getting guns pointed at you. And you realize that while money, love and fame is power, nothing beats force. Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time in places that I wished had gun control, so I’m not theoretically opposed to keeping a lid on people brandishing lethal weaponry. I don’t think a rocket launcher in every home is a very good idea. You can understand why machine guns were banned. The problem is that the problem can’t be fixed. That’s a lesson I learned during a civil war in Georgia, where there were guns everywhere, in a country that had been out of the Soviet Union for like an hour, which had some of the most restrictive gun laws on the face of the earth. And the guns weren’t stolen military guns. There were all kind of guns. Every kind you could imagine. What they told me was that there was a civil war between white Russians and red Russians, and that the reds won, banned all the guns and everyone smeared their guns in lamb fat and wrapped them in sheep skins and buried them. So when I was there in 1991, decades later, they dug up all those guns. Seventy years of rigid gun control out the window…overnight. And believe me, those guns worked.
So you can’t prevent a flourishing firearm black market with regulation.
Not when the booze is out of the bottle. Nobody knows how many guns are in the United States, but in all probability there’s one for every person, certainly one for every adult. Especially with assault weapons, because you’re essentially banning them because of the way they look. The thing is that the actual ban had to do with magazine-size. We were out target shooting in the field and I realized that I had this ancient old 22, long-rifle plinking gun, which I passed down to my kid. It’s a nice little straight-shooting mystery make, about 70 years old, but it has a gas-operated, tube magazine that holds about 25 rounds and it’s semi-automatic. It’s technically illegal: It’s an assault rifle. You’d be hard put to hold up an armored car with it, buy nonetheless.
Is there a miseducation about firearms that’s fueling the media’s current narratives?
It’s a little bit like what we’re talking about with Trump. When you create a devil, you’re going to create a certain number of Satan worshippers. When you put forward the gun as a powerful symbol, rather than just a tool or a toy, it takes on a life of its own. I have no worries about my kids with guns. They’ve been well-drilled on gun safety. They don’t think guns are anything special. They enjoy shooting them, but it’s like their skis, golf clubs or tennis rackets.
There’s this truly tragic thing in life: In turns out there are fads in evil. I was reading an analysis about whether mass shooters fit the same profile as serial killers. Somebody actually ran the numbers and serial killing is now less common than it was in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s while mass shootings are more common. There are fashions in evil…how evil is that?
Has the NRA taken their opposition to gun control too far?
I think the NRA has lost the plot. They are so terrified of any form of gun control that they would take Marshall Dillion off television reruns out of fear that his idea that you should check your guns with the barkeep could catch currency (laughs). I’m friends with Alan Mossberg at Mossberg Shotguns and I was friends for many years with Bill Ruger, who founded Sturm, Ruger Firearms and obviously they weren’t in favor of gun control, but they weren’t panicked by the idea. Alan would like there to be some sort of sane advocacy for some degree of gun control that wasn’t panicked about guns—or their symbolic importance.
Aside from the hydrogen bomb, what’s your first memory of a technology that genuinely made you feel uncomfortable?
Computers. During my stint as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon from the end of 1977 to early 1981, when people were first starting to write on computers, my writers would turn in these horrible dot-matrix manuscripts that even in my youthful age drove my eyesight crazy. But also, there was a change in style. When you had to write something longhand, which I often still do, or on a big, old IBM typewriter where you had to correct it before submitting it to a magazine, you took some care because you didn’t want to retype the thing. With computers it was just, “Whoa, let’s go.”
Around the same time, I remember seeing the Ramones at CBGB, and it was “Hey ho! Let’s go!” and I didn’t get it with the Ramones, and I sure as hell didn’t get it with stuff that was written on the computer. It was a little like listening to your dumb-ass high school buddy on methedrine.
Did computers affect your writing?
Yeah, probably, but I made such a slow transition. I stuck with my IBM Selectric until the last guy within 50 to 100 yards of me that repaired them died. Just this summer, I took my last IBM typewriters to the dump. About 10 years ago, I began using a computer to edit, and look, it’s darn handy for moving stuff around, but it doesn’t replace forethought.
There’s a section in the book where you list things you’d “unnovate,” like crack, texting and advanced computer-graphics in movies. Which one goes first?
I got kids and I spend a lot of time explaining to them to think before they speak; that there are mind words, and mouth words, and not everything that goes through your mind has to come out of your mouth. Let alone go on a Twitter feed. I’m not sure we were ever good about thinking before we spoke, but now we’ve gone to a format that insists we think not at all.
Was there an innovation in your youth that was as unavoidable and potentially addictive as, say, social media is today?
