I'm not interested in food or cars. But, I am interested in things like records. I've got 2,000 records. Why would anyone need 2,000 records? It's self-indulgent and obsessive.

I think like a baby boomer. I definitely have that thing where I always want to learn new things, but I half-learn them. I half-learned Italian. Half-learned how to fly a plane. Half-learn how to do everything. That's what baby boomers like to do. They just can't stick to anything. They flit from one thing to the next.

Contrast Clinton and Bush as baby boomers and how they reflect the generation.

Bill Clinton's a poor kid from a state with three electoral votes and he became president of the United States. I don't care what else he does, my hat's off to him because he did it. That's the American dream. He's the poor kid, like Ronald Reagan, who grew up to be president of the United States.

But, Bill Clinton has all of the hypocrisy of baby boomers and all of the false sense that if you simply say the right thing, it's like you did something. But, with that said, he still became president of the United States, so he didn't sell out as completely as other baby boomers. He made some kind of difference.

Bush is the frat boy version [of a baby boomer]. He's less like baby boomers than most of us, because I don't get the impression that George Bush works very hard and I think baby boomers really, really do work hard. However, he has one classic baby boomer characteristic -- he networks like hell. The whole thing with the Texas Rangers where you just meet the right guys and hang around for a while and before you know it you've got a lot of money. That's a classic baby boomer thing.

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I don't dislike George Bush at all, though. Bush isn't Quayle. Quayle was the real deal. The guy was just not smart enough to do the job. Bush isn't like that. Do you think Gore is that much smarter than Bush? If he's so damn smart, how did he manage to lose Tennessee?

Your writing makes a lot of people angry. Do you wind up hearing from the people you make fun of or piss off?

There is this woman in the Boston Globe, Katherine Powers, who just absolutely hates my stuff and always does the same kind of review. She doesn't review the book. She says, "I hate it so much that I can't review it." Which to me is a form of intellectual dishonesty, because your job is to read it and specifically talk about how much you hated it.

But, she really, really hated ["Balsamic Dreams"]. And when I saw her review I thought, "Bingo. This is great. This is really cool. I hit the target. Some old lefty, movement person in Boston hates the book because I made fun of Jimmy Carter or the old hippies." It's better than people liking it. That's an exhilarating feeling.

Do you ever feel bad about the fact that you're basically mean to people for a living?

I decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to be a nice person. Like all satirists, I basically hate nice people. I hate do-gooders. I loathe Ben and Jerry. I loathe all of those people. So did Molière.

But, I thought, I've been doing this for all of these years, maybe I should try being nice for a change. Who wants to be evil and hated? So, I tried to be a good person for six months. One of the things I did was set up a Web site where I apologized to all of the people that I've been really mean to. Though I must say that I went out of my way to reaffirm my dislike of certain people. You would never apologize to Geraldo for anything.

So, I set up that Web site and shortly after that, I decided that I didn't want to be a nice person anymore.

When did you start doing this type of writing, where you are part of the story, like you did in "Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon," or the Mickey Rourke or Hugh Grant for a day stories?

At Spy in the '80s. I would pretend to be the president of Bunny Burgers and we would tell people that we had a restaurant where you could pick out a bunny and we'd skin it and kill it and make a hamburger. So we went around to nine P.R. firms and said we wanted them to take the account. Six of them responded. We have this great tape of them coming in and wanting to do the Bunny Burgers account and I could always keep a straight face.

Two things that really help are that I can always keep a straight face and I really like people. I don't like journalists, but I really like ordinary people. My experience has always been that when you're doing a story, the public will always write it for you. They just unite as one. They'll say, "Joe's here in Philadelphia dressing as Hugh Grant, and he wants us to provide him with humorous material and by God, we will."

The only exception to that is working with WASPs. They're deadly. If you have to write a funny story, stay out of Connecticut, because you won't get any material from those people -- they are serious, humorless. Not stupid, but without a sense of humor. Let me stick to Jews, Italians, blacks, Dominicans, the Irish -- just stay away from WASPs, they cannot rise to the occasion.

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