©2007, UrbisMedia
I phoned an old friend a few days ago, one I had no spoken to in many years. He was a guy I had played basketball with, and I stumbled on his phone number in the alumni section of the website of one of my alma maters. We chatted about people we knew in common and, as is often the case, he remembered incidents and anecdotes that were like old photographs that you discover in the bottom of a drawer that remind you of the person that you one were, because that’s how he remembered me.
All the talk was reminiscence talk, about this or that so-and-so, that professor, who were the best-looking girls, and of course, who is no longer with us. But I got the sense that Tom (not his real name) was still much closer to those days than I am. He had worked for a big American corporation for his entire career, raised a family, and stayed within an orbit of a few hundred miles of where he was born. He was retired and had recently become widowed. Tom said that he didn’t have a computer and didn’t want one or an email address—so there is little chance he will encounter this essay.
It was interesting to me that he remembered me as “a liberal, always wanting to talk about “philosophical stuff nobody could come to agreement about,” who was not as influenced by a conservative professor we had taken in common. I don’t remember myself so much to the political left, at least not until I got into graduate school, away from Catholics. I needed that “separation” to have really open-minded philosophical encounters that showed me that I had been living in an intellectually-confined world—what I like to call a “back-patting society” where everyone conspires to maintain group solidarity and amity by conflict avoidance and emphasizing areas of agreement.
That’s why when Tom mentioned the “L word” I decided it was time to start looking for the conversational exit strategy. I surmised that I had yet another old friend from my school days who had remained philosophically within that old conservative Catholic orbit, much as they had with their geography and there was little sense or profit in “going there,” going into the state of contemporary affairs when the arcs of our lives had been so different. Tom wondered, he said, why I had moved to California, a place about which he retained some stereotypes of it being a “land of fruits and nuts” (he didn’t use those words), or what I liked about living in France, or England, or China, as though I had been exiled to some undesirable assignments.
As I summoned my reservoir of conversation closers from years of boring cocktail parties I realized that my old friend was very much a stranger and, that if I met him sitting on a plane next to me I would probably strap on my headphones and leave this rather rigid, socially and politically conservative person to that whole cohort in our nation that people like myself make the decision to either confront or avoid. I usually end up saying to myself, well, I’ll cancel your vote with my vote, and hope there’s a few more of our kind than there is of yours. There is also a disturbing, and deeper, feeling that you don’t want to entertain, even in thought, that at this cellular level of social interaction—friendship—there exists a germ of what we have comes to see in the very dissolution of entire societies; Tom and I might not be too many degrees of separation from being mortal enemies. All the elements are present, if held in some way, and perhaps more tenuously than we allow ourselves to believe, from a flashpoint by little more than shared memories of “good old times.” It may seem to us that that the lethality of the Shia and Sunni Muslim sects, or Serbs and Kosovars, have no potential counterpart in the American context, that our “system” is invulnerable to such vicious and irreconcilable rifts, but our own history cautions against such comforting delusions.
In some sense I see this as what has happened to our entire country. Certainly there is an aspect of this that is part of life in general; it precedes and is transcendent to, out current political climate, and even precedes George W. Bush. It was the 1960s and the Vietnam War that elevated the fact that life can be a life-changing experience, to a wedge that opened changes that crystallized around around major institutional factors—faith, political philosophy, patriotism, social values—what we came to call world views, cosmologies, and weltanshaung. It may have been more imagination than reality that there was much solidarity to the American culture; it may just have been that a couple of key elements had not come together—a triggering political event, and a medium that could draw together and permute its divisive characteristics to a flashpoint. We might have come close in events like the Kent State killings.
Media and other social institutions have since chosen sides; we have Red States and Blue states, Left and right, Christians and non-Christians, and modes of cheap and immediate communication that allow for a form of those “back-patting” societies to quickly coalesce the non-introspective and non-critical “tribal” components of a self-sundering society. We have citizens that mean it when they say to their fellow citizens: “I am an American, and you are not.”
I have a more recent right-wing acquaintance to whom I regularly put the question: “What do you admire about George Bush?” He refuses to answer, claiming that I am only looking for a point of leverage to jump all over his right-wing politics. But I am serious about wanting to know the answer. I am curious if he wonders what I wonder, which is how the hell anybody could find anything to admire about a man who, like a bad dream, and who speaks an Orwellian language in which he wishes us to believe that he is “a uniter, not a divider,” has any admirable qualities. But my acquaintance reacts just like his leader—that the question itself is just politics—he invokes a sort of “executive privilege” that answers the question by “taking the 5th.”
I have long believed that it is possible to maintain a civil society if its citizens agree on discursive process, even if they disagree on the substance and outcome of that process. Process, or rules of resolution of differences, at least have the element of fairness. Maybe we have never had an ideal level of adherence to a fair application of process, but we have seen that broken, brazenly and egregiously in recent years, and most especially since the election 2000. That election ushered in a new, Rovian, political ethos, one committed to winning, holding, and applying political power at all costs, one in which, as has been said many times in these pages, the ends justify the means.
But in a civil society the end—the commonweal— is the process. Substance is the product of the means. The very schools that taught my conservative former classmates and myself taught that you cannot have a just end by unjust means. We cannot, for example, have a freeAmerica by abridging our own Constitution and freedoms by doing so. That is the logic that leads to having to “destroy the village to save it.” Americans no longer trust that the process is fair because politics has become the activity not so much of persuasion as of rigging the process —of rigged elections, executive privilege, congressmen owned by lobbyists, and justices appointed for their tendency to see justice through ideological lenses.
Friendship is the most complex and difficult social relationship, more complex even than marriage (we all know enough marriages where the partners are not friends). But friendships are essentially formed on the basis of commonality of values. Therefore, they are, in some sense, political systems in microcosm. Sometimes it seems impossible to maintain them in the increasingly divisive universe of macrocosmic politics. But this much I know: any friend who won’t tell you what he admires about George W. Bush, is a friend in question.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.14.2007)