Louis Roney: Political animals

A friend I like a lot seems to be addicted to creating political arguments — at least, arguments with me.

And I am a guy who seeks no argument about anything at all. I have asked him nicely to cool it but, as I said, my pal is addicted! I thought I had made my point politely, and reminded him of our permanent political “truce” before he sat down at a dinner party for eight in our house. Suddenly, in the middle of up-to-then sociable and enlightening table talk, my friend began to assail Donald Trump. As I remember, a couple of other friends responded nimbly, and the party was once again amicable.

The fact is, I write a column in which I often state political views based on my life experience, multifaceted research, and reading of others’ views. I write my opinions — no more important than others’ opinions. I’m not running for anything.

I welcome readers with different views to write a “Letter to the Editor.” Such letters are published with no interference from me.

I simply hold that personal “arguments” about politics are cantankerous, and a futile waste of energy. Voting booths are the confessionals of private preference. I do not want to cajole anyone into changing his mind about anything — unless we’re in a war and he’s out to kill me because I am an American.

I believe I would still love my beautiful wife just as much if she wanted to vote for Hillary. (How could I even think such a thing?!)

I consider myself an Independent, and have voted for a lot of Democrats, e.g. Linda Chapin, Harry Flood Byrd, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. Some of them disappointed me, as has Republican George W. Bush, for whom I voted twice.

I could not tolerate John Kerry, and have found no other Navy vets who could.

I enjoy discussing philosophies and ethical principles without any reference to political parties or religion. Plato is a good buddy of mine.

Recently I found myself at a breakfast table with about a dozen people in a restaurant. During a conversation about a national judicial issue, I said that both a prominent Democrat and prominent Republican had expressed almost identical views “in principle” to me recently. I lauded the value of sticking to time-honored principles that oppose laissez faire greed and man’s inhumanity to man.

“Many revered principles,” I said, “flow unimpeded from the Magna Carta and English Common Law into our Constitution. When George III flouted a key principle, we rebelled.”

“You sound like a Jerry Falwell!” said a middle-aged loudmouth in a baseball cap.

I imagine he intended his remark as the ultimate insult. I don’t know very much about Jerry Falwell, but I know he may deal in religion, whereas I had been referring to ethical legal principles. I can think of myriad other more applicable names a better-read person could throw at me as an ad-hominem slur.

I elected not to remind my assailant that the subject of “ethics” (i.e., principles) was well visited in Plato’s agora 400 years before Christ —as well as in the lives of earlier Zoroastrians.

I must have riled someone in an off-hand reference to myself as a “common man.” I was challenged loudly as to whether that term was sincere. I said I was raised in very modest circumstances in the Depression. I added that, if I ever had any youthful hubristic illusions about my own importance, four years of service in the Navy had quickly dispelled them.

“The military is the great leveler,” I added. “Aboard ship we all looked alike, and none of us was less vulnerable than his shipmates. We fought side by side to defeat a common enemy.”

“Here we go! Now we gotta listen to your war stories!” said a nondescript old guy across the table from me.

“Were you ever in the service?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

Aristotle was a discerning Menschenkenner. He wrote, “Man is a political animal.” The animal I can handle. The political too often nowadays smacks of sentiments to deplore, e.g. “game-playing” that is outrageously self-serving, and devoid of principle.

Writing my thoughts down in my home office is one thing. However, I have learned that the use of the spoken word as a kinetic political weapon to annoy, threaten, connive, belittle, and even debase, best suits — if Oliver Wendell Holmes will grant me license — “autocrats of the breakfast table.” Amen.