We Learn Nothing Page 7

  The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct. I like to believe that liberals are the ones who are at least trying to transcend this sort of tribalism, who Celebrate Diversity and promote tolerance and think of themselves as citizens of the world instead of parochial nationalists, which is what makes us such bad chanters, but I have to admit that our contempt for those primitive, tribal conservatives is itself pretty tribalistic.

  This cultural divide serves all kinds of powerful interests: the Tom & Jerry–level narratives required by the infotainment industry, the vampiric longevity of a two-party system that last represented any actual constituents around the time I learned to color inside the lines, and, above all, the portfolios of the obscenely wealthy, for whom it serves as a convenient diversion while they help themselves to the last of the money. But it’s not as if anyone needed to invent it. Maintaining any sort of dogmatic ideology necessarily involves some exhausting intellectual dishonesty—forcibly ignoring dissonant information, dismissing counterarguments, constantly reassuring yourself that you’re in the right—and seeing what we’ve repressed in ourselves unapologetically embodied in someone else infuriates us. Immediately after 9/11, I was secretly relieved that we had heartless warmongering bastards like Dick Cheney in the White House, because I knew they would wreak some suitably Valhallan vengeance. It was only when I saw crowds of crew-cut frat boys chanting “U!S!A!” with open red mouths, and slogans like FUCK ISLAM scrawled on the sides of cardboard missiles, that I recoiled from my own ugly bloodlust. It was like seeing some dick in a shopping mall who turns out to be you in a mirror. I realized that where I belonged, on any given issue, was on the opposite side of a police barricade from those guys. Red and Blue bash each other with the hysterical homophobia of the closeted because we recognize in each other our most loathed secret selves. We’re the Red States’ feckless, ineffectual, faggy compassionate side that they like to think they’ve successfully quashed, just as they, those angry chanting bandanaed rednecks, are our more credulous and aggressive selves, whom we’re too inhibited to own up to. Thus conservatives have coined pejoratives for compassion and altruism—“bleeding heart,” “do-gooder”—while liberals get nervous and ironic in the presence of passionate patriotism and religious zeal—what we call “flag waving” and “Bible thumping.” We are one another’s political Shadows. We may hate each other, but let’s at least quit pretending we hate hating each other; we love hating each other.

  I’m afraid most people choose political parties based on the same question they ask about regular parties: Who else is going to be there? Even though the facts in the debate over the invasion of Iraq were few and unclear when they weren’t deliberate fabrications, I had no difficulty figuring out where I belonged: look, lined up over on that side, all the guys who ever called me a faggot in high school or beat me up outside a bar, all chanting “U!S!A!”; on the other, my friends and all the hot girls. When I listened to Tony Blair’s defense of the invasion of Iraq, I was abashed to realize that if we’d had a president who’d been half as eloquent, and had flattered my intelligence instead of appealing to fear, I might well have been persuaded to support the war. It turns out I respond to the Pavlovian stimulus of propaganda as reliably as the next rube—Bush was just using the wrong brand on me. (I’m essentially no different from those ignorant schlubs who cast their vote for the candidate they’d rather have a beer with—I’d just rather have beer with a different kind of guy.) I disagreed with Christopher Hitchens’s advocacy of the Iraq War, but I couldn’t help but admire his integrity—or maybe it was just cussedness—in breaking ranks with his own ideological allies, risking the scorn and moral opprobrium of his former friends and allying himself with people he must have despised. But it troubles me to see how rarely this happens.

  You’ll blunder up against these unspoken taboos if you venture a heterodox opinion or just mention a fact that clashes with your side’s official narrative. For example: for all its crimes and ineptitude, the Bush administration tripled the amount of money funneled into humanitarian aid and development in Africa, and did more to combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa than the previous Democratic administration. The name George Bush still drops out of my friends’ mouths like something that wasn’t supposed to be in their food, but it’s evidently spoken with respect in places like Sudan. When I mentioned this to some friends over beers, it kinda clunked awkwardly onto the table. Nobody knew what to do with it. “Well,” they’d allow grudgingly, “at least they did one thing right.” Or they’d float the notion that they’d done it for cynical reasons, to compete with Chinese influence in Africa, or that some underling in the administration had done it without any higherups’ knowledge. It came as a real relief when someone speculated plausibly that it must’ve been a giveaway to a pharmaceutical company. It still felt impolitic, almost treacherous, of me to have mentioned it. As a friend of mine once sighed: “I hate it when they’re not assholes.”

