David Penberthy: People who are different can still be friends
People were outraged by photos of gay talk show host Ellen DeGeneres sharing a laugh with former President George W Bush last week, but David Penberthy wonders why a friendship like this is so hard for people to swallow.
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It pains me to say this but one of my favourite actors, John Cusack, star of such great films as High Fidelity, The Sure Thing and Con Air, confirmed himself this week as something of a pin-up boy for everything that’s wrong with the standard of discourse in this mindlessly polarised age.
Cusack led a chorus of fury from prominent small-l liberals and preachy Hollywood stars at the apparently outrageous fact that the gay and progressive Ellen DeGeneres is, horrifically enough, friends with former Republican President George W Bush.
DeGeneres and her wife Portia De Rossi sat with Bush Jr and his wife and former First Lady Laura Bush at a Cowboys game in Dallas during the week.
Images of them chatting happily and sharing some laughs were circulated across social media and billed as one the greatest fascist get-togethers since the Nuremberg Rallies.
John Cusack accused DeGeneres of “normalising mass murderers”, liberal activist Peter Daou tweeted that Bush “launched a war based on lies that caused untold carnage”, while several LGBT news organisations accused DeGeneres of betraying her principles given Bush’s hostility to marriage equality.
“As one of America’s most visible and powerful queer celebrities, Ellen pal’ing around with those who have actively tried to harm us feels disappointing, irresponsible, and dangerous,” Out magazine wrote in a thundering editorial.
DeGeneres reply to all this abuse was gracious. But in 2019, it was a reply that, for many people sadly, is completely incomprehensible. DeGeneres admitted something that the Cusacks of this world can no longer understand — that it is possible to have civil conversations, even happy friendships, with people with whom you disagree.
“Here’s the thing. I’m friends with George Bush,” DeGeneres explained. “In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have.”
“We’re all different and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s OK that we’re all different.
It sounded like a trite sentiment in this relentlessly divided and discourteous age, where at any given second there are thousands of conservatives on social media and in news sites denouncing left-wingers as “leftards”, with the lefties responding in the kind by labelling them “RWNJs”, right-wing nut jobs.
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In addition to being a lesbian and an advocate of marriage equality DeGeneres is also a Democrat, a climate change campaigner and a vegan who has a regular segment on her program called Meatless Mondays.
Bush hails from a family of oil magnates; his father, who was also president, was a director of the CIA. And as a proud Texan, Dubya would love nothing more than chowing down on a giant hunk of slow-cooked brisket.
For some, it clearly does not compute anymore that people who are that different can still be friends.
This sad fact confirms the reduction of politics, opinions and ideas to a kind of sporting contest, where rather than listening to the points that others make, and processing them before agreeing or disagreeing, you simply keep barracking for your chosen team.
This is the dominant feature of political life on social media, especially Twitter, where people even use little emoji symbols like water droplets or rainbows to designate their implacable adherence to one thing or another.
When you scratch the surface of all this chest-puffing, where people assert that their view is the righteous one and all others must be bigots or buffoons, it has at its centre a form of intellectual insecurity.
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Rather than having your opinions tested, and facing the risk that someone might get a shot over your bows or point out a fallacy or flaw, it is actually safer to gather only with those whose world view conforms with yours. That way you never have to risk admitting that you’re wrong, or that you’re not fully informed, or that perhaps you have succumbed to stereotypes or assumptions in forming an opinion.
The quaint old form of words to avoid heated exchanges in social settings was that sometimes it was best “to agree to disagree”. It was also held that the best way to avoid any conflicts or embarrassment was to ensure that politics, religion or sex were never discussed in polite company.
These days the world has been overrun with bores who can do nothing but that — ideally with people with whom they are already in agreement.
The school debate of the future will be a thing to behold, where to ensure no-one feels marginalised by the power of their opponents’ arguments, the affirmative and negative teams can get together in different parts of the school and reassure themselves that they’re both in the right.
The other thing about the Cusacks of the world — and having looked at poor old John’s Twitter feed, it seems to be one long advertisement for the far Left Democrat presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — is the extent to which these tedious people are obsessed with politics at the exclusion of all else.
Do they really think that when Bush and DeGeneres get together to catch up that they’re talking about the invasion of Iraq or the merits of water boarding? I guess the problem is that in her critics’ eyes, that’s exactly what Ellen should have been talking about, given that she had a ringside seat with such a despicable war criminal.
The good news from all this is that Ellen’s nice remarks about the power of friendship were liked some 4 million times within hours of being posted, which hearteningly suggests that the power of football, hot dogs and few laughs can still triumph over these crushing bores.