I was looking at someone's profile tonight and they had a rather stringent political requirement for their prospective dates. This woman proudly proclaimed her Democratic enthusiasm and insisted that any man who would win the coveted prize of some time with her must, must, must have the same leanings. She was attractive but as soon as I read that I closed the browser and was suddenly reminded that I had dishes to do. One of the least attractive qualities for me in a prospective date is inflexibility. Finding someone so certain of their correctness left an acidic taste in my mouth.
Wearing your political heart on your sleeve has become de rigueur over the last few decades. With the election season this year, things hit a frenetic peak. Barack Obama became second-hand Jesus, combining the sex appeal of Mick Jagger with the elusive optimism of Allen Ginsburg. People in bars make derisive comments about living in "red" states. A generation has been hypnotized into thinking that politics can encompass an emotion, "hope." George W. Bush declared war on an emotion. Obama engaged in a measured campaign of PDA with his own branded emotion. He took America by the hand and said it's okay to feel good about ourselves again.
Democrats always represent those with good intentions while Republicans are the mustachioed villains held over from some lost chapter of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Republicans suck. Voldemort is a Republican. Talk about politics in many modern circles has been reduced to an intolerable point of stupefaction. We cannot come to grips with a political force unless it can be compared to a character in the Harry Potter universe. This terrific reduction in terms has left some people with an indignant moral authority that lets them feel comfortable in dismissing huge swatches of the population based on whether they're "red" or "blue."
I'm interested in politics to a point, but it is, by nature, mind numbing. The process of creating policy is only slightly more amusing that trying to figure out how the tax code applies to all the W-2 forms that magically appear in your mailbox once a year. Politics matter, but how and why is always much more difficult to define. Nobody likes to talk about things that are difficult to explain, so we tell each other nursery rhymes with a Bruce Springsteen backbeat and lob rocks at the other half of the country for not singing along.
In the four presidential elections I've voted in I've gone Republican once and Democratic three times. My local voting record is less one-sided. For the few political ideas I have a strong conviction in there is a mountain of others that I'm wholly uncertain about. The task of making national policy, deciding what is right for 300 million people, is staggering. It's something that doesn't have any inherently right answers.
I like talking about politics, and I like hearing other people's ideas, but it's hard for me to imagine someone who's willingly answered questions like "_____ is sexy; ______ is sexier" in the hopes of ameliorating their existential loneliness might have some great insight into how best to handle the marginal tax rate with the specter of stagflation lingering on the horizon. Someone who's willing to abdicate their voice in that process to a surrogate based on what team he or she plays for is even less appealing.
We always know less than we think we know, and our convictions are always more porous than we'd like to acknowledge. I want to date someone who's capable of challenging me. I want someone who won't be frightened by the idea of me challenging her. Isn't that the point? Aren't relationships supposed to move us forward? To take us to a place farther along than we could have traveled on our own? Knowing upfront that a woman is so closed-minded that she couldn't consider dating someone from team "red" is about as arousing as reading the guy you're dating has an STD on some blog somewhere.
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