  Which is kind of how I felt when I ran into someone I knew at the Tea Party rally. It was one of those out-of-context moments where, for a few seconds, you can’t recognize someone you know you’ve seen many times because they’re not where you usually see them: the bodega clerk in a bar, your therapist at the Y.

  “Matt?” I said, experimentally.

  It was Matt. He was a former student of mine, from a cartooning class I’d taught. Now that I recognized him, it made perfect sense that Matt would be here. Matt was an aspiring political cartoonist with rightward-leaning libertarian sensibilities, working under the nom de plume “Slim Dodger.” I’d laughed out loud at a portrait he’d painted of Obama wearing the big frowsy gray beard of Karl Marx, captioned GROW A BEARD—SOCIALISM’s HERE! because it turns out anybody looks hilarious in a Karl Marx beard, but especially Barack Obama, his grin splitting through the nimbus of whiskers. It wasn’t my job as his instructor to argue with Matt’s characterization of Obama as a socialist. My main criticism of that cartoon was to caution him against its looking like an uncharacteristically merry Frederick Douglass.

  “So are you writing about this,” Matt asked me, “or . . . ?”

  “Um, I’m not sure yet,” I said. Which was true, and yet I felt myself squirming a little. Matt certainly knew my own political sensibilities from my work, and he must’ve known that I was not there as a wholly sympathetic observer. I noticed he was wearing a yellow T-shirt with the word MARSHAL across the chest. I suffered an irrational spasm of worry that he might identify me as a liberal infiltrator and I’d be thrown out or torn to pieces by the mob, an infidel at Mecca, but of course no such thing happened. He told me he’d gotten involved with the Tea Party only a few months before, but it was such a loose, grassroots structure that within a couple of weeks he’d found himself in the role of organizer. We chatted for a few minutes more before he had to resume his duties and Sarah and I fled to debrief over beers.

  A few weeks later I saw Matt profiled in an article on the New York City Tea Party in one of the city’s alternative weeklies, and sent him a note of congratulations. There’s a conspicuous lack of any talented political cartoonists on the right, and it occurred to me that if Matt were to become a successful conservative cartoonist I’d be perversely proud to tell people I’d been one of his mentors. Even old Obi Wan Kenobi, seeing his former student now some sort of big shot on the Death Star with legions of stormtroopers scuttling around at his command, must’ve thought: The kid made good. The student/teacher relationship supersedes ideological differences, which is as it should be. I’ve seen so many friends and families sundered and turned against each other by politics. I know people who’ve been disowne
d because they’re atheists or bisexual, people who love their parents painfully but can’t even talk to them about the news without getting into a tearful shouting match. To me this seems not just sad but obscene, like a symphony interrupted by a ringtone. Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective. Over Belgian ales Sarah remembered an Israeli friend of hers who’d reminded her, when a conversation about the Situation had come to a sputtering impasse, “You know, we don’t have to agree about this.” Perhaps in a country where political struggles involve suicide bombings, military incursions, and actual fortified concrete walls it’s easier to keep mere differences of opinion in perspective. In America, where we’ve endured exactly two days of foreign assault on our soil in the last century and now use words like warfare to refer to progressive taxation, we’ve made partisan loyalty a precondition of friendship, and escalated our wonky policy squabbles into an hysterical internecine war.

