This Friday night, I am due to have drinks with some friends. But there’s a problem: I’ve been avoiding these people for weeks.
The first sign of trouble appeared on November 8. Like many a fan of politics, I had gone to bed very late the night before. The last election party I’d attended had turned into a middle-of-the-night victory party and then into an early-morning victory-on-hold party. Daybreak had found me asleep on a libertarian friend’s couch wearing a borrowed T-shirt that said “Stop Lawsuit Abuse.” Only in Washington, kids.
Anyway, I went to lunch that day with several of the friends I am supposed to see on Friday. There were four of us: a Democrat, two Republicans, and one apolitico. Unlike me, the others knew what the morning television shows had been saying. Something about butterfly ballots. The Democrat gently explained that in Palm Beach, Gore’s name had been printed second on the ballot but not next to the second punch hole. It could be the basis of a serious challenge, he said.
He was unnaturally soft-spoken, as if straining to sound objective. At this point, before we’d seen a picture of said ballot, the Palm Beach story had a facial plausibility. It actually sounded like Gore’s name had been transposed with Pat Buchanan’s — which indeed would cause large counting errors. But that was just too unlikely for me to believe. Far more probable seemed the alternative explanation I was entertaining: The Gore campaign had come across a convenient tale of witless confusion and was more than happy to exploit it to reverse a close election. But this meant my good friend — who, it must be stressed, is a decent and thoughtful guy — was an unwitting tool of Gore propagandists.
In mere seconds, a man I respected had, in my mind, been turned into a sucker. One lesson here is that politics is hard on friendship. (Other lessons not so flattering to me we’ll pass over in silence.)
A certain type of politician likes to say that things weren’t always so partisan, that after a good debate, real statesmen used to retire to the bar for whiskey and branch water, leaving behind all disputatiousness. Maybe it’s my relative youth and inexperience, but I have never seen a fight grow peaceful at the introduction of booze. So much the opposite, the vodkas and the scotches have been the only excuse for all of the really vicious political screaming matches I have seen. If not for the liquor, which afterwards everyone cites as a mitigating circumstance, none of the participants would have ever spoken to each other again.
Fortunately, there are ways to relieve political pressure on a friendship. One is not talking to each other, but this quickly starts to seem a lot like not being friends. Agreeing to disagree is a popular solution; too bad it’s a despicable sham whereby you promise to look down at each other indefinitely for the wrongheaded opinions you respectively hold dear. The truth shouldn’t be shirked, and the truth is, friends fight. And good friends let friends fight. But even the strongest of friendships can weaken under the constant pressure of political controversy. Among my closest buddies, I often detect an unspoken effort to find a reasonable balance: We might avoid each other some, so we’re not fighting all the time, but we also accommodate a fair amount of fighting, so that we can remain friends who see each other regularly.
I wish a similar principle had controlling authority among the members of my family. Lately, various relatives have been deluging me with petitions and statements of outrage and even some more elaborate literary efforts. In an example of the latter, the original author (not a relative of mine) asks the reader to picture the current electoral deadlock in a Third World setting. “Imagine,” the forwarded e-mail says, that one candidate (Bush) were a member of a corrupt ruling family, and his opponent (Gore) a purehearted representative of the people, many of whom belong to a “despised caste of former slaves” and have risked their lives and livelihoods to vote for him . . .
Imagine . . . a conservative journalist sharing an eggnog toast with his cousin, the man who forwarded the above e-mail message in the belief that it was brilliant and profound. “Oh, I sent you something a few weeks ago. Did you get it?”
I’ve discovered it’s useless to suggest to my relatives that, at a busy time like this, I don’t always get around to reading forwarded e-mails. The messages keep coming. And all of them are coming from the left. In my family, the liberals are many and outspoken, while the conservatives are few and quiet. At a recent family gathering, thinking to deepen our friendship, I shared my political inclinations with another cousin. A gay liberal, he snorted, “There’s one in every family.”
DAVID SKINNER