The outbreak of drug use in the sixties, I suppose (laughs). That was a shock. Of course I was all for it at the time, but in retrospective, it was dangerous. A certain number of friends of mine went on trips and never came home. Psychoactive drugs are obviously not good for people lacking a certain amount of mental stability.
Your distrust of the innovations that have complicated our lives is a larger subject of this book.
That’s a fair statement, and it’s not because I’m some sort of Luddite. I don’t make my own toothbrush. I love technology. I’m happy and comfortable with it, except when it’s useless. For example, I do not see the purpose of Twitter. I don’t need it.
Why haven’t you tweeted since 2014?
Let’s rephrase that: Why was I ever on Twitter? The public relations department at Grove Atlantic and Morgan Entrekin have published every single book I’ve written. The PR department called me up one day and said that there was this great thing called Twitter and it was really attracting a lot of attention, and was a great way to promote my back list. And I asked them how often I had to do it, and they said every day. So I made myself a little grid and quoted myself, or someone every night for for three to five weeks and I was like, Wait, why? It was like was having to feed the dog, but you didn’t really have a dog. What was the point? I saw what people were tweeting, and then it became the Trump campaign strategy where you set your pants on fire and then everybody in the world has to watch the fireman put it out.
What is your take on social media companies banning controversial public figures—take Alex Jones, for example—from their platforms?
I just had a long conversation about this on a podcast, and the co-host was Buck Sexton, and we talked about this. With all freedom comes responsibility and individual human responsibility, and the problem is twofold: Facebook belongs to Zuckerberg, and it’s his property, and he’s got a right to run whatever he wants on it. But with that said, the way electronic media works is that it’s functionally, not technically, a monopoly. That may change next week and not everyone will be on Facebook and everybody will be on ButtBook, where you go to get in touch with everybody you don’t like. But right now, people are using one form of each social media platform because it’s handy, for the same reason you wouldn’t have six different phone companies.
YouTube has something close to 80 percent of the video-sharing market, so wouldn’t banning Alex Jones there raise a serious First Amendment concern?
It’s putting duct-tape right across his mouth. But look, it requires a certain amount of responsibility with freedom of speech to know when people are talking out of their butt. Prove him wrong, do what you will, but don’t ask somebody else to take the responsibility for you to make him go away because he annoys or disturbs you.
“It’s one of the great conundrums of freedom, which is about letting people do what they want to do. Unfortunately, a large number of people want to just get high on oxycontin. But how do you answer that?”
You make fun of Facebook a lot in the book. What’s most perplexing is few truly like the thing, and yet, we’re all on it. Nobody trusts it, and even millennials, like your daughter, think Facebook is not hip. Why are we still on it every day?
It’s kind of like the school bulletin board gone insane. Nobody was interested in that either, and yet everybody pinned stuff up, everybody walked by it and looked, but nobody was a fan of it. I think my daughter nailed it pretty well: If you want to get out a broad message to everybody you know, it’s just the easiest way to do that.
You write in the book, “I haven’t seen my eldest daughter, age nineteen, face-to-face for years”—a funny line illustrating a real problem.
She’s almost 21 now, but for a while, in her teens, she was just attached to her phone and I was talking to the top of her head. Of course, the great irony was I couldn’t get in touch with her either because she didn’t use her phone for phone calls or to check emails. She used it for texting. Which I cannot do. I have big, fat arthritic thumbs and really the apex of my skill is over the course of 10 minutes, I’ll get out “okay.”
Why do you think we’re incapable of combating the fact that some innovations like social media are making us dumber?
It’s like the obesity problem. The core problem is the availability of too many good things to eat. Now contemplate any sort of idea to limit the availability of too many good things to eat. In the case of social media, human beings innately have a very short attention span. The moment radio and movies came along, we ate it up. It’s one of the great conundrums of freedom, which is about letting people do what they want to do. Unfortunately, a large number of people want to just get high on oxycontin. But how do you answer that? I suppose one way is regulation and restriction. But do we set up trying to change human nature? In a way we have. The world, for instance, in the ordinary social discourse of me going into a bar is a lot less dangerous than it was 50 years ago. It’s been years since I saw a bar fight, and I’m not very selective about the bars I go into. Grown men were much more violent 50 years ago than they are now.
One of the funniest parts from the book is when you make fun of driverless cars and how they’re taking us further from individualism. You write, “If Taxi Driver gets remade, it won’t star Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. It will star Elizabeth Warren in a driverless car.”
