Some Friends That Were

Friendship Is a Victim of Ideology

"What a fool believes, he sees." - The Doobie Brothers

One night during my eighteenth year, the phone rang in the wee hours. My dad woke me up to tell me my friend Ricky was on the phone. Ricky was calling from the hospital. “My mom just died”, he said flatly.

Ricky was a friend from school and from church. We played music together. He played well. My playing, then as now, was relentlessly mediocre. Ricky’s relationship with his father, at that time in his life at least, was fraught and so distant as to be almost non-existent. With his mom now gone, he was facing a bleak and lonely familial future.

It was 2:00 a.m. when Ricky called. I immediately threw on some clothes, grabbed the car keys, and drove over to the house of our mutual friend Doug. Together, Doug and I drove to the hospital. We found Ricky in the ER waiting room. The three of us then got back into my car and made our way to a nearby all-night diner. There we sat down and listened to Ricky talk. We stayed there until the sun came up, eating pancakes, mourning with him, listening to him and, I guess, just doing what friends do: being present.

After high school, we all went different directions and I didn’t hear from Ricky for forty years. One day, out of the blue, a friend request showed up on Facebook from my old friend. Sure enough, Ricky and I reconnected and it was such a fun thing to catch up on forty lost years. But our rekindled friendship didn’t last. At some point, shortly after reconnecting, I offhandedly posted a meme that poked fun at Barack Obama for something or other. I’m an equal opportunity memer. But my friend Rick took umbrage at my willingness to poke fun at the one “we’ve been waiting for”. Shortly after reconnecting, my old friend “unfriended” me for my transgressions. I reached out to him but he never responded. A year or two later he died unexpectedly. So that was the end of that. It was my first experience having a friend who preferred distant politicians over old friendships.

How is it that someone can become so enthralled by a politician? So enamored, in fact, that they are willing even to toss aside lifelong friendships for someone who is really no more than a stranger to them.

I have another high school friend. We went to the same church. We were very close friends. We also went to the same college after high school and never lost touch with each other for more than a few years at a time. I reached out to him to help my grown daughter once. He reached out to me to help his grown son. My friend is incredibly intelligent, charismatic, well-spoken, and has had a positive impact on the lives of countless students and friends.

We hadn’t spoken for a while, my friend and I, until recently. A few years ago, I stopped using Facebook in the midst of its censorship and content suppression. But with the censorship storm seeming to blow over, I recently started giving Facebook another try. And what I found was that my feed contained one catastrophizing post after another, from my old friend, about Donald Trump.

I like Trump well enough - far and away better than any of the alternatives who were on offer in the recent election. My friend, on the other hand, is now endlessly reposting the most egregious anti-Trump propaganda. And not just occasionally. Every single post on his wall, as far back as I scrolled, is a repost of some kind of anti-Trump invective.

Now, to be honest, I’m not all that concerned with whether my friend likes or dislikes Donald Trump. Trump is not the center of my universe. I think what surprises me, though, is that Trump has somehow become the center of my friend’s universe.

At first, I would respond to his posts with relevant factual information which was sometimes at odds with his drumbeat of impending doom. I was assuming, falsely as it happens, that we could talk about things and engage. You know, like friends do.

“Hey bud - no one is deporting or discriminating against ‘all the immigrants’. All that is happening is that immigration laws enacted by duly elected representatives are being enforced.”

I was (naïvely, in hindsight) operating with the misconception that he was the same person I had known since high school and throughout most of my adulthood - someone as interested in the facts as I was. I had assumed that healthy friendships are characterized by honest dialog.

But that is not what was going on. My friend made clear that he was mystified by my blindness to the Trumpian threat. If I couldn’t perceive the threat, he had no interest in engaging. He seems devoted to his belief that the re-election of Donald Trump portends the imminent transformation of the United States into the moral equivalent of another Nazi Germany. 😳 And anyone who tries to dispassionately offer a more factual take on our situation will soon discover that my friend is impervious to facts. He sees what he sees and is disappointed in those of his old friends who don’t see it as well.

For my part, I would be happy to talk with my friend about many subjects other than Donald Trump. But “the Donald” is all my old friend wants to talk about, just not with me. And here is the lesson I have learned: to conceive of yourself as someone who is heroically saving the world from Donald Trump, your concern for factuality must evaporate.

If I set aside my friend’s troubling disregard for facts, and focus instead on the ambient themes found in his stream of posts, two noticeable phenomena begin to emerge. First, he exhibits an uncharacteristically humorless credulity toward the federal government. Second, my friend seems to be captivated by a heroic self-image, as if his social media activity is, in some meaningful way, helping to prevent America’s slide into fascistic despotism. I have come to suspect that anti-Trumpism serves as a Mirror of Erised for some of its devotees.

My friend’s credulity takes the form of an almost mystical belief in the overarching competence, sophistication, and beneficence of the government bureaucracy. He has developed a humorless inability to take anything with a grain of salt, or to laugh at the mildest humor-tinged criticism of the government. In his imagination, every government bureaucracy appears as an exquisite, delicate instrument which must not be tinkered with by the unqualified, lest the precise balance of the agency, along with its self-evident beneficence, is damaged. The commonsensical recognition that government bureaucracies are mere human organizations, run by fallible bureaucrats, and famous for not being run all that well, is utterly lost on my friend. One is left wondering if he has ever visited the DMV, or been dealt the misfortune of having to interact with the U.S. Postal Service.

My friend’s perspective on the DOGE team is instructive. Imagine an elderly nun discovering some unruly frat boys have been playing capture the flag with the Shroud of Turin. Now you have a sense for how my friend reacts to DOGE. He seems to believe that government agencies should be treated as sacred relics. DOGE, to my friend, appears as a mob of ignorant, rampaging barbarians, viciously despoiling the innocent bureaucracy.

