Satire: “Please Stop Talking About the Fiscal Cliff”

“Please Stop Talking About the Fiscal Cliff”
by Andy Borowitz

TOLEDO (The Borowitz Report)— “An Ohio man’s fascination with the so-called “fiscal cliff”—and his steadfast refusal to talk about anything else—has alienated everyone close to him, former friends of the man say. Harland Dorrinson, a forty-one-year-old carpet-tile salesman and self-described “fiscal-cliff nut” has turned himself into a pariah with his inexplicable interest in the most tedious conversation topic ever. “We were all like, ‘Harland, every time you talk about this, people start to lose consciousness,’” says Carol Foyler, a former friend who has cut ties with Mr. Dorrinson over his fiscal-cliff obsession. “I don’t know what effect the fiscal cliff will have in January, but if you’re stuck in a conversation with Harland the effect is you want to drown yourself.”

For his part, Mr. Dorrinson says that his ex-friends who have shown no interest in the fiscal cliff “are a bunch of losers who don’t know what they’re missing.” “I guess there are people out there who aren’t interested in whether capital-gains taxes and marginal rates will rise, or which Republicans have backed away from Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge,” he says. “But seriously, would you want to be friends with someone like that? Or, for that matter, married to one?”

If Mr. Dorrinson has a regret, it is that the fiscal-cliff issue will be resolved one way or the other by the end of the year: “I know I’m going to experience a profound feeling of loss when it’s gone. There hasn’t been anything this fascinating since the debt-ceiling debate.”

- http://www.newyorker.com/

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