A political discourse, completely baked
Just in case a videotape emerges, or it turns out I should have read the Patriot Act, I’m coming clean: Several weekends ago, I attended a liberal, anti-Bush administration bake sale at San Vicente Park in West Hollywood.
I did this knowingly. It was a pleasant Saturday at the park, and I purchased peanut butter cookies and a Rice Krispies bar. Painless activism. My money went to a political action committee established by MoveOn .org, a progressive grass-roots online group that is vehemently anti-Bush. The bake sale was a nationwide event variously called “Bake Back the White House” or “The Bake Sale Against Bush” or “Bake Sale for Democracy.”
I do not know how to bake, much less bake a person out of a building or bake a political system into being. But I do know how to support my friends in their public Bush-hating, just as I know how to attend a friend’s art opening or chess tournament. You don’t have to get involved, just support their involvement, I figured.
And buying a cookie, frankly, is easier than talking politics with them, especially lately. It’s not a matter of having an opposing view; certain friends of mine are getting so high on the anti-Bush rhetoric nowadays that engagement typically leaves me feeling like a kind of buzz kill.
I think this is one of the reasons the friends of “Friends” have been able to remain friends for so long: They never talk politics. If they had -- if, say, Chandler had suggested to Ross that Israel was an oppressor in the West Bank and Gaza -- the show might not be celebrating the conclusion of a 10-year run tonight.
But they’ve remained blissfully apolitical, the friends of “Friends.”
They don’t talk politics just as they don’t acknowledge that one of them has lost an alarming amount of weight, or gained an alarming amount of weight, or done something to their hair that is most unfortunate.
Mostly, they come on my TV at 8 p.m., do funny insult jokes, offer a few suggestions on sweater-and-shirt combinations, and get off the stage. Every now and then, out of the blue, they declare a need to have sex with each other. And then they have sex. And then they talk about this.
Why can’t my friendships be more like this? A weekly half-hour of “Hey nice shirt, see you next week, you make me laugh.” And then next week comes and it’s the same thing, or slightly different: “Hey nice sweater, you make me want to drink coffee, you make me a better person, hey, let’s hug, once again very funny, insult me, insult me, insult me. Let’s have sex.”
More than anything, it’s the political vacuum that makes “Friends” such pleasing fluff. Abortion, gay marriage, the occupation of Iraq -- more than glancing contact with such issues would be the death of “Friends.”
But that’s the risk that real friendships run -- political arguments that degenerate into statement-making that neither you nor your friends really mean. “Most people are stupid,” is one. Or: “It’s getting really scary out there.” Where? I always want to ask. You mean with the valet parking? Are they finally fed up with us and staging a revolt?
I blame cable TV and talk radio, in part, for the direction of our discourse. All that ranting has rubbed off, and it’s easy to forget that the people on TV are people on TV. Showmen, I mean. Who listens anymore?
The radio network Air America is supposed to be the liberals’ revenge for Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, but I don’t think advocacy shouting deepens the discussion. It only excites it.
I include myself in this. Talking politics with friends, my mind races, I try to cite articles I’ve read, but it comes out wrong. I say things I don’t mean, or don’t exactly mean. Sweat forms on the brow. In the car, on the way home, I review all of the misstatements. I think, why didn’t I take debate back in high school?
The friends of “Friends” understand this better than anyone I know. The stupid one, Joey, in particular. Try to get him going on Bush. Ask him about abortion. Say to him, “How do you feel that your country has become an imperialist power cynically protecting its oil interests in the name of liberation?”
It’d be like talking to a wall.
Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.