Blind Date

One of my favorite scenes in "The Great American Fourth of July," a terrific movie (how could it not be, when it features a chain letter involving washrags?) along the same lines as "Christmas Story," is when the narrator (same guy in both), recalling his teenage years, recounts being forced by his parents to go on a blind date. At some point in the date, having expressed self-pitying reluctance beforehand, and then observing his gorgeous date (the junior corn blossom queen), spilling his Good and Plentys like a premature ejaculation, later trying to put his arm around her at the movie, rebuffed, he comes to a startling moment of clarity: "I am the blind date!"

Recently, in the operating room, I had a similar moment.

Disappearing ink barely dry on my license, starch still emboardening my white coat, I arrived in town many years ago, young, eager, and not without belief in a certain amount of talent. First time I did a colon resection, in forty minutes or so, a cholecystectomy in fifteen, nurses said to themselves (they told me later), wow, we're in a new era.

Those nurses were young and eager, too. Energetic, sassy, skilled and aware of it. Even a little flirtatious, which I can't say I disenjoyed. And there were some that had been around for decades: wise, calm, mentors. Same with the older surgeons. They (many of them, anyway) had the elegance of experience and grace among the whippersnappers. It was heady, and I was ready.

I've always been glad to have had elders to turn to; in training, differing from many of my peers, I relished the time I had with my professors, absorbing as much as I could through the end. Others wanted as much independence from them in the OR that they could get, especially in our senior years. I've benefited throughout my career by working with older surgeons, observing and incorporating techniques I hadn't been taught. And, over the years, I came up with some of my own. With the passage of time, I became a much better surgeon than I'd been when I left the halls of academe.

Of late, and after a few years of lassitude, I've been assisting a young guy, a cancer surgeon who seems to want me there for his most complex and demanding operations. Once in a while, I can show him a little something, and he'll express appreciation, tinged, maybe, with surprise. Always, I can provide decent or better help. But until the other day, I'd never really looked at myself the way he must see me. It happened as I gazed, from my side -- the assistant's side -- of the OR table, at one of the nurses that I'd known since the beginning.

Gray were the hairs poking from under her cap, her face full and not a little saggy, her waist time-sturdied. A student nurse had been earnestly listening as she explained what was going on. I looked around. There are other nurses there from the time I arrived: then young, frisky, and very good at what they did, youthful and brimming. Over the years we'd become friends and teammates, mutual respecters. Age showing, deference given, there they are now, wearing the length of their years as the years have worn them. And I'm among them in kind. The old guy, the guy who used to work here. A little respect extended, subtly mixed with the slightest whisper of condescension, like when I'm in a store and get sir'd and asked if I need help.

It happened so incrementally that I might not have noticed, had I not been absent from that place for several years. I doesn't bother me much; it's how things have always been. In some ways it's like putting on a warm coat, making the inevitable seem to fit. But it's noteworthy. Transition is happening, has happened, and on some level it nearly escaped my notice. It's okay that I'm just an assistant who can sometimes show a trick, impress a young kid. I'm tolerated.

What to do? Nothing. Accept it. Value the time that was, enjoy the remnants. My good and stalwart friend recently quoted someone to me, saying old friends are the best friends; nurture the relationship. They were there, stayed, and in important sense they're the best of what's left of it. (Check the "update" here, you'll know it's true. Which is not the point.) I just spent some very good time with a best friend from college, talked with a fellow surgeon from my original practice days in Oregon, traded emails with the nicest guy and best friend from my (many) years in training.

And I'll keep doing this assisting gig. It's fun. I still bring something useful to the table, even if I have to stand back from it a little more than when I started. (The gut. Because of the gut.) Even if the piss and vinegar of which I used to be full dribbles a little, I haven't spilled the last of my Good and Plenty. Yet.

Breakup

If I sound even more irascible than usual lately, it's because I've been through a messy divorce.

Well, that's a little dramatic, I suppose, since I'm talking about a former friend and not my wife of thirty-nine years (in two days). It's a guy with whom I've always shared major disagreements on all the things they say break people up: birth certificates, mosque locations, religion, politics, civil rights, gay rights, church and state, global warming, which way to hang the toilet paper, and where you squeeze the toothpaste tube. But for several years, because of other things in common -- including, I thought, inquisitive and skeptical minds -- we'd managed to maintain a rewarding friendship. Notwithstanding the occasional blowup, we could discuss these issues in ways that some might consider rational.

