Bestemies

Our friends help define us. We say in essence: “I’m the kind of person who likes this bunch of books, plays that collection of music, and has those friends.” Our enemies do too, though more so if we choose them than if they choose us. (Sometimes folks can have it in for you for reasons of their own that have little or nothing to do with you in particular.) Among the more interesting relationships, though, are friendly enemies. These relationships usually require face to face interaction to develop, which is why they may be less frequent in an online world that is conducive to dehumanizing one’s opponents, but they still exist.
 
G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary are a prime example. I’m painfully aware that there are at least two generations over the age of 18 to whom those names mean little, but they loomed large in my youth. Leary was the psychologist and psychedelic guru who touted the wonders of LSD and urged listeners to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Convicted on drug charges, he escaped prison with the help of the Weather Underground. He was re-apprehended but was pardoned in 1975 by Governor Brown of California. Liddy was the FBI agent who had led the raid in 1966 on a New York estate where Leary and his followers were conducting experiments. During the Nixon Administration Liddy planned, conducted, and botched the Watergate break-in that ultimately forced the president to resign. Liddy and Leary both ended up in the same prison. In 1977 President Carter commuted Liddy’s sentence. (Neither man was shy to write about himself: Will by G. Gordon Liddy and The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary are both worth a read.) To the public Liddy was the face of a corrupt authoritarian establishment. Leary was the face of the counterculture. In the 1980s the two went on speaking tours together and became the best of friends even though they remained philosophically opposed. Their mutual respect and playfulness is obvious in Alan Rudolph’s 1983 documentary film Return Engagement.

Perhaps an even odder couple were Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt. These, too, were once household names that... well… no longer are. Larry Flynt in the 1970s was founder and editor of Hustler. This publication was nothing so innocent as Playboy; it was porn. Flynt was a radical free speech advocate who constantly faced obscenity charges. While in Georgia on account of one such charge in 1978, he and his lawyer were shot on the sidewalk. Flynt survived but damage to his spinal cord confined him to a wheelchair thereafter. Jerry Falwell was a televangelist and head of the Moral Majority, a lobby group for the religious right. (Incidentally, he was also cousin to Jerry Lee Lewis.) The Moral Majority was very high profile in the 1980s. Among its targets was porn. Flynt decided to satirize Falwell in Hustler in 1983 with a fake alcohol ad that recounted a tale of Falwell supposedly losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued for libel demanding $45,000,000. Flynt lost the lawsuit in the trial court and then lost an appeal, but he then appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case. In a unanimous decision Flynt won. The Court defended the right to satire regardless of good or bad taste.
 
The 1996 movie The People vs. Larry Flynt gets the basics of the Flynt/Falwell battle more or less right, but it ends without mentioning what happened next. Jerry Falwell approached Larry Flynt to make peace. The two chatted for an hour. They hit it off and decided to go on debating tours together. Jerry would push Larry’s wheelchair into and out of the engagements. They joked and sparred and enjoyed each other’s company. Said Flynt, “I disagreed with him on absolutely everything: gay rights, a woman’s right to choose, everything. But after getting to know him I realized he was sincere.” They remained friendly enemies.
 
Those two cases are more dramatic than anything I’ve experienced, but I have had small tastes of something similar. Back in the 1980s, for example, there was a young lady who was the most intellectually challenging of any of my serious involvements. (Not “the one that got away” – she was a decade earlier – but serious nonetheless.) We traded and debated books of all types. I was a libertarian while she was a former SDS member whom I called (without irony) “my favorite Marxist.” Our first principles couldn’t have been more different. Yet we worked for over three years, and when things ended philosophical differences had nothing to do with it.
 
It may be that we cheat ourselves when we refuse to associate “with people like that,” meaning folks with outlooks radically different from our own. (Of course there are some people who really are beyond the pale such as the fellow who shot Larry, but there is a temptation to cast our nets too wide.) We miss out on friendly enemies.

 

Johnny Rivers – Enemies and Friends