My friend’s reverence for bureaucrats makes the very thought of laughing at them a moral impossibility for him. Every simple change to a prior spending decision, or to an agency’s structure, is perceived as definitionally illegitimate and destructive - like drawing a moustache on a beautiful painting of Mother Teresa. Thus, my friend can no longer laugh at anything having to do with the foibles of government.

To be honest, I really don’t care what my friend thinks about President Trump, or about DOGE for that matter. I don’t need him to agree with me. We can still be friends. After all, every politician has his pros and cons, and not one of them is perfect. But my friend’s loss of any sense of humor is something I find depressing. His ideological capture has stripped him of the joie de vivre he once exuded, and which was so instrumental in facilitating the good that he once brought into the world.

The other ambient theme in my anti-Trumpian friend’s posting, is his apparent self-image as someone who is taking heroic action. Believing America is on the very precipice of becoming Nazi Germany, he seems also to believe he has a heroic obligation to warn those of us who don’t possess his kind of moral clarity. He is saving us from ourselves, hoping to prevent America’s final descent into a hellish 21st century MAGA reich. Only he, and those who agree with him, have the vision to see what’s coming. Or so his posts and comments imply.

Now, you can expect to find this sort of calculated, performative hysteria among politicians from the out-of-power party. But my friend is no politician. Nevertheless, something about his ideology’s grip on his brain has had the disastrous effect of inflating both his ego and his gullibility together.

Here is a recent example.

My friend has been calling attention to media reports of Trump’s alleged revisionism regarding who actually started the Ukraine war. My friend’s tone is always more in sorrow than in anger, as he often ends his posts with “shaking my head”. On this issue of Trump’s recent comments, my friend seems blind to how he is equating the meaning of “started the war” with “attacked”, and how that might lead to a misunderstanding of Trump’s point. Now, to be clear, I don’t claim to know what Trump had in mind with his remarks about the origins of the war in Ukraine. Of course, my friend doesn’t really know either. But it doesn’t take much effort to recall that the actual root causes of wars generally precede the outbreak of hostilities. It isn’t a stretch, then, when pondering culpability, to consider whether there might be fault on both sides. Maybe the ultimate attack on Ukraine had precipitating causes that Trump was referring to? 🤷‍♂️ People much smarter than I have speculated along similar lines.

Nevertheless, to support his self-image that he is saving us from Trump’s incompetence in all matters, my friend recently posted an article in which Trump is quoted as saying that he never intended to suggest that Russia hadn’t done the attacking. This clarification is characterized by the article’s headline writer as “a reversal” of Trump’s earlier remarks. While the headline writer chose to frame Trump’s clarification as a “reversal”, that framing is belied by a careful reading of the actual contents of the article itself. But there I go, nit-picking again.

Regarding Trump’s original remarks, my friend comments:

“I wonder how many of my friends said this was bizarre as opposed to remaining silent."

It is hard to convey just how shocking and uncharacteristic such a comment seems, to anyone who has known my friend from childhood. The person I used to know offered more grace to his friends. More benefit of the doubt. His imagination was not so imprisoned by his own narrow interests. There is more than a whiff of chest beating in this comment, since my friend, of course, was not among those whom he perceives are guilty of “remaining silent”.

I can’t speak for his other friends, but in my own defense, as one of the guilty who had been “remaining silent”, I was entirely unaware of the class assignment to report out on the historical accuracy of presidential comments. I may have been absent that day. Even now, it is unclear to me whether the assignment was to cover all presidential observations, or only those which relate to the history of the Ukraine war.

And where might I find the rules, if someone would be so kind, which explain the moral dereliction that attends having interests which occasionally divert one’s attention from this kind of political melodrama? Because, in my friend’s imaginings, merely “remaining silent” on such semantic disputes is prima facie evidence that he is justified in viewing the rest of us, with sadness of course, as a disappointment.

His main social media goal seems to be that all of us come into his light, fully acknowledging the imminent threat to the republic, along with the urgency and heroism of his own actions. We must accept that his online efforts are truly helping to keep the infidel at bay, at least within his sphere of influence, and making Facebook safe for right-thinking opponents of the Nazi MAGA horde.

Alas, then, for those of us who have been operating in blissful ignorance of our moral obligation to offer an opinion on every utterance made by the American president. We simply do not measure up. And if we ever want the rest of the world to acknowledge us as online heroes along the lines of my friend, we will need to stop with the funny Star Trek memes and buckle down. We must start spending more of our time scouring online news in search of something we can plausibly tart up into a presidential faux pas of some kind.

By the way, I found this funny Star Trek meme…

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Afterword

More seriously, I undertook to write this post because I have encountered more than one person who has remarked upon having had an experience similar to my own. You find your old friend is no longer able to be a friend in any meaningful sense. His enthusiasms and interests have become so calcified around anti-Trumpian politics that he can no longer engage in normal conversation or laughter outside of that lane. And, of course, he thinks you are the one with the problem, because you don’t partake of his hysteria.

I would be happy to talk to my old friend about any number of things. I certainly don’t care whether he loves Donald Trump. But neither do I believe I’m being a true friend if I simply ignore his repeated concerns, or his evident emotional turmoil. I have no interest in artificial friendships.

It was only after my friend declared his disinterest in engaging in the kind of normal dialog that friends have, that I decided to write this post. Perhaps my experience will serve, perversely, as an encouragement to others. If you have a friend who was once a vibrant human being, one who could laugh, and who maintained varied interests in things both beautiful and true, but whose narrow focus on presidential politics has somehow strangely eclipsed the wonderful person you once knew, you are not alone.