I’ve known Joe as long as I’ve known myself. We were born three months apart and two doors down from each other. In virtually every memory from childhood that’s still meaningful to me, we were sidekicks. We had a pyro phase at six years old where we set fire to his back porch. We stumbled together through our indoctrination to cheap wine in junior high and marijuana in high school (I’m still happily smoking the ganja). In a true sense he is my brother. By my high school junior year I spent more time at his house than my own. His mother was permissive and hands off and was unconcerned if we stayed out all night. We often did!
Joe is fond of saying, “When the Depression ended (talking about the big one here, 1930s), it never left Fayette County.” We grew up in Uniontown, PA, a town built on coal and with its share of monumental civic buildings that hinted at a resplendent past. But by the 1960s and 70s the coal had played out. Boarded up store fronts cropped up, this trend accelerated by two out-of-town malls that were built and which subsequently sucked the life out of the downtown businesses. It didn’t help that at the same time, the steel industry in Pittsburgh was packing its bags to head south and take advantage of that cheap Southern labor.
Joe’s family—single mother and eight kids—moved away across town when I was eight. I didn’t know why at the time. I was eight. Four years later I had a downtown paper route and I ran into Joe in the winter. 1967. I was wearing my father’s great coat from World War II. Joe had on one of his brother’s long coats from the Vietnam War. We were olive drab and green twins. We didn’t understand the counterculture then, but we understood the style. And we became inseparable once again.
Joe’s political philosophy is based first on the fundamental truism that *all* politicians are corrupt, that socialism and the Democratic party are bad, and that shadowy groups control the the world’s politics and have for centuries. We’ve argued in the past about Obama’s birth certificate, police violence, the Vietnam War, you name it. I remember losing my shit and screaming at him about the Gulf Wars (both of them). I don’t think he’s full-blown QAnon, but I worry.
Hillbilly Elegy, the book, tried to explain the lives of the working white class in an economically depressed region. I like the narrative details and the evocation of place. I recognize the people and landscapes of the book. What I don’t like about the book is its simplistic analysis of the politics that drive these people (many of them my people). Ron Howard, in directing the movie adaptation, must have been bothered by the same thing, as he removed virtually all the politics from the proceedings. However, the movie’s an even thinner gruel without the spice of politics.
Joe’s family could have been the model for Hillbilly Elegy. They were poorer than I knew, on Food Stamps for a time. Four brothers, including Joe, joined the service; two went to Vietnam. Two took advantage of the G.I. Bill for college education. Two did not. Joe told me a few months ago their house had been sold in a sheriff’s sale when he was eight and they had to move out overnight. I’m embarrassed I didn’t know this before. They are people who feel that the Feds forgot about them years ago but they’re not sure they would accept the government’s help now.
Honestly, if Joe wasn’t my life-long friend, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get past his politics to establish a bond. But it’s like we share a brain lobe. He remembers things I don’t and I remember what he’s forgotten. Reminiscing with Joe is not a pleasure I want to be without. We make our peace.
Neither Joe nor I were politically active when we were younger. Oh I stuffed envelopes in high school for McGovern’s doomed campaign but found the end result so dispiriting that I retreated to the world of opinions, of which I have more than a few. Likewise, Joe. But something shifted for him in 2016. He started frequenting Republican headquarters on Fayette Street and he got involved in all kinds of online shenanigans. Trump did well in Fayette County, winning 61% of the vote there. Joe and I spoke the day after the election and I told Joe to forget about Trump’s inherent corruption, his unmitigated cruelty and rudeness, his simplistic worldview—I worried most that he would be inept at the job. Joe claimed not to like Trump, but he liked his policies. We argued a lot.
Fast forward to 2020. I am prone, as I suppose some of you are, to bouts of depression that can last days. The previous winter I had the worst depression of my life, the kind where it’s hard to come up with a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Therapy and a kind wife helped me thaw out from that through the spring. In thinking through the things I could do to help me heal I came up with one crackpot plan. I would either convince Joe to vote for Joe, or I would convince some other voters to Cancel Joe’s vote. To that end I signed up to the Swing States postcard project. I would (and I did!) write 1,000 postcards to reluctant Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, my original home state. I can’t tell you how soothing I found this ritual. I will definitely do it again in the future.
As for the other part of my plan, Joe and I engaged in a pitched battle on Text throughout the year. Sometimes we shouted at each other over the phone too, leveling insults the way 12-year-olds do. As heated as these encounters became, though, after the politics played out we’d reminisce about stupid childhood pranks and would trade gardening stories. I’d like to report that I convinced Joe to change his vote. Alas, I wasn’t successful. But having a MAGA friend in my life that I can yell at without consequence has been as important to my well being as writing those postcards was. And maybe my effort helped turn the tide in Pennsylvania. I like to think it did. I don’t feel so depressed these days.