It’s a dislike on several levels. In life, one of the important things is a feeling of agency, or free will, and people that lack agency, or feel like everything just happens to them or done to them, are invariably unhappy people. One of the ways they manifest their happiness is complaining a lot, that they’re not in charge, and of course driverless cars is depriving us of agency. I also love to drive. I grew up in the automobile business. My family has been in the automobile business possibly longer than the Fords. My grandfather has been in the automobile business since 1887; he was a buggy mechanic, and one day he saw a horseless buggy and became a car mechanic. And later he became a car dealer.
I don’t even remember learning to drive, it was just one of those things we did. It’s something I love. Sitting there playing Solitaire on my phone while the car drives themselves strikes me as no fun, whatsoever. It’s also a technology that cries out for government regulation. We’ve already seen the hoo-ha caused by the first few people hurt or killed in driverless cars.
I also belong to the New England Auto Journalists association, and an expert from MIT gave us a lecture on driverless car technology, and somebody put up their hand and said, “This would be great in a New England snowstorm,” and the guy from MIT responded, “Wrong, that’s the one time you wouldn’t want driverless technology”— in a severe snowstorm, where you’re relying on years of knowledge and intuition. It’s just a machine and in some situations, there are too many variables. You can get a computer to win at chess, but you can’t get it to win against William Butler Yeats in a poetry contest. But you might put a lot of forklift drivers out of work.
There’s a funny observation in the book about how cars have become unfixable because of emissions regulations, fuel efficiency standards, federally mandated automatic sensors, and that you basically can’t recognize the components of your car engine anymore. Explain this struggle for eco-friendly millennials who Uber more than they visit Pep Boys.
It’s a struggle between the analog world and electronic world. In a binary electric world, things either work or they don’t. It’s basically a black box and automobiles contain a massive number of black boxes. Amidst that there’s mechanical or electronic technology that can be understood by looking at it. You cannot understand digital by looking at it, you have to delve into the programming, which is hard to do on the side of a highway on a rainy night.
Firstly, I don’t understand (and people who do will laugh at me), but it also vastly complicates certain simple functions. I have a great big Chevy Suburban. It’s basically an indoor pickup truck. I live on a tree farm and so I need clearance. Plus, I hunt, and I go to places in Atlantic Canada where I need a car that’s going to beat the bush, and I really don’t care what the car does besides run: I want four-wheel drive, I want to be able to tow something, I want the air-conditioning and heater to work, I want the wipers to work, radio is a plus…fuck, that’s all. This car, besides a bunch of other bullshit, has a back-up warning. And what do I do with a back-up warning? I backed the car into a tree. Now why would I do that if the back-up warning is beeping? Because the back-up warning beeps for everything: weeds, tall grass, anything.
So I quit paying attention to it and smashed the back-up beeper into a tree. But that set off a chain reaction throughout the rest of the electric system in the car. All sort of other things stopped working including the automatic door locks, and to fix it is gonna cost me three to four thousand dollars and the car isn’t even worth that much. If it wasn’t for the damn computer, there’s another hundred thousand miles left in this car.
America used to built things to last. We don’t build a lot of things anymore, which I suppose is the one aspect of Trump’s “America First” protectionism and so-called trade wars that should be relatable to everyone: The idea that there’s a real desire to make “Made in the USA” in vogue again. Do you think this something we can actually accomplish?
Traditionally, American products were maybe not on the cutting edge of sophistication, but they were well built and over-engineered. One of the things, oddly, that’s put an end to things being well built and over-engineered is free trade, but not in the sense of cheap foreign competition. In the sense of shipping weight.
Explain.
Why doesn’t your washing machine last for three generations like it used to? Why doesn’t your refrigerator last like the old round-top ones that had been mom and dads wedding present in 1938 that was up in the summer cottage 30 years later? Well part of it is weight. The shipping weight of an over-engineered products is much greater, so if you’re manufacturing things to put them in cargo containers and ship them overseas, every ounce matters.
I get the value of cars like the Prius or Tesla as being both high-tech and eco-friendly, but I don’t like them. They’re pretentious and look too futuristic for my taste. How do you feel about electric or hybrid cars?
Well, the thing about electronic cars that’s cool is that they’re wicked fast. The Tesla handles really well. Part of the reason is its center of gravity, because the battery is down in the floor pan, so its center of gravity is exceedingly low and the torque is immediate. There’s no torque curve, it just goes up. But as long as your Prius or your Nissan LEAF is slow, I have no use for it.
The other problem is range. My sister-in-law has a Tesla. I forget the exact figure, but the Tesla’s range is okay, it’s like 150 to 200 miles or something. But when you actually have fun driving it, it uses up all the battery because you’re driving fast, and she says when the temperature goes down to like 30, the battery capacity goes way down.
Describe to me your annoyance with “elitists do-gooders” and their need for more regulation, which comes up in the book.
