The Odd Couple II: Crafting a Loyal Republican

Continued from Part I.

Abel left. He dropped a money order for five hundred dollars on my desk, put his baggage in my spare room, and got on a plane to New York City to whip his Alma Mater’s crew team into shape for an upcoming competition.

The apartment was mine. All mine. Tiny towers of dirty plates migrated to obscure corners. Empty ice cream cartons started popping up like spring flowers. Reckless abandon. I took long baths and failed to properly dry myself afterwards. I secretly outlawed clothes and fixed the volume knob on my radio to eleven. The living room had been transformed into my own exclusive, never-ending rave. Were my landlord to enter the apartment, he would have mistaken me for a vagrant squatter raised by wolves. It was disgusting. Blissfully disgusting.

I stumbled over the book in the midst of dancing a slow funky chicken while blasting the Reverend Al Green. Immediately, I recognized Abel’s round young face centered on the cover from Polaroids he had shown me when he first moved in. My curiosity got the best of me and I began to read, unaware that I was flipping through the case study of his childhood, meticulously catalogued in Times New Roman font.

A bit of reading revealed that Abel’s childhood, his adolescent development, was the opus of a conservative New York psychologist. His life had been an experiment in crafting a loyal citizen with strong morals, and a healthy respect for money. Abel was literally the golden child of the GOP, a republican soldier forged from the riches of a free market economy.

I started to feel bad for him. He never had a chance. He emerged from the womb touting an American flag in one hand and a Nixon poster in the other. While brainwashing is indeed an effective tactic for passing down a political ethos from generation to generation, it is certainly unethical. As the progressive community grows older, these Junior Reagans are the folks who will try and stand in our way.

Abel is certainly a good guy. Reliable, charming and amiable. Unfortunately, he is Vader-esque in his political persuasion. Is it too late to convert him back from his conservative dark-side? I don’t know, but through all my attempts at revealing the virtues of progressive politics, he has been unresponsive.

I wet my parched lips with a cold one, sat back in my filthy liberal bat-cave, and pondered the ultimate question. How do you show a conservative the light?