I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
and other looming threats to ideological pluralism. “Listen,” he said, when I ran into him a few days after the election, smiling but keeping his voice low, “we’ve got a big attic. If it comes to it, you guys can hide out up there, like Anne Frank.”
The Purple Party
OR, MY WIFE TRIES - AND FAILS - TO BRIDGE THE GAP
THE NOTION THAT your average liberal is governed by anything even vaguely resembling rationality can only lead to no good.
My wife, bless her, not long ago made the mistake of imagining otherwise and decided to throw what she called a “purple party” - i.e., a mix of red and blue - with three women as invited guests. The chosen liberals were a couple of our otherwise good-hearted and eminently likeable neighbors; the conservative, for want of a suitable local candidate, was a battle-hardened import from Brooklyn. My wife was excited about this, thinking of it as a kind of outreach program. She figured they’d start off talking the usual stuff - kids, jobs, home furnishings - and then, a couple of bottles of Chardonnay in, when everyone was feeling chummy, she’d deftly steer the conversation toward politics and social policy.
Yeah, like that was gonna work.
How to say this kindly? The Purple Party was a disaster. Twenty minutes in, there arose some serious unpleasantness about Iraq. Then, a little liquored up, one of the liberal women unearthed a couple of Bush jokes. Like, for instance, the one about the sweet old lady recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “‘What’s your name?’ the doctor asked her, and she answered correctly. ‘Where were you born?’ Again correct. ‘Do you know what day of the week this is?’ Right again. Now the doctor asks: ‘Which president started the Iraq war?’ There’s a looong pause, as she tries to come up with the answer, and then she remembers: ‘The Asshole.’”
A bit before this, my wife, per my request, had snapped on the tape recorder I’d given her. On the tape, you can hear the joke teller and her liberal pal crack up, but from the other two - silence.
Soon they moved on to Hillary Clinton. Since this was New York, and the liberals were part of Hillary’s permanent core constituency of white suburban women of a certain age, things went downhill quickly.
“I really could never understand her appeal,” said the conservative woman, understating her true opinion, and added that in her view Hillary had only gone so far because of her debased husband.
She was interrupted by both of the liberals at once, who shouted about Hillary’s superhuman achievements as a diplomat, senator, lawyer, and, let’s not forget, as an author and all-purpose “humanitarian.”
One challenged: “What about everything she’s done for children?”
The conservative shot back: “Tell me, what? What, specifically, has she done for children?”
The other was momentarily taken aback. Everyone knows Hillary Clinton has done loads for children. “She’s a child advocate,” she said, belaboring the obvious.
“What’s she done? She screams, ‘I’m for the children, I’m for the children!’ But show me one significant piece of legislation she has to her credit. Show me anything!”
Let’s just say it did not end well - and I haven’t even gotten to the part where one of the liberals talks about how FDR had lots of affairs, but no one ever threatened him with impeachment...
“But no one knew about FDR,” you can hear Priscilla exclaim.
“What are you talking about? Of course they did!”
“The press, maybe, but they protected him.”
“Everyone knew!”
As gasped the dying John Wilkes Booth, paralyzed by a shot through the spine and surrounded by enemies, after asking that his lifeless hands be held to his face: “Useless, useless. . .”
Friend or Faux?
WHAT ARE LIBERAL “FRIENDS” SAYING BEHIND OUR BACKS - AND, OKAY, WHAT ARE WE SAYING BEHIND THEIRS?
THIS IS GOING to get personal. Then, again, when the subject is sundered friendship, what else could it be?
I used to have a good friend - let’s call him Nick. A writer specializing in popular culture and politics, he was a lefty from way back - but, then, when we met, so was I. Though I was aware that he was somewhat baffled when I began my rightward drift, I was caught short - and royally pissed off - when a couple of friends in common reported he’d told them I’d changed only because I’d recently struck it rich with a book deal.
“Sure, I said it,” he replied immediately, unembarrassed, when I called to demand whether the report was accurate. “I think it’s true.”
“What the hell are you talking about? A, I’m not making all that much from the book. And B, money doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it!”
“Listen,” he said coolly, in that smug, high-handed way of his that somehow had never bothered me before, the one that I’d come to associate with so many on the Left, “as far as I’m concerned, greed is the only reason anyone ever becomes a right-winger.”
I guess there’s something to be said for that kind of honesty, but nothing I was interested in. The friendship ended right there.
There’s an aphorism attributed to Indira Gandhi that applies: “You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.”
Talk to conservatives, especially those who started out on the Left, and you’ll hear a lot of stories like that. “It truly is astonishing how few liberals credit those on the other side with having any principles or ideals worthy of respect,” notes John Leo, the columnist, whose social circle includes many liberal eminences in journalism and the arts. “You can go your whole life and not hear a liberal take seriously any conservative argument - they just yell ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ and think they’ve won.”
True enough, direct attacks on one’s very decency, like Nick’s on mine, are hardly the norm; civility is the natural order of things and most of us are especially protective of our friendships. But with a certain kind of adamant left-liberal, the possibility of such an outburst is always there, lurking, lurking, and there’s no telling what will set it off.
For Amy Anderson’s impassioned, irrational, newly left-of-center friend Jane, the tipping point was Fahrenheit 9/11. “One night I’m in the kitchen, trying to get dinner on the table for the kids,” recalls Amy, a good-natured, tart-tongued Westchester mother of two, “and the phone rings. She’s just seen this ridiculous movie, and it’s like the road to Damascus - she’s seen the light! She starts haranguing me: ‘How can you support these monstrous people? What is wrong with you?’ Just this emotional sturm und drang, viciously attacking me, hammering and hammering away. This, mind you, from a woman who does not read the paper, does not listen to radio, someone not plugged in in any way. I swear to God, she didn’t even know who Rupert Murdoch was! But we’d been close since college, she was my maid of honor and godmother of one of my children, and I wanted to save the friendship. So finally I said, ‘Jane, stop, we cannot talk about this.’ But, really, the damage had already been done.”
For Marlene Mieske, a psychiatric nurse and reformed Sixties veteran, it was the right to bear arms that abruptly ended a friendship. “We’d always gotten along wonderfully, this woman and I, and just then we were co-chairing a blood drive. But it was shortly after Columbine and we were in New York City, so someone walked in with an anti-guns petition. Of course, everyone but me immediately signed. When I refused, this woman was beyond furious. Her attitude toward me changed instantly - it was literally as if she couldn’t stand the sight of me, just stood up in a rage and started to leave. I said,