So I left it alone and didn’t call. And now it’s been a year and a half since we last spoke.
I have 143 friends on Facebook. My sister has 341 friends. I’m not surprised that she has more friends than me because she’s always been the more outgoing and sociable one. She was the vivacious extroverted sibling and I was the bookish introverted sibling, because in families siblings always define themselves against each other, trying to be as different as possible so that we can figure out who we are. Hence, she has more people whom she can call friends than I do.
On the other hand, my sister isn’t more than twice as friendly as I am. I would say that she’s maybe 20 percent friendlier than me, maybe as much as 30 percent more fun overall. I can be aloof and difficult to reach out to; I tend to simmer and withdraw into myself when I’m upset; I can sometimes make harsh judgments about people too quickly or because I feel threatened by someone’s behavior or personality or way of talking. But my sister can be explosive. She gets into fights and tells people what she really thinks of them, no holds barred, no punches pulled. She breaks off friendships abruptly, dramatically, while I let them wither through studied inattention.
So really, those things should balance each other out and we should have about the same number of friends or maybe she should have a few more than me. But not twice as many.
I put the disparity down to the fact that I’m a person who has high standards for friendship. I don’t count just anyone as a friend. For example, I don’t pretend that I’m friends with someone whom I just spent time around getting stoned in college. I don’t count as a friend someone with whom I just share mutual friends and acquaintances. I don’t know if my sister has these high standards.
Or maybe the difference in numbers is partly explained by the fact that some of those friendships are people whom she’s going to get mad at and break things off with, but that hasn’t happened yet and so they are still on the rolls right now, the way dead voters sometimes remain on the list long after they’re deceased. Once my sister and each of those friends have their fight, then they’ll disappear because you can’t stay friends with someone after a huge, disastrous fight, whereas it’s easy just to have people hang around when you’ve just kind of let things slide between you through a gradual diminishing of contact and affection.
WAR
We were friends until the buildup to the Iraq war. We’d been friends since college and back then we were very close, him and me and whoever I was dating at the time and whoever he was dating at the time. We lived in England at the same time, right after college, so we saw each other a lot during those early, uncertain years when we were all still finding our directions in life, deciding who we were going to be and staying out late every night. And then later we lived in New York at the same time. That was where things went wrong.
When preparations for the war began, we still agreed about a lot of things. For example we agreed that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a disaster of terrible proportions that nothing could excuse or mitigate. We agreed that while a certain radical element of fundamentalist Islam was pernicious, it was important to differentiate between the vast majority of Muslim people, who might not agree with the West about everything and might even dislike the United States, but should not be confused with their militant co-religionists any more than we ourselves should be confused with Pat Robertson. We agreed that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator. But beyond that we did not agree.
I thought that the terrible events of the preceding years had showed that, in spite of all our flaws, the United States and those countries known collectively as “the West” were nevertheless better than our enemies and we should therefore try to spread our ideals, imperfectly realized as they are at home, to other countries that didn’t have them yet. I thought that we had been too strategic, prioritizing security over justice, supporting any foreign leader who could keep order at whatever cost. What had that achieved, except to make people around the world hate us?
He thought that these same events showed that the United States and “the West” had already caused too much resentment by trying to spread our ideals and that if we’d only stop trying to make everyone behave like us and acting like we knew best and imposing our version of free-market capitalism on everyone through the mechanisms of the IMF and the World Bank, people from other parts of the world might not hate us so much. Even if we could agree that democracy was a good thing, using the military to spread it wasn’t just wrong, it was also antidemocratic.
I thought that Saddam Hussein was so bad that even though usually it’s not a good idea to invade other countries that haven’t attacked you, it would be better to get rid of him while we had the chance. He thought that sending troops into a country that hadn’t attacked us, however bad their government might be, was categorically wrong. He also thought that the reasons the government was giving for why it wanted to do this — WMDs, collaboration with al-Qaeda — were bogus, a cover story that the men and women pushing it didn’t even believe. I thought that, though perhaps this was so, our motives didn’t need to be 100 percent pure to do some good; if we did the right thing for the wrong reasons that would be all right.
In principle we agreed that it was fine for us to disagree as long as we respected each other’s reasons for thinking as we did. The problem was that after a little while, every conversation that we had seemed to circle back to this topic whether we meant it to or not. We would go out to the movies and if we saw an American film, he would always be sure to mention how it exemplified our militarism, our belief in ourselves as exceptional, our simple-minded concept of heroism through blind faith and physical exertion. If we talked about the news as it was reported abroad, I always made sure to note the knee-jerk way that America was portrayed as stupid, boorish and brutal. If we went out to a restaurant, if we discussed a book we’d read, if we related an encounter between ourselves and a stranger, everything seemed to come back to this question: good or bad? Are we (Americans) basically good or basically bad, basically better or basically worse than other groups of people? In the end it became difficult for us to speak about anything, and around that time he moved to Holland. We call each other occasionally but not as often as I wish we did now that some time has passed and those concerns, which seemed so urgent at the time, don’t seem that way to me anymore.
What I remember most vividly, when I think of him, is none of that. It is a trip we took together in March just before we graduated from college. We went to France, where it was already spring, coming from New England where it was still cold and dark and snowbound. I remember that we took the train into the city from De Gaulle and emerged from the Metro into the Jardin du Luxembourg, into sunshine and green. I remember that we put our backpacks down on the grass and ran around in circles, waving our arms and laughing madly from the pure pleasure of being together in a place that beautiful.
THE GROUP
When we lived in New York, my husband, who was then my boyfriend, had a group of friends I didn’t get along with. What was wrong with them? Nothing was wrong with them. As individuals, I liked them all, more or less; at least I didn’t have a problem with any of them. One of them was a gifted composer; another was a well-read student of politics and philosophy; yet another was an interesting, funny and insightful writer about art and literature. But when they were all together, I found them difficult to deal with.