It’s not all regulations per se that bother me; cars did really used to be filthy and dangerous, and they’re less filthy and dangerous now, and let’s be frank, all my ranting about their electronics aside, cars are far more reliable today than they were when I was a kid in the ’50s or ‘60s. Nowadays you hardly see anyone on the side of the road with their radiator doing old faithful, or even with a flat; you couldn’t go a block in 1958 without helping someone change a tire.
But the regulatory process is an extremely dangerous one. What it does is accrue political power and expand it. This brings me back to my basic worried libertarian-slash-conservative outlook of government, which is that they have a kind of power that nothing else has: Government has a legal monopoly on deadly force. Once a law is passed you can be forced at gunpoint to obey that law. So it’s very important to be very careful of giving government more power over you, and my beef with the elite is that they just love political power and always look to expand it.
There are a couple of reasons for that. One is the idea of getting someone to be virtuous for you, which is a danger. “I would love to help the poor, but there’s only so much I could do, I have a family of my own…” So let’s get the government to help the poor. “I’d really like to rid the world of evil, but there’s nothing I can do.” So let’s get the government do it. The other is who controls politics. I don’t mean to go all “Qanon” on you, and I won’t, but if you look at the people who are in politics, from the local level to the White House, you wonder what’s the bar of entry for this field? There’s a bar to entry or skill level to get into any field, except politics. Any idiot can get into it and it seems like they have. They should at least have to stand on one leg and spell hippopotamus or something.
What is your take on U.S. Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
It’s the flip side. If Trump is heads, she’s tails, or the reverse, but it’s the coin of populism, the idea that somebody did me wrong and that they’re getting the stuff that I deserve and that the government should fix it. Trump is one way, and she’s another.
What is currently the more dangerous form of populism in America: left or right-wing?
That’s a hard call. The fascist movement in the middle of the 20th century did a lot of damage, but the left-wing version, the communists, did even more. If you’re just counting dead people, the communists managed to trump the fascists. But she’s less dangerous because she isn’t the president of the United States. And she ain’t gonna’ get there, but somebody like her might.
Why are millennials so distrustful of capitalism?
All kids fall for communism because of something Marx said: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Okay, that is a ridiculously fallacious foundational statement for a society, except for one place: The family. So kids are natural little communists. I don’t think the millennial generation is hugely different from my generation except for one factor. Just as millennials were entering the age of responsibility, acquisition and ambition, capitalism was undergoing a radical change that we’re in the middle of and we don’t know where it’s going. All sorts of basic ideas about how you make a living, how you should paid, what you should own, what the government should give you and what it has no business giving you are all in flux at the moment. Being 25 is confusing anyway, and to be 25 in a confusing moment has the best of times and worst times thing going for it.
You make fun of Antifa in the book, describing them as a kind of fashionable rebellion for unemployed hipsters. But you were once one of them.
Oh, sure. It was the sixties, and once we got our dander up with the war in Vietnam, we decided we were angry at everything. I can’t even remember how many different things we were opposed to, and I bet we could give the average Antifa a run for their money. But to look at them, I think we were having more fun. I could be wrong.
One change from the activism of your generation versus today’s is how fashionable rage has become.
Look, I think this sort of rebellion manifests itself in different ways but the psychological and sociological core remains the same. It is the discontent of prosperity. When the economic situation is tough, people are more focused on feeding and sheltering themselves—they’re too busy to be frustrated. They suffer, horribly, but they don’t suffer from formless anxiety and weltschmerz. They suffer from hunger and pain, but when the world is prosperous, and everything seems possible, the fact that everything isn’t possible becomes infuriating.
“Journalism has become one of the ‘elitist do-gooder’ occupations of choice, and it just didn’t used to be that way. First and foremost, it was about what building was on fire and how many engine companies had to answer the alarm. “
The book offers a humorous monologue on 21st century economics, from the perspective of a boomer, but specifically as it relates to Trump. I want to talk about an innovation that comes up in the book that relates to his protectionist policies: Washing machines, which you describe as one of the underappreciated innovations. How do you feel about the possibility of washing machines becoming more expensive for working class families following Trump’s tariffs from earlier this year?
Well, I’m a solid free-trader; I’m also a solid Libertarian, but it doesn’t mean I’m always going to follow my logic all the way to the end of* reductio ad absurdum.* Trade and tariff policies are an enormous headache. Trump’s inarticulate about them, but he’s not completely wrong about the unfairness of some of our trade deals. China has been very reluctant in letting some of our products in, and so has Europe. There’s a kind of covert protectionism in Japan, which doesn’t don’t slap tariffs but regulations. The Europeans and various countries in Asia have been doing this for a very long time, and nobody has been successful in changing their minds. We’ve tried being tough, we’ve tried being nice, but maybe being crazy might work. But it comes down to a fundamental question about Trump: He’s crazy, but is he crazy, like a fox, or is he crazy like Fox News crazy? And that’s a Venn diagram, so it doesn’t exclude the possibility of there being a lot of overlap.
