Dan and I first became friends back in Indian Guides (a non-PC version of the Cub Scouts for first and second graders) back in 1975 when I we were 6 years old or thereabouts. We remained friends after that for more than 25 years. Because of our friendship, Dan's family and my family also became good friends, and I attended countless family events for not only Dan but for his sisters and other family members. I attended his and his sisters' graduation parties from high school and college, and vice versa. I went to his grandmother's funeral, he he came to those for my grandmothers. One college summer, Dan got me a job working in an office where he worked, where we had fun making fun of our managers and blowing off steam with our co-workers at the local pub after work. When I got married in 1998, Dan was my best man; when he got married in 2001, I was his.
This despite the fact that Dan and I were seemingly incompatable. I was, as a kid, skinny, bookish, intense and shy. Dan was chubby, friendly and outgoing. But in spite of that, or perhaps because we complemented each other so well, we became good friends.
Our differences extended to our political views; he was conservative and I was very liberal. We engaged in endless debates on Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton. I first heard of Rush Limbaugh from Dan, probably back around 1993, and he once took me to a restaurant at lunchtime where they played Limbaugh's show. The meal was very good - we both really loved Portuguese garlic shrimp - but Limbaugh was enough to give me indigestion.
No matter, though, because Dan and I had enough other things in common to make our disagreements on politics relatively unimportant. When we were kids, we both loved exploring in the woods behind our houses. We both loved history. As a teenager, we both got into "war games", and spent too many hours moving little cardboard chits around maps of Gettysburg and Normandy. After college, we were both a bit adrift and somewhat lonely, and spent too much time hanging out in bars, perfecting our pool games and striking out with the ladies. Even after I went off to a far-off city for graduate school, Dan would come visit me and my then-girlfriend (now wife) and we'd all go out together and have a great time hitting the bars.
At some point during the Clinton impeachment mess, though, I found it more and more difficult to talk to Dan about politics. There was such a blind intransigence developing, such an anger that bore little relation to an actual, reasonable assessment of what was going on, that I soon started to feel that political debates - long a fun mainstay of our relationship - were becoming too emotionally fraught. There was increasingly awkwardness when we shifted from talking about Clinton, about which we didn't agree, to talking about the Yankees, about which we did. And I felt like it was not really my fault. I wasn't approaching these discussions from a place of deep anger, but Dan always seemed to. I could never really understand why that was - Clinton was really pretty moderate. One might reasonably dislike his politics, I guess, without feeling that he represented an imminent threat to the Constitution or America.
But I was willing to let it slide, because we had been friends for so long, and because that unreasonableness never extended to anything else: Dan was generous to a fault, would almost literally give you the shirt off his back, and he was genuinely a nice guy. So while we started to edge around the subject of politics, even as it was becoming more important to both of us, we remained good friends.
But somewhere the friendship was starting to unravel. More and more, during telephone conversations, it felt like there was an enormous elephant in the room that neither of us could discuss. Whenever I would (ill-advisedly) broach the subject of politics, I found that Dan was becoming more and more entrenched in views
that seemed rigid, extreme and just unlike him, with his friendly, easygoing nature. He was having trouble finding a girlfriend, and while I could completely relate to that, his interpretation of his situation was becoming less and less based on personal assessments and more and more political, which I couldn't understand.
Men and women have always had problems with one another, even before Hillary came along, and it was becoming difficult to relate to someone who incrementally was losing sight of that fact and growing somehow suspicious of women as women.
The final straw started in an innocent way, probably sometime in 2002. Someone Dan and I both knew from high school sent a whole group of high school acquaintances, including us, one of those idiotic spammy e-mails about the Pledge of Allegiance. The gist of it was that liberals were sticking their big noses where they didn't belong and foolishly, in their PC way, trying to get rid of public acknowledgement of God. The e-mail was poorly written and not well thought-out. At the same time, though, it wasn't hateful or despicable, just kind of dumb.
So I wrote back a reply to the group, taking what I thought was a very reasonable, polite and common sense approach, because I knew I was going to be arguing against what everyone else perceived as the reasonable position. I pointed out that few liberals really cared about this issue, but that the facts about it should be stated correctly. In a brief paragraph, I corrected a wrong statement in the original article about the origin of the pledge, which did not contain "Under God," and wrote (including a link) about how those words got added in the 1950's. I pointed out that, contrary to the article, our money has not always had "In God We Trust" on it, and included a neat link to a coin-collectors web site that had pictured demonstrating this (noting that there were all sorts of pictures of neat coins there). Finally, I closed with a simple statement that I was glad to live in a country that - unlike places like Iran - allowed me to think for myself about the deepest and more important issues in life, rather than telling me what to think.
What my friend wrote back to the group stunned me and effectively ended our friendship. He started out by saying that while liberals always try to confuse issues by referencing the Federalist Papers and Magna Carta (which I didn't), the case was simple. Liberals hate God and God-fearing Americans. They are trying, he wrote, to push a sick and warped agenda to children - eliminating God from schools while advocating elementary school sex-ed courses about (I'll never forget this) "rimming, fisting and homosexuality" (?!?) It was all part of a conspiratorial plan to turn America into a modern-day anything-goes, Sodom, and Americans needed to wake up to liberals and their insidious plans.
Dan's response was so over-the-top and hateful I was stunned. The "liberal" in this conversation was ME - and he knew me - and really well, I thought. I didn't have ulterior motives, I love my country, I don't hate "God" (I'm very active in my Unitarian Church!), and I even had to ask around to find out what "rimming" was! I couldn't believe that Dan would write things like that, essentially about me, and distribute it to a bunch of people I had grown up with. Worst of all, the hatred and anger was out of control, and the smear method was strict out-of-the-book conservative demonization tactics.
I couldn't really talk to Dan after that. Something essential had been broken - I guess it was a sense of trust. I called him a few times after that, but didn't have much to say. Dan had somehow really changed, right under my nose, without me fully realizing or noticing it. I don't doubt that some sort of personal problem might have played a role in this, and maybe, had I been a more attentive friend, I might have been able to notice it and talk to him about it. But I knew, regardless of what prompted it, that I couldn't be friends any more with someone who had so much hate based on nothing more than ideology.
I miss Dan, I must admit - we stopped being friends after almost 30 years. But I also feel like it wasn't really my fault that our friendship fell apart over politics. It was probably his fault - but at the same time, I also blame the Dobsons, the Robertsons, the Coulters, the Limbaughs, the DeLays, the Roves - all those people who are intent on turning America into a place where you can't be friends with people who don't vote the way you do. And down this road lies ruin - because if Dan couldn't see the humanity of his friend of thirty years, what hope do we have of bringing together our country?