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Dinner Party Mischief

OR, HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE NO ONE, BUT HAVE FUN DOING IT

SINCE THERE IS an approved left-of-center stance on everything from taxing the rich (good) and nuclear energy (bad) to Jon Stewart (hilarious) and global warming (settled science; more proof of humankind’s awfulness; my God, what about the polar bear?!), liberals always know exactly what they should think. The catch is that there are certain issues on which, for many, the approved position is quite a distance from what, privately, they do think.

This can provide all kinds of amusement for the enterprising conservative at a neighborhood dinner party or barbecue.

For many years, the number one cause of liberal psychic dissonance was crime. Often the mere mention of an especially brutal rape-murder by a recently paroled thug was all it took to set liberals to disagreeing amongst themselves. Welfare - that is, its clear role in promoting dysfunction - was also good. (Note: For maximum effectiveness, it was important to use the term “well-intentioned” in this context, since liberals like not only to be absolved of responsibility for their own foolishness, but also to be praised for it.) Finally, for a time, before Bush Derangement Syndrome took hold, there was 9/11.

These days, there is no issue more likely set liberals at each other’s throats than affirmative action, since most liberals know as well as we do that racial preferences are a scam; the trick, given their terror of being called racist, is getting them to say so. A quick anecdote - say, about some local white kid whose doctor mother happened to have been born in Argentina being admitted to Yale as an Hispanic - is often enough to get things rolling. With luck, one of them will bring up that, while Obama officially supports preferences, he doesn’t want his own kids to benefit from them; and remind everyone of Martin Luther King’s admonition that people ought “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” so you won’t have to - though it will almost surely be left to you to let drop that JFK abhorred racial preferences, whereas Richard Nixon supported them.

I’m proud to say that one evening, a couple years back, I actually helped engineer the following delightful exchange (dialogue not all that far from verbatim).

ANGUISHED LIBERAL GUY: I’m just not sure it’s right that the kids of this African-American lawyer I work with, who has more money than any of us, should get an advantage over the kids of a West Virginia coal miner.

ME: Or the kids of Vietnamese boat people. [Blank stares all around.] Because, as I’m sure you know, Asians aren’t eligible for affirmative action. They’re classified as an “over-represented minority.”

ADAMANT LIBERAL WOMAN: Well, I’m sure there are problems, but black people still need it. It’s their turn.

ALG: That’s easy to say, but what if it’s some less qualified African-American kid getting a place at a college instead of your daughter?

ALW: I’d want the African-American child to get the spot, so my child will personally experience just a tiny bit of the unfairness they’ve had to suffer for centuries.

ALG (disbelieving): Right, let’s talk again when that happens.

My favorite tale in this vein is from a friend of mine in the left-of-center bastion of Park Slope, Brooklyn. She reports creating not so much anger as level-red discomfort when the talk at a recent party turned to gay marriage. Everyone was for it, of course, including my friend, more or less. “But wouldn’t it bother you if your own children were gay?” she asked, all innocent curiosity. “After all, isn’t it natural to want your kids to mirror your experience? To have a traditional marriage and raise children in the traditional way? I can’t think of anything that would make them more foreign.”

She reports that, hearing this, the liberals around the table “got very flustered, because of course they feel exactly the same way. There was a long silence, and then someone said, ‘I would be much more upset if my kids were Republican,’ and that let everyone off the hook. But afterward, one liberal friend came and whispered in my ear, ‘I would be really devastated.’”