The more you attack him, the more powerful he becomes.
You see why I’m not writing about politics very much (laughs). It’s not because I don’t have anything to say, it’s because it gives me a big headache, but you speak truth. One of the things Trump thrives on is it all being about Trump and you gotta figure out a way to criticize him in a way that doesn’t make it all about Trump, which is a very, very hard thing to do. I tell my lefty friends that if they want to counteract what he’s doing, stick to the issue, be specific, leave his name out of it, if possible.
The media has focused more on Trump’s Twitter than every major thing threatening us as a species. How do you feel about how the media is handling the president?
Yeah, it’s Gresham’s law of journalism, where bad currency drives out good, that the easy and sensational drives out more important news stories and the hard to talk about stuff. It’s really easy to write about what Trump tweeted, which he does deliberately, I think, but the trade issues we were talking about, currency manipulation, central banks, and the fact that there isn’t an open market in currency, all those things are really hard to write about: They take thought, research, and to make them interesting takes a lot of work. I think the media is falling for the bate.
Fatigue from this sort of coverage has led to a lot of the negativity toward journalists.
Oh, hell yes. And there’s another problem the journalist profession has had for quite a while now, since at least the Nixon-era. Journalism was, even when I first went into it in the early 70s, still a craft or a trade, basically a blue-collar profession. Your beat reporter was a blue-collar guy in those days. When you’re working class, Irish Catholic, like to read, don’t like to get up early in the morning and lift heavy things…what do you do? You can be a priest or a newspaper reporter. So what’s it gonna be, whiskey and women, or just whiskey? Or as it turns out, altar boys, but we didn’t know that back then.
So these were down to earth people. Not to say, they had brilliant political opinions, but they were practical people and they had a desire, as H.L. Mencken said, to have the front-row seat on everything. And along came Watergate, and the All The President’s Men world-saving aspect of journalism and all sorts of people who should have gone into the Peace Corps went to journalism school instead, which was something nobody had ever heard in the newsroom of the old Daily News, where people would yell for copy, banging on manual typewriters with a Camel hanging out of the corner of their mouth.
It seems the journalist has become more like a professional activist or a populist politician.
Yeah, journalism has become one of the “elitist do-gooder” occupations of choice, and it just didn’t used to be that way. It didn’t mean that we didn’t have left-wing or right-wing journalists, but first and foremost, it was about what building was on fire and how many engine companies had to answer the alarm.
You voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Reluctantly?
I voted for her because while she was wrong about everything, she was wrong within normal parameters. And it was my small-c conservatism that made me vote for Hillary. She was the devil I knew. I was more comfortable with opposing somebody politically who I understood, whose actions I could predict with fair accuracy, than putting a wild card in arguably the most powerful position in the world.
I look at Trump and if he was an acquaintance or something, I’d figure him to be unstable. I wouldn’t let him take care of my gerbil, whereas with Hillary Clinton, you’d probably come back to very healthy, probably slimmed down gerbil.
I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Hillary, so I abstained from voting in 2016.
But you didn’t have to. You live in California, and it didn’t matter what you did. You could have gone into the voting booth and taken all your clothes off. But New Hampshire is actually a swing state. And my wife and I actually had a talk about this, as well as my oldest daughter who’s old enough to vote—she was having none of Trump once she heard the Billy Bush tape—but my wife and I who really disliked Hillary realized our vote actually could matter. If we were in a pure blue state we could have voted for Trump as a joke, or register a protest, but we weren’t.
If 2020 sees Elizabeth Warren against Trump, who would you vote for?
Golly, Elizabeth Warren is kind of an easy punching bag. But let’s posture it like we’ve got a real live leftist running against Trump. The one thing to consider is that by the next presidential election, Trump will have had two more years of a track record. One would be able to do the analysis better, so I’d be getting ahead of myself if I was to say one or the other right now, but at that point I’d be able to do risk analysis. I have a friend who’s the Chief Risk Office of Prudential Insurance, and he’d go, “Okay, Trump is unpredictable in this way, but fairly predictable in this other way…” So then you could look over to the other one and go, “How bad is their agenda? How effective will they be in enacting the agenda?” And then you can do a pure risk analysis which might end up having me vote for Trump. It might.