"Are you mad at Mr. Ulbrecht, Dad?"
"No, Kathy. Why?" My father appeared to be mildly interested despite the Sunday drivers cutting in front of him and muttered about the almost empty gas tank. We were on our way to early Mass, just Dad, one of my older brothers and me. The summer air was still cool despite the rising Arizona sun and it was a delicious, intimate, quiet moment.
"Because you were arguing about the election, yesterday, and you both always seem to argue about the government. " I reminded him.
My father and the father of one my best friends, Lynn Ulbrecht, seemed complete opposites.
Physically, Buster (Mr. Ulbrecht), was a sun browned, compact, muscular man with an intriguing tattoo on one of his forearms and hair so short, he seemed bald. I cannot recall his occupation but I believe it was in construction or air conditioning, work that required him to be outside. His greatest joy was to work outside in his backyard during the hottest part of a summer day, sweating and making something useful with his hands. Whenever I spent the night at Lynn's house during the summer, the swamp cooler went off at 10:00 pm, despite the temperatures in the high 90s - it was hell.
My father was a music teacher. He was stocky, fairly tall, and avoided the sun which burned the bejeebus out of his fair, Irish skin. (Unfortunately, I inherited this cursed skin and have suffered numerous bouts of sun poisoning and permanent sun damage.) He enjoyed making things with his hands and I think this was what attracted Buster and Vince to each other initially.
What kept this friendship going was their ability to talk politics. Buster was a "Goldwater" Republican and in Arizona at that time, it was a position slightly right of God. Dad was one of the few "Union" liberals in our neighborhood, anathema to the Republican majority. While Buster was normally a low-key, quiet person, he would begin to roar whenever Dad would bring up the latest government scandal. My Dad was usually the instigator, although I remember Buster laying in wait a time or two where he would offer Dad the obligatory coffee, hustle him over to the newspaper pointing out the latest Washington scandal that made the Democrats look bad, and then they'd be out the door to his shop. By the time they were "in the back" the whole house could hear the "debate." Mrs. Ulbrecht would close the back door, crank up the cooler, and turn up the volume of her favorite Montavani record, knowing that the debate would continue for at least the next hour.
This pattern continued for quite a while and both men seemed to enjoy what Dad called a spirited political discourse until "the argument." I never paid any attention to what the elders were doing, except in my mental peripheral vision and on that Saturday, I sensed a decided animosity. The dynamic of the political discussion seemed to change from debate to argument, and I recall Mrs. Ulbrecht having to break out some sweet rolls and coffee to distract them from waving any further red flags in front of their bullish selves. It was the only time I heard Mrs. Ulbrecht scold, ever so slightly, and I noticed that Mr. Ulbrecht was very resistant to this scolding.
A line had been crossed. This dark moment reminded me of times when my brothers would wrestle around with each other until someone poked an eye or shoved an elbow into a gut and the whole "wrestle" dynamic would change to punching, gouging and intentional hurting. An elder would intervene and I soon learned that friendly wrestling had to have strict rules vigorously enforced.
I didn't realize it at that time, but in hindsight, I know that that ferocious argument was the beginning of the end of my friendship with Lynn, and killed Dad's friendship with Buster. I don't recall what political landscape these two men got themselves into, but it was during the time of the Viet Nam war, and many such friendships were fractured and/or destroyed over this conflict.
Yesterday, William F. Buckley died. Like Barry Goldwater, he was an icon of modern U.S. political conservatives who managed to gather together the more coherent voices on the far right while adroitly shunning the the bible thumpers and white supremacists. By excluding the conservative "fringe" he was able to form an actual movement which avoided, until now, perhaps, self destructing. Buckley was a human template of "spirited political debate" and his "Firing Line" television segments always seemed to have the necessary rules and enforcements to avoid the vicious gouging and pettiness in lesser political debate programs. I seldom agreed with him. I admired his questions, yawned through many of his tedious and overblown responses, but always respected his desire for cut-throat debate vs. brass-knuckle argument. He was an interesting and magnetic personality.
