“At the junction of the ropes where a boxer rests between rounds his second, the corner man advises him, gives him water, tries to reduce swelling and stop bleeding.”
I have my own corner men. After Nate and I argue, I usually talk to my dad, who is the smartest person I know, or my cousin Missy, whose default opinion is that Nate’s balls should be cut off.
Nate has two friends that he runs to whenever we’re fighting over politics. Al and Zipay. They’re both liberals, both well educated, and both people I’ve known and respected for a long time.
In fact, Zipay teaches Government at the high school in my hometown and, at one point or another, the rest of us have all been students in his class. He and Nate became very close They’re in a folk band together. Nice guy, smart, and totally wrong about a great deal of things.
Nate gets most of his political “facts” from them. He doesn’t watch or read the news much. Nor does he read many books or articles by political pundits. Instead, he tends to take my arguments back to Al and Zipay, and see what they have to say about them. This is frustrating for a number of reasons.
One: He can’t trust a fact coming from me until it’s ratified by Al, but whatever holy proclamation thunders down from Mt. Zipay is taken as law.
Two: Quite often, he gets my arguments wrong. For example, once he told them that I said that Sadaam Hussein was involved in the orchestration of 9/11. I never said anything so patently stupid, and this not only makes me sound like an idiot to his friends, but proves that he’s not really listening, so all of the gut-wrenching effort I put into fighting with him is for naught.
Three: It’s demeaning to the argument. It often makes me wonder why I waste my time fighting with someone who doesn’t care to look into things for himself.
I had tried to avoid fighting with Nate in front of his friends. Dragging anyone into a fight is rude, and Al is a pacifist and any kind of acrimony makes him very uncomfortable, but oftentimes, when I back up my argument with a fact or statistic that surprises Nate, he’ll say something along the lines of, “Really? I don’t know anything about that. Tell that to Al and see what he says about it,” or “Alright, try and convince Zipay.”
The fact that he can argue with me so vehemently, and then divest himself so quickly of responsibility is infuriating.
So I took him up on his challenge.
For example, Al, a history major, idolized Ted Kennedy, but had never even heard of Mary Jo Kopechne, the girl Kennedy killed in an incident that probably cost the senator the American presidency. I showed him newspaper articles that detailed the story. Zipay, a teacher of government, denied that Barack Obama was ever at a party at Bill Ayers house. I showed him the CNN clip that reported otherwise.
In the time since, Nate has either forgotten these instances, or diminished them.
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