  I’m not issuing some naïve plea for civility or bipartisanship here, or pretending that the opposing sides in this fight are intellectually equal. We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus. My cruelest hope for the Tea Party is that one of their candidates wins the nomination for the presidency and they implode of their own hubristic stupidity. But at least when I hear about them now, instead of reflexively picturing some braying ignoramus like Michele Bachmann, I try to remember that Matt’s out in that crowd somewhere, too. God agreed to spare Sodom if ten good men could be found within its walls (Abraham had to haggle him down from fifty). He ended up napalming those perverts anyway but the basic principle of sparing the sinner for the sake of the righteous, or the shithead for the sake of the basically okay, remains sound. As Sarah’s Israeli friend pointed out, Matt and I don’t have to agree. It can’t have been easy for him to be a conservative at a Manhattan art school; he told me he’d “graduated persona non grata” after outing himself in that article. In his interview he mentioned that his parents had been small business owners, and he remembered listening to Rush Limbaugh in the car with his mother. I came by my own indefensible utopian notions not from studying political science or history but from having pacifist parents, reading science fiction, and watching a lot of M*A*S*H. Matt’s ideology, like mine, has less to do with what he thinks than whom he loves. Which is one reason why any attempt at a “national conversation” degenerates almost immediately into a shoving match. Your mom started it.

  America will never be either Canada or Iran. It’s far too sprawling and motley, barbaric and hilarious. Any generalization you try to make about politics will unavoidably be bullshit in a country that includes Truthers, Birthers, Flat Earthers, Earth Firsters, militant vegans, and Christian swingers, people who believe the government is controlled by the Illuminati, George Soros, or extraterrestrial reptiles. This nation was founded by wackos who were driven out of their homelands over their subversive politics and lunatic religions, and a nation of wackos we remain. Like absolutely everyone else in America, including people currently in bunkers awaiting the onslaught of the Islamofascist fifth column, I don’t think of myself as an extremist, or even especially political, just as a guy who believes in common sense and human decency trying to live in a country gone bonkers. I, too, am a wacko.

  I have a neighbor at my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay who’s a former marine and a Republican. We’re both eccentric artists and middle-aged bachelors who are disturbingly overinvested in our pets. He keeps an eye on my cat for me when I’m out of town and complains about her bitchy ingratitude; I sent him a hand-drawn sympathy card when his detestable potbellied pig died. I do have to set firm limits on my involvement with his various moneymaking schemes—the department store custom-engraving gig, the gourmet potato chip franchise, the TV pilot script about the blind hit man. He and I inhabit almost wholly separate informational universes: he watches Fox and listens to a lot of talk radio; I read the Times and listen to NPR. We don’t just disagree about political issues; we haven’t even heard about the news stories each other is incensed about. My ex-girlfriend Margot once got into it with him over Ronald Reagan while drinking whiskey around a bonfire and things got uncomfortable fast, but, because we’re neighbors, he and I mostly don’t talk about such things. His only comment after reading my collection of scabrous cartoons about the Bush administration, offered after a judicious pause, was: “Well—some of us have to be right, and some of us have to be wrong.” We both laughed. Once in a while he invites me up to his house for what he calls a “martini,” by which he means a gigantic tumbler filled with pure rail vodka and garnished with whatever pickled vegetables he has in the fridge—cocktail onions, okra, tomatillos. We’ll carefully clunk glasses and say “Cheers,” and then I suddenly wake up the next morning with my skull thumping and miasmic memories of having a second “martini,” whomping down a huge pepper-encrusted steak, and, improbably, of my neighbor and me watching old video footage of Brian Wilson and Freddie Mercury in concert, both of us getting all weepy. I’m pretty sure that he and I describe each other behind each other’s backs in much the same terms: “Oh, he’s definitely a nutjob, but you gotta love the guy.” In this, I believe, there is hope for America.

  The Anti-Kreider Club

  Yesterday my friend Harold reported another Felix sighting. Harold was walking out of a supermarket in Baltimore when he happened to see Felix walking in. Felix made a gesture of casual command at the automatic doors and a sound effect under his breath like mmwOWm, which Harold understood was meant to indicate that Felix was opening the door with his mind. My laughter at this story was fond and grudging, the kind that says: That fuckin’ guy.

