1
My Mission Should I Choose to Accept It

"How do you normally part your hair?" asked Julie, my barber. "To the left or to the right?"

"To the—well, let me see—I guess I never thought about it. I go like this," I said, smooshing the thinning crop to one side in a halfhearted motion like I usually do in the morning before leaving for work. I was a little confused by the mirror but after quick calculation was able to say, "So I guess to the left."

"No," she said, "your hair goes to the right. You should comb it that way. You naturally go to the right." She had no idea how chilling that was for me to hear or why I sat in silent stricken terror for the rest of the haircut. "Is everything okay?" she asked, noticing that I was frowning gravely at myself in the mirror. I told her the haircut was fine. It's me that I was wondering about.

It was mere days before I was to begin a potentially life-altering experience. I was going to try to make my politics like my hair, moving from left to right.

I live in Seattle. Republicans still run for office once in a while around here but it's more of a hobby for them. In the Seventh Congressional District, which includes most of Seattle, Jim McDermott has been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in nine straight elections. He cruises to easy victories every time. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, McDermott went to Baghdad along with thirteen-term Michigan representative David Bonior and the two of them were shown around town by emissaries of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately they announced that as far as they could tell, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. McDermott was heavily criticized for the trip. Conservative columnist George Will said, "McDermott and Bonior are two specimens of what Lenin, referring to Westerners who denied the existence of Lenin's police-state terror, called 'useful idiots.'" The trip took place just a few weeks before the 2002 elections and McDermott, despite being denounced as a traitor by many on the right, cruised to victory with 74 percent of the vote. Of course it should be noted that he was, you know, right about the whole weapons-of-mass-destruction thing, but still, he could have been dead wrong, run naked through downtown Seattle shooting random strangers, and eaten a baby koala—live on television—and he still would have received at least 62 percent. Seattle likes liberals.

It should also be noted that the Communist Party historically has always been strong in Seattle and I've heard we have one of the lowest rates of churches per capita among major cities in the nation. So if one were to claim that Seattle is a bunch of godless liberal commies, well, we would have to pretty much fess up to that.

This is the world I was raised in and where I've lived most of my life. Seattleites are aware that there are Republican voters that exist in the world, but those voters are sort of like those stars that astronomers can only posit the existence of, they cannot be picked up on any traditional viewing device. And yet…Sometimes, while reading The Nation and sipping on a latte, trying not to spill any on my Gore-Tex pullover, I would think about what liberal meant. I knew liberals were against the war in Iraq and against racism and homophobia and against Bush's tax cuts and against the power of major corporations, but what were liberals, you know, for?

I was also aware of the axiom that if you're a conservative when you're twenty you have no heart, and if you're a liberal when you're forty you have no brain. I couldn't help but wonder at age thirty-six if my liberal lifestyle was getting in the way of my natural evolution.

My life was not a conservative vacuum, however. My wife Jill's brother-in-law DJ is about as conservative as one can humanly get. The son of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, he was once one of Ralph Reed's top men at the Christian Coalition and went on to be a Bush appointee in the Federal Highway Administration. DJ has his beliefs, he's sincere about them, and when we talk/duel/argue, those beliefs couldn't be more different from my own. Maddeningly, he invariably wins the debates we have. Too often, he has points while all I have are complaints. Of course, he has some rhetorical advantages since he earned a law degree from Georgetown while I earned a theater degree at an obscure liberal arts college, but the point remained: he won arguments.

Unlike the traditional liberal caricature of conservatives, DJ is a great guy. He does not secretly plot the conquest of the world with covert emissaries from Halliburton, he doesn't fly into a murderous rage at the mention of any member of the Clinton family, and rarely, if ever, does he roll around naked in mounds of gold coins stolen from third world families. He's a good husband, good father, and a patient golf partner.

Around the time of the 2004 elections, the program director at the public radio station where I work asked me to do more segments about national events on my weekly radio show. He thought it would be interesting to have a conservative and a liberal on together to hash out a particular question from week to week. "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" for instance, or "Should Rumsfeld be fired?" I was skeptical. "But won't that be an awful lot like those stupid shows where everyone yells and acts like jackasses?" Not if I didn't yell or act like a jackass, he told me.

So I tried it out and soon started having lengthy interviews with guys like Rich Lowry and Pat Buchanan. Shockingly, they turned out to be smart, friendly, helpful people who were articulate in their beliefs and formed their arguments coherently. I didn't always agree with them, but often they made a lot more sense than whatever was being argued by whichever liberal I was able to grab. Maybe it was the quiet confidence that comes from knowing their side was in power, maybe they were more personable because they were sitting in their luxuriously appointed offices, with overstuffed leather chairs, paid for by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. A pipe full of good tobacco, smoked while not being encumbered by oppressive antismoking laws and hypersensitive liberals, and a snifter of brandy would make anyone a nice guy. Meanwhile, liberals sitting in stiff metal chairs in their makeshift storefront offices, constantly being detained and severely beaten by Patriot Act– enabled government enforcers, could hardly be expected to compete in the friendliness department.

But maybe, I thought, all those righties are confident because they're actually right.

As I reassessed my view on the conservative universe, I remembered Morgan Spurlock's movie Supersize Me. If all that McDonald's food was able to so radically transform Spurlock's body, what would a massive concentrated amount of conservatism do to someone's brain? Is liberalism like a liver or a kidney and will it just shut down after a while? Or could it be possible to switch? What if I could go over to the other side and, instead of merely appreciating and understanding what the conservatives have to say, really believe it and become one of them? Sure, some people drift from right to left or left to right over the course of years or after a series of randomly occurring cataclysmic events, but is it possible to change your own mind? Could I pull off artificial conversion?

What would happen if I invaded my own brain with troops in the form of conservative opinion, conservative experiences, conservative art and culture, and all the trappings of conservative life so familiar to red-state America and so foreign to me? Would those troops be greeted as liberators? Or attacked by insurgent brain cells? The more time I spent thinking about these possibilities and watching the postelection moping of every liberal I knew (parents at my son's preschool wept, actually physically wept, for weeks afterward), the more attractive it became to really try it.

With every Noam Chomsky lecture I heard on public radio, every "Lick Bush" bumper sticker I saw on an old Volvo, I wondered if I was like Neo in the movie The Matrix, trapped inside an illusory liberal universe waiting for Laurence Fishburne/George W. Bush to set me free. Would I get to learn kung fu fighting skills if I broke out of the Matrix?

After some soul-searching and a somewhat awkward conversation with my deeply liberal wife, I requested, and was granted, a month's leave from the station. In that time I would change my wardrobe, travel the country on some carefully planned trips, and ingest all the conservative dogma I could as part of an effort to conservatize myself.

Yes, I risked my friends and family disowning me. But I would also have proven that people, even in this polarized America, really could change their minds if they heard something thoughtful that they had never considered. That people could be persuaded. That ideas still matter. The other thing that might happen is that Jill would likely divorce me and never let me see the kids again. That would be a drag, but I was sure that the military-industrial complex would gladly provide me with a new wife and shiny happy new children, possibly android in nature.

In planning the project, I needed some guidelines. While sitting at a Starbucks in Seattle with my Apple laptop computer, I jotted down some parameters to try to get to a place hitherto unknown by people in Seattle working on their Apple laptops in Starbucks.

Copyright © 2006 by John Moe.