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?

The Odd Couple

He penetrated my defenses easily. There was an introduction, handshakes, smiling and laughing. There were beers. Coronas and limes, rings of condensation scattered about my apartment. Boisterous toasts, bottles clinking. Foam on the carpet.

Something incredible had happened. My roommate had been trying to finagle his way into the LA porn scene.

Meanwhile, an old college friend was just arriving at my apartment in Berkeley to retrieve his car, a Subaru which I had been taking care of while he was in Fort Lauderdale shooting a documentary. He pulled up with his filming associate in the passenger’s seat of a teal El Camino, and a crumpled mole-hill of Wall Street Journals in the back. I needed a roommate for two months. They needed a place to edit their footage. A perfect fit.

Only later did I discover that I had just let one of the GOP’s Frankenstein poster children into my home.

His name was Abel and he was the subject of my friend’s next documentary. He didn’t wear wing-tips, he wore sandals. His hair was longer than mine. There was no tiny metal American flag pinned to his shirt, no “Save Terry Schiavo” bumper sticker on his car. But despite appearances, this friend of a friend was as conservative as Strom Thurmond.

A conversation about Social Security awoke the sleeping Cheney in him.

“I think it’s ridiculous that the Republican Party expects Americans to invest their own retirement money. It’s unfair to thrust this type of responsibility on uneducated people.” I remarked off the cuff.

Abel voice transformed into a high shrill when he responded.

“You liberals have no faith in the common man!”

I was immediately taken aback. You liberals? My beer slipped from my hand and shattered against the false oak tiles. I excused myself to go get some paper towels, quietly retreated into the bathroom, and then locked the door. Panic sweat stung my eyes. Did I hear correctly? The kid was a Republican! And he’d be living with me for the next three months!

I grabbed a disposable razor that had been discarded in the bathroom trashcan and began to work the blade out of the casing. This situation could only end in violence, and I wanted to be prepared.
But the voice in my head stopped me. Murdering this bastard will get you nowhere, I told myself. Chill out. Chill out.

Tolerance is a virtue.

I put the blade down. The conservatives have already taken over anyways. I’m gonna have to learn how to talk to these guys.

Liberals have no faith in the common man.

What’s the correct response?