The War At Home

I am a happily engaged woman, lucky to be with a very deep, thoughtful, kind, funny man. However, like any couple, we fight. Sometimes our fights are like anyone else's: money, the dog's constant destruction of our property, family, general irritations. But other times we seem to fight about politics, which always surprises me. It's not that we disagree on larger issues, and we both read the same journals and newspapers. More often than not, he seems to chafe at my critique of liberalism. What makes it interesting is that he almost entirely shares my views. But somehow, I sense a fear that I will "go too far." The other night, we clashed while discussing the announcement by Tony Blair that he was seeking a third, but not a fourth, term. Sorry, Terry McAuliffe, despite your pronouncement on John Gibson's show on 9/30, he is not "retiring" because the Bush foreign policy kills all who touch it. In the words of Aersosmith, Dream On. I was saying to my beloved that I think it's a shame to see Blair go, and unfortunate that he seems to be leaving under a cloud of suspicion. My fiancé replied that the suspicion was somewhat deserved, at which point I interjected that I didn't think the famed British intelligence on Iraq had been "sexed up," as was charged. "Yes it was," he insisted, and we were at an impasse. What makes this disagreement interesting is that we had largely read the same pieces about the case; the excruciatingly detailed narrative in The New Yorker, and the website of The Hutton Inquiry itself. Yet somehow, we came to opposite conclusions. From my memory, there were two inquiries, I believe, both of which held the BBC, not 10 Downing, responsible, despite charges that Alastair Campell et al leaned on Kelly. In fact, wasn't the head of BBC, Greg Dykes, removed over the incident? Anyway, that was my understanding. But there are, and always will be, charges and insinuations. I think that what we were really fighting about was my comparatively greater comfort with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the fact that I am pretty much undaunted by the absense of WMD. My fiancé, I know, feels much more conflicted than I, and he finds my strident support for the war to be unfamiliar terrain. We are both life-long Democrats, successors to the Boomers, protesting apartheid in college, memorizing the litany of U.S./C.I.A. crimes. Now we find ourselves just as likely to direct our seemingly endless supply of personal bile towards Michael Moore as towards John Ashcroft. It takes a great deal of personal certainty to let go of pat partisanism. I know that he is right, that in my case, there is a truculence born directly of personal anger at the murder of a friend on 9/11. He, on the other hand, is, by nature, coming from a more considered, careful, thoughtful position. Fortunately, it was only a minor and temporary flare-up; we were quickly reunited (and it felt so good, Peaches and Herb ), when RNC weirdo, and my fiancé's fellow UGA classmate, Ralph Reed, showed up on TV. Hiya, Ralphie Boy. I was regaled by stories of working at the Red and Black, their college paper, and what a reactionary douchebag crank Reed was, even then. All was again well at 116 Berry. I don't know how it is in your family, but nothing unifies us like a new, shared object of contempt.