If you're a good, God-fearing, patriotic American, you probably often wonder just what the heck those liberals are up to, and would use any and all forms of subterfuge to find out. No, honestly, politics isn't about making enemies, and that's exactly the deceptive attitude I used to trick my way into a meeting of my most hated enemies here on campus: ASU's Young Democrats.
Having never spent much time amongst a purely Democratic gathering, I naturally expected a depraved pit of orgiastic debauchery. The reality was quite different, but then again I wouldn't really know for sure on account of I've never really been to one of those debauchery things in the first place.
The first thing I noticed was the informality. In contrast to the College Republicans, the YD opt for a loosely structured round-table format of discussion, eschewing the minute-readings, photocopied flyers, ritual sacrifice, etc., that I'd grown accustomed to. Also, while there's no shortage of internal strife in CR, the strife within the Young Democrats is totally external; club members just air their hostilities by openly mocking each other. Interesting.
And lots of attractive young women. I'm totally serious here; not to disparage on this campus' lovely conservative ladies, but the YD had a pretty strong turnout of lookers, even on the Friday before spring break. If this turnout was a devious attempt by the YD to seduce me to the dark side, then ... well, it came dangerously close to succeeding. One of them even bore a striking resemblance to actress Jewel Staite, whom scientists have objectively determined to be the cutest human alive.
The main point of my visit, though, was to ask a series of questions and get the club's general opinion on a number of "divisive" issues, people, concepts, etc., that each side of the political spectrum has its own firmly held beliefs on. So for instance, all real conservatives know filmmaker Michael Moore to be a psychotic lying narcissist, but we don't know what mainstream Democrats think about him. (For the record, the gist seemed to be that Moore is both competent and entertaining, although no one would trust him with their children.) Ostensibly this was to better understand the viewpoints of others, but really it was because I wanted to make fun of those answers in the school paper. Ha! So what did I get?
"Is there a liberal media bias?" I guess not -- CNN is "neutral" and MSNBC is "kinda liberal." Sure, if you're Karl Marx.
"Should America, as a country, try to be more like Europe?" They say that socially speaking, yes; socialized health care is apparently like the raddest thing ever, and also us Americans are much more "Puritan." I don't know what they meant by that, but I saw Goody Proctor with the devil.
"Israel: Are they awesome, or not?" The YD I talked to said that Israel is not perfect, but does pretty well for itself. Good thing, too, because when people hate on Israel, I get all ... well, let's just say it takes me to a bad place.
Speaking of which: "Noam Chomsky: honestly?" The consensus is that he is interesting. Yeah, interesting like a ten-car pileup.
And, "Do you agree with the constitutionality of the decision in Roe vs. Wade?" This one took some time, as most of the YD didn't seem to understand the difference between whether a right to abortion was "good" vs. whether it was granted in the Constitution. But yes, once that got cleared up, they were totally behind Justice Blackmun and his blather about the Constitution's magic invisible penumbras.
"Star Wars or Star Trek?" (I didn't say ALL the questions were serious.) The men present were laudably unanimous in their preference of Star Wars, except for trekkie Cole Hickman. Nerd!
"Who's your favorite Republican politician?" Everyone was quick to say none other than Arizona's own John McCain. They must have misheard me then, as I'm pretty sure that I said the word "Republican."
"In a perfect world, which of the Democratic candidates would you really like to have supported?" There was, of course, a variety of answers, but Dennis "I'm insane" Kucinich got some serious props. This was a trick question anyway, because in a perfect world everybody would obviously be Republican.
Rounding up the odds and ends, there was general praise for multilateralism, MoveOn.org, Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, and even, ugh, France. I would have asked more questions, but they were off to play some serious Frisbee (thus destroying another perfectly good stereotype -- I'd thought that dirty hippies preferred hacky-sack). Overall, I'd say that while the YD are ideologically nuts and maybe a little whiny, they were some pretty nice people.
But they don't seem to like Bush very much. Go figure.
Eric Spratling is a public relations senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.