Testing Positive...

You know how it is in college.

You're not careful. You drink., You expose yourself to a lot of people, in numerous meaningless encounters.

Well sometime in late 1986—I tested positive for the GOP virus.

It’s got a lot of names – some of them are clinical: Republicanism and conservatism, for example. But there are a lot of unpleasant names for it too, hurtful ones. We’re right-wingers, reactionaries. We’re bigots, we’re narrow-minded.

I had my first outbreak of GOP in my sophomore year. (I'd felt some stings before, but kept my mouth shut. Somehow anti-Americanism is equivalent to intellectualism, on campus, and I hadn't wished to appear dim.)

Some French Canadian girl I was going out with, a poly-sci major, said about our president “Your Reagan is such a clown. He’s like a dancing bear in a circus. We sat in bars back in Montreal [she pronounced it ‘Mon-Ray-Ahl] and turn him on for amusement.”

I did what we Yanks do when some foreigner talks like this: all of a sudden, I became Texan.

“Izzat so?” said I. “Know what we think of your president?”

“No.”

“We don’t. Who in Hell is he, anyway?”

“Typical of an American!” she spat. “You know nothing [pronounced ‘nussing’] about the world. I’ve met Americans who think Canada is a state!”

“We wouldn’t have you. America stands for something. We do stuff like liberate deathcamps and send in our Army Corp of Engineers after a natural disaster. We’re that tough uncle who’s a lot more adventurous than your father. Canada’s that finger-wagging maiden aunt who corrects your manners all the goddamned time and doesn’t want you to sit on the furniture.

"And another reason you couldn't be a state, is because your armed forces couldn't break an egg. The National Guard from our smallest state, which is Rhode Island, could knock the Canadian military on its ass. Hell the crossing guards from Rhode Island could do that.

"And that, Arlette, is how the cow ate the cabbage."

Too bad, I liked her. Until she opened her goddamned mouth.

GOP turned out to be just like an STD. A few women – a very few – didn’t mind at all. But mostofthem dumped me then and there.

“Don’t tell them!” said a GOP-positive friend of mine. I brooded that over. That would make life a whole lot easier for me. But I concluded—your partners have a right to know. So—round about the third date, when I was beginning to get invested in the relationship, I’d tell them. Usually and no matter how well we were getting along, I was discarded without a second thought. 

So instead of waiting, I was completely open about it. I’d tell them on a first date—or even before.

I met a charming woman, who seemed charmed by me, ‘round about when Bush was running against John Kerry. She was kicky, she was smart. She was elegant and charming and good humored and professional and warm. She had said somewhere in the conversation that she was volunteering for the Kerry campaign. She also said that when it came to dating, she’d tolerated smokers, tolerated guys who were shorter than her, overweight guys, uneducated guys, but there was one dealbreaker. Guess what it was. “You know, I really like you,” she said somewhere during the talk.

“I like you too,” I said, and meant it. “But,it seems that your prime mover is your politics. You call yourself a liberal – I call myself a conservative. Frankly, I like being with the opposite of myself, I’d be bored out of my skull with a woman who thinks precisely as I do – then what in Hell would we talk about?

“Besides which – I value how a woman treats a dog far more than how she votes. I value a woman who treats people who disagree with her decently far more than I value a woman who agrees with me completely. Does that make sense?”

“It does,” she told me. “But I just wouldn’t be able to get past it. We’d enjoy each other, but it would keep coming up. Does that make sense?”

“It does to you,” I said. “Do you imagine that we sit around telling ethnic jokes and trying to figure out how to get the vote back from women?”

“Yes,” she said.

Nonsense. There’s a minority subset like that. Reactionary is one word for them, jerk-off is another. They don’t define us, any more than eco-terrorists who spike trees define the left. We on the right don’t all own a locker full of guns, and you on the left aren’t always stuffing flowers in them. 

Sara (the liberal whom I eventually married) and I went out on a first date to a Cajun restaurant. We discovered quickly that we were not quote unquote compatible, in terms of politics. To this day she recalls the conversation – eating gumbo and disagreeing on presidents and foreign policy – when I said, “You haven’t changed my mind. but you’ve given me a lot to think about.” What I meant was, “I promise I WILL think about it,” and I did. And she in turn, thought about what I said.

Sara talked about her exes, every one of which suited her perfectly and politically. But they were twerps. The guy who opposed ROTC on campus also smoked his intelligence away on weed. The guy who accused her of holding him back as an actor is now doing community theatre, and badly.

So at last I can speak aloud about my GOP. I’ve learned to control my outbreaks, with a bit of tact and maturity. Not every snarky comment by a Canadian or German graduate student must be met with anger, and opponents need not be enemies.

Did you know, a lot of famous people are GOP positive. Robert Duvall, who’s been married for years! GOP Positive. And who would you rather have a beer with – Tom Selleck, who's GOP Positive, or Tim Fricking’ Robins? Kurt Schilling, one of the heroes of the Red Sox first penant win in decades, is positive for GOP. And Dennis Hopper who was in that counter-culture classic Easy Rider? Surprise. You can keep Rosie O’Doughnuts, we’ve got Sandra Bullock.

Short of it; I had to meet a really open-minded woman to accept my condition. We won’t have children and we cancel each other’s vote in every election. But Hell. If it weren’t for her kind—we’d all be my kind and that would be dull.

What in Hell would we talk about?