A Pilgrim’s Digression

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The proper name for the story I am about to tell is Testimony. Christians call it testifying when one tells the narrative of one’s coming to know Christ. This, then, is my political testimonial.

I am mistrustful of such narratives, and so I begin this testimony uneasy with the means I am using to testify. Ultimately, is there any coherence at all to our lives? Coherence is necessary for narrative structure, you see. All the pieces have to fit or else the reader feels dissatisfied. I cannot make all the pieces fit. My story is unintelligible to me. I look around me, and it seems like most everyone know themselves better than I know myself, despite my introspective nature.

However that may be, this is my attempt at a conversion narrative, the story of my political conversion, if such an anti-climactic story can be called such a thing. The task before me is not easy. I have been at first a liberal Democrat, then a Republican for many years, and now an … indeterminate creature. This is hardly a story that will provoke sympathy in anyone, for as I said, I feel most people have gone through their life much more self-assured than I have, moving from one year to the next without much doubt as to their beliefs. How does one begin to understand someone who seemingly has no “core values” guiding him, to use the buzz phrase of the conservative majority in this country?

My political awakening began in 1988. All I recall of the ‘88 election is I was but a sophomore in High School, and for whatever reasons now long forgotten, I had a preference for Michael Dukakis. It is truly embarrassing to think of, at this late date. One cannot even say the man’s name without secretly snickering, at least if one’s sense of humor runs to the juvenile, as mine does. Yet I mean to make a full disclosure here, and so I admit, I could not vote, but I liked Michael Dukakis.

There happened to be another boy, a Senior, whom I liked and respected. For the sake of giving every character in the story a name, call him Henry Wood. Henry was going to enter the Marine Corps after finishing High School that year, and I believe he followed through with that ambition. Last I heard, which was probably 1989, he was stationed in Guam. One day in a discussion about the election, I expressed my naive preference for Dukakis, and Henry had quite a good time laughing at me. Henry was a Bush man of course, and he found it quite inconceivable that anyone with a name like Dukakis could ever be President.

In my first exposure to partisan politics, therefore, I already found myself being influenced via peer pressure towards the Republican party.

Why would I have preferred Dukakis anyway? It seems likely my parents may have expressed a preference and I was merely mimicking them. Though I had only known my parents to vote for Ronald Reagan previously, they were registered Democrats. I recall my Dad expressing his feeling that eight years of Republican rule was enough. Whether they actually voted for Dukakis, I don’t recall. They probably would not admit to it now, even if they had done so.

A couple years passed and, in August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. I awoke even more to the world of politics. At the time, I happened to be taking a senior AP Political Science class. The teacher, who had the rather improbable name of Woodrow Wilson, seemed to me a conservative despite the implications of his name. In class debate, I typically took the liberal side of an argument, mostly to irritate him. And when Mr. Wilson brought voter registration forms to class for us to fill out, I registered Democrat.

Throughout the Fall and Winter of 1990, 1991, Iraq was the only story in the news. Not having lived through a war of any kind, it was an exciting and scary time. I don’t know to what extent those who were alive then can still conjure the fear of Saddam Hussein felt by people who, prior to August 1990, had not even known of his existence. I recall seeing a television program, a low-budget documentary on Nostradamus, which theorized that Saddam was the anti-Christ and that the apocalypse Nostradamus predicted was at hand. Nothing much seemed to matter in those months except the questions surrounding the war.

I recall that a longtime friend, Todd (dhalgren), and I debated the war nearly every day in the Physics class we had together. It was an intellectually exciting time. Only war can enervate discourse in quite that way. Before, after, and sometimes during Physics, Todd and I would argue about the war. I took the liberal position. Todd, who was much more conservative at that time, defended the war-monger point of view. Todd is another young man whom I must say has travelled far down the road of political maturation. The Todd who last Tuesday voted for John Kerry once refused to watch one of my favorite movies with me, David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, because in the very first scene Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern were engaged in some hot and heavy sex. Todd refused to watch any further, claiming I was trying to corrupt him by foisting such a sleazy porn flick on him.

So then he and I argued about the morality of the Iraq war as well. Eventually, events rendered such argument irrelevant. Bush moved ahead with the war despite concerns that it would become a quagmire (suddenly I am feeling a moment of déja vu). The war was not a quagmire.

The worst night of the war, as I recall, occurred when Saddam began firing SCUDs into Israel. I remember watching TV as one of these missiles fell on an Army barracks in Saudi Arabia, racking up our greatest casualties of the war in a single incident. Watching the war on television in this way was exciting, but I was disturbed that I, who had been so stubbornly opposed to the war, was excited watching it unfold on TV. This was the first hint of the schizophrenia that seems to characterize my political thinking. It is a split between my reason and my emotions.

Finally, all the naysayers turned out to be wrong about the first Iraq war; indeed they looked rather foolish, in the light of how quickly we had smashed the Iraqi military. The war over, the 1992 election season began. This was also the year that Todd introduced me to Rush Limbaugh.

Continue to [Part Two]