Suddenly, it's not that Obama is simply wrong about everything. (There have been times when my former friend actually admitted he'd done certain things well, including his much greater attention to the needs of vets of Bush's wars than Bush ever gave.) Now, Obama is an Islamist plant, controlled by unseen forces, deliberately trying to destroy our country, and it's unconscionable that I don't recognize it. Now, I'm not just a blind apologist for this treasonous incarnation of pure evil (yes, he's used terms like that), it's that I'm a Jew; and Jews, he averred, collaborate with the enemy. (In that little pearl, he began by talking about Michael Bloomberg, but then, fully knowing my background, generalized.)

Yike. (Which rhymes...)

He seems to think that pictures -- sent to him by his fellow wingers, forwarded to me with relish -- of Obama on a bicycle at Martha's Vineyard, juxtaposed with some (non-simultaneous) of Bush at a VFW hall, prove something very, very important. I implored him to argue about policies, not bicycles, especially since, when he wasn't posing for cameras while "clearing brush," Bush rode his bike all the time and since at the same time in his presidency, Bush had taken twice the vacation days. I didn't -- but I wish I had -- point out that Bush can visit VFW lodges until the troops come home, and it will never make up for sending them, unprepared, into an unnecessary and unplanned war, making Afghanistan immeasurably worse for the kids fighting there by abandoning it prematurely, and standing for woefully inadequate care for the returning troops.

Ignoring the entreaty, my former friend insisted again that bicycles trump, oh, I guess, efforts for mass transit, energy independence, electric grids, teachers, cops, firefighters, kids with PTSD and TBI, health care, and saving the auto industry as proof -- proof! -- that Obama is evil. And that I'm a black-hearted accomplice. (And now, in his most naked America-hate yet, the president is trying to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The bastard.)

Suddenly, the man says he never knew these things about me, that I was a liberal. Weird. I've been writing this stuff for years, and as recently as a couple of months ago he wished we were neighbors so we could talk it over on his porch, with our favored clear spirits, on ice.

We spent a week together last year. Hardly a stranger to my views, he's visited here, with his wife, most recently earlier this year. He's found my ideas on miracles (who put the geese in the jet engines?) and death (we become what we were before we were born) interesting and challenging, even as he disagreed. Now, he says I constantly bash Christians. (Okay, I sort of do: but only the ones who want to make it the law of the land and substitute it for science in my schools. And I bash all religions. Except Buddhism. I kind of like Buddhism.)

Well, this lost friendship plucks out not even the smallest fiber from the fabric of space-time. My disappointment is not that I can't change his mind, but that we're no longer in the same universe. My greater concern, though, is the extent to which it speaks of where we are as a nation.

Polarized to the point of putrefaction, is where. If two guys who actually knew each other, face to face, talked about old wars and old loves, can't maintain with differing views, who the hell can? And it might just be that the worst possible explanation is really true: there have always been chasms between right and left, but there were also always a few bridge-builders (of which we were, sort of, two). What there hasn't ever been is a black president.

This resorting, by the right, to lies and conspiracy theories about birth and religion and terrorists and not one of us. Where does it come from, if not that? This absolute refusal to argue the issues but to focus on made-up "otherness" -- comes from the same place as the Jew thing, I guess. Looking at Glenn Beck's all-white rally of the aggrieved, it's hard not to believe it.

But I'll take them at their word.

When this person, to whom I've actually said "I love you, man" (and anyone who knows me knows how monumental that is), and who said the same to me along with promises that "I'll never let you down," pulls the Jew card out of his... uh... pocket and claims that had he known where I stood on things he'd have stayed away... well, I actually worry a little for his mental state but a lot more for the country's. We're too far gone, we're past the point, we've set ourselves asunder in ways that are simply irreparable. And it comes at a time when the opposite is needed more than it ever has been and, ironically, when we have a president most suited to have bridged the gaps. (Ain't no R candidate on the horizon who'd try; sure as hell ain't any in the Congress.)

