With one week until the November election and a U.S. political landscape that’s as tense as it's been in recent memory, writer P.J. O’Rourke is yearning for our arguments of yore.
The libertarian satirist joined Boston Public Radio on Tuesday to make an appeal for moderation, in a conversation sparked by his latest book, A Cry From the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land.
"Let’s get back to fighting the way we used to during the Reagan years and the Clinton years,” he said. “We could leave Monica out of it, but you know what I mean."
The self-described member of the "unorganized resistance” against President Trump described today's liberals and conservatives as “crazy tribalized,” and compared the current discourse to a married couple who’ve left too much unsaid for too long.
“Anybody who’s been in a long-term relationship… knows this kind of argument,” he joked. "It starts out with ‘We need to re-slip-cover the couch.' And then somehow it gets a little out of hand – like we start arguing about all the furniture in the room. And then pretty soon, you get to that 'throw-in-the-kitchen-sink' point."
“Not only does this lead to the break-up of the relationship, at least sometimes,” he said, “it always leads to the couch never getting slip-covered.”