  I haven’t seen Felix in over ten years. We met on the first day of fourth grade, in 1976, when we were nine years old. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to talk about “best friends,” but he was among my closest and certainly my most constant friend from then until we were well into our thirties, when he inexplicably disappeared on me. I don’t mean he fled the country or changed his identity or got abducted; the last I heard he was still living in Baltimore. He just stopped returning my calls. It took me almost a year of leaving messages on his answering machine to get the hint. It took me much longer to understand that I was never going to know what had happened.

  Losing a friend may not hurt as intensely as a romantic breakup, but it often hurts more deeply, and for longer. I can have friendly and affectionate exchanges with women over whom I was publicly sobbing just a few years ago, but being reminded of Felix, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to for over a decade, still makes me go quiet with puzzlement and sadness. Society doesn’t officially recognize friendship as an institution in the way it recognizes sexual relationships, so there’s no real protocol for ending one. If you’ve been going out, dating, or just sleeping with someone for even a month or two and you want to stop seeing him, you’re expected to have a conversation with him letting him know it and giving him some bogus explanation. This conversation is seldom pleasant, and it ranges in tone from brittle adult discussions in coffee shops to armed standoffs in day care centers, but once it’s over, you at least know your status.

  Because there’s no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. (I do know some people who’ve explicitly renegotiated the boundaries and conditions of friendships—saying From now on we don’t talk about my personal life, or Listen, I can’t be your confidante anymore—but these people have all been female. I hesitate to draw any broad generalizations along gender lines, but it feels to me as if it’s a taboo, in male friendships, to talk about the friendship itself.) When I’ve had to end friendships myself, I’ve been just as grace
less and craven about it. Listening to the other person’s puzzled phone messages, reading their jokey/plaintive texts (“ARE U ALIVE?”), I feel the same way I do when I smack an insect and it doesn’t quite die but lies there piteously writhing. When it’s you doing the defriending, the defriendee seems needy and obtuse, not getting the obvious message, overstepping the boundaries everyone else understands implicitly. You want to say: Look: we were friends in college. That was twenty years ago. It’s always you who’s the reasonable one, and the other who’s being either unfathomably cruel by defriending you or clingy and demanding by not accepting their defriending with dignity.

  I should clarify that this method is painless only for the defriender; for the defriendee it’s more like getting buried in sand up to your neck and left for the ants. Because the end of a friendship isn’t even formally acknowledged—no Little Talk, no papers served—you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It’s a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn’t even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can’t tell people, “My friend broke up with me,” without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt—“You look like you just lost your best friend”—is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who’d treat you this way isn’t a very good friend and doesn’t deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they’ve ditched you is that you suck.

  I’ve replayed conversations and incidents from my friendship with Felix in my head, cringing at things I said or did that might’ve been stupid or thoughtless or insulting. But all my private theories are pretty obviously projections of my own insecurities, and they still amount to a perverse kind of vanity; whatever happened with him probably had less to do with me than I imagine. It’s true that he’d acquired a serious girlfriend for the first time in years around the same time he stopped talking to me, but the one time I met her, at a wedding, she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d try to pry her boyfriend away from all his old friends; she wondered aloud why we hadn’t met before and said we should all hang out sometime soon, the three of us. I left messages inviting them both over for civilized, grown-up activities—dinner, a movie, a canoe trip—but they never called back. And it’s not as if he became a different person, found Jesus, or entered a twelve-step program; whenever someone unearths new evidence of his existence from the Internet, it only confirms his unchanged Felixness: a photo of him with two pillows pulled over his arms, looming vampirically over the camera, a video of him pushing two squealing girls on a luggage cart through the corridors of a hotel late at night. The only thing he ever told me that gave me any insight into his disappearance was that he got tired of people too easily—little traits began to get on his nerves and he’d just leave. It was something he considered a character defect, but one he felt helpless to change. He was talking about the short half-life of his romantic relationships at the time, but I had occasion to recall it later on.