Selective memory of my once and former friend aside, the president did try, hard, when he took office. Congressional Rs literally marveled that they'd had more face time with Obama in a month than they'd had with Bush in eight years. To the outrage of many liberals, Barack Hussein Obama had Rick Warren speak at his inaugural. Remember that? (All part of the plot, I assume.)

And then it dawned on those elected Rs: if we let Obama succeed, we're screwed. Not the country, of course -- who cares about that; the more important things: party and personal power. So they abandoned ship when we needed them the most. Abetted by the RWS™ and their collaborators at Fox "news", they've spewed nothing but fear and hate and lies -- never solutions (other than "second amendment" ones) -- ever since. Knowing they had no cogency or credibility on policy, and realizing that they could make money -- bags of it -- by betting on and stoking the prejudices and fears and zombie beliefs of their base; substituting soilage for substance, they anakined to the dark side. Take down the man, at the expense of the country. How enthusiastically they've been followed.

It's been bad enough to watch the creation and funding and astroturfing of a bunch of frightened, angry, self-sorry, uninformed, gullible, paranoid, deliberately and proudly fact-free teabaggers. But now, out of the blue, like the predator drones that our president fires at (his fellow) terrorists in numbers greater than his predecessor, they got to my former friend, too. If him, then more than enough to bring us -- themselves included -- down.

Jews?

Who didn't know whom?

OTOH, I gotta admit it makes it a hell of a lot easier.

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Postscript: as if a gift from the gods, I've received an email from another of my conservative friends. He writes a weekly newspaper column about which we frequently correspond. Arriving just when I'd mostly finished the above, here's what he wrote, in part: "...although we may disagree on some things, I've come to respect your opinions, thoughts, and arguments. In fact, next to Leonard Pitts, yours is the site I visit most often..."

His words are restorative to my dying hope for reaching across divides. It's not enough to save our country, but it could go a little way to saving me. So, thanks, Larry. (When I asked if it was okay to quote him, he said: "Go ahead. We need more people to understand that differences of opinion are still permitted and can, in fact, be enjoyed."

Enjoyed. Imagine that.

A Friend Indeed

Every time I've gone to New York City I've had a great time. I'd love to live there for a few months. Based on what I've read, I credit Rudy Giuliani with making the city safer for tourists, although he may have done so with a too-heavy hand. I was impressed with his early response to the attacks of 9/11 (which he later parlayed into a multi-million dollar business), prior to which I'd thought his attempts at censorship were the acts of a man so obsessed with power that he willfully ignored the law. When he was booted out of the executive mansion for screwing around on his wife, I liked that he moved in with a gay couple who, it turned out, were long-standing and good friends. He was unabashed and open about it. "Good for him," I thought.

So I'd seen him as an interesting and complex character, an egotistical and untrustworthy power-monger but with some redeeming qualities.

He ran the worst presidential primary campaign in recent memory.

And now, he's shown his truest colors, by being a last-minute no-show at his gay friends' wedding. Didn't even have the decency to call them himself:

"Rudy and Judith were both invited with a beautiful written invitation by mail," Koeppel told the Post. "His secretary called Thursday and said he was not able to come to the wedding and wished us all the best."

Nice. His secretary.

I think it's a semi-big deal. Admittedly I don't know exactly how close their friendship is (was); but he made no attempt to hide or discount it at the time. As mayor of NYC, a liberal bastion, he had no problem letting it be widely known that he had gay friends, and lived with them; a counter, perhaps, to his other transgressions, particularly ones involving the law. But then he ran for President, and you can't be seen as open-minded and expect to get the Republican nomination. And now he's considering running for Governor. Primary colors, once again.

I don't really care about Rudy one way or the other; but it says much not only about him, but about the party whose nomination he'd be seeking: his calculus is that they'd rather see him as a man who'd dump on long-time friends, decent guys by all accounts, than attend a same-sex marriage.

Tough choice, eh? Friendship or fame. Integrity or self-interest. I'd like to think I'm not the sort who'd hurt friends for my own aggrandizement. Or, at least, that I'd make the damn call myself.
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