Whack Your Friends, Tony Would

I turned into Tony Soprano last year. I got so disgusted with a couple of my friends that I whacked them. Not literally, of course; they’re not sleeping with the fishes or anything. But in terms of being a daily part of my life, they’re gone.

Whacked.

I whacked a friend with whom I had worked a number of years ago, and who I enjoyed and respected as an actress. I said (during a recent email exchange in which she evangelized for my conversion to the Obama religion), that I could not vote for Obama because his background, his associations with Wright and Ayers, and his public pronouncements led me to believe that he adhered to a Marxist philosophy, which was explicitly revealed in his “Spread the wealth around” comments to Joe the Plumber. As a free-market conservative, I told her, I believe that government-enforced redistribution of wealth is anathema to the American way of life.

In one of the most baffling non sequiturs I have ever experienced, she immediately accused me of engaging in “hate speech,” and informed me that she could no longer be friends with me.

Now this same person had, in 2004, the morning after George W. Bush was reelected, loudly proclaimed at our table read that she had hung her head out the window on the way to work while President Bush’s acceptance speech played on her car radio and screamed, “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE ASSASSINATE THIS MAN?” Through clenched teeth, I noted that many people agreed with her, and most of those people were known, outside of Hollywood, as “terrorists.” While I found myself unable to speak to her again for a week after her contemptible outburst, I did have to continue working with her for the foreseeable future, and I did find a way to forgive (but not forget), and remain cordial and professional with her.

But my disagreeing with Obama on philosophical grounds based on his own comments was unforgivable hate speech?

I whacked her.

Another friend slowly transformed in front of my eyes during the last election season from a trusted friend, with whom I had had many agreeable discussions over the past eight years about issues like the threat of Islamic terrorism, excessive taxation, and the dangerous Bush Derangement Syndrome afflicting so many of our colleagues, into an unrecognizable Sarah Palin-hating Obamatron, unwilling to listen to any criticism of The One, and parroting mainstream media talking points that only months before we had both ridiculed.

The first red flag appeared to me when he spoke with contempt about Sarah Palin — which I will admit, I simply cannot bear. Sarah Palin reminds me of my mother, who came from nothing and earned everything she has. If you disagree with Palin’s policies or opinions substantively, I can handle that. But call her stupid, and I see red. It’s like saying “Yo Momma” to me. Mrs. Palin is exactly the kind of citizen politician our forefathers envisioned. She is a decent, normal, beautiful American woman from a small town who worked her way through college without the benefits of wealth, pedigree, or (ahem) Affirmative Action, who then climbed the political ladder, being rewarded by voters for her job performance, and became Governor of her state.

Sarah Palin has been a mother (of 5), a small business owner, a mayor, a governor, and the point guard on her high school state championship basketball team. That means she has run a family, a business, a town, a state, and an OFFENSE, for God’s sake. And she was running with McCain against Obama and Biden, three Senatorial blowhards, each of whom had only ever run one thing: his mouth.

The last straw was when he sent me one of those chain emails which listed all of Obama’s “accomplishments,” such as they were, and then concluded that the only possible reason anyone could not support Obama was racism. I told him that since I did not agree with Obama on any issue he could name, and judging by the conversations we’d had over the years that he didn’t either, then if either of us was voting based on race, it had to be him and not me.

Then after some fruitless back and forth, I realized he was gone. The friend I had known didn’t really exist anymore. He was ready to reward the party that had called our President a liar, a loser, and a terrorist, and called our brave soldiers killers, with control of every branch of government because he had succumbed to the Hope and Change cult. So I put him out of his (and my) misery.

I took him out behind my address book and whacked him.

Whacking your friends is a dirty business, but sometimes, for their own good and yours, it’s got to be done. And like Tony Soprano, I have some residual feelings about it that I might need to go talk to Lorraine Bracco about. But in the end, it’s much like my wife’s philosophy of creating space. If she has clothes she doesn’t wear, or a piece of furniture she can’t stand anymore, she gets rid of them before she has a replacement. By getting rid of the old crap you don’t enjoy anymore, she says, you create space in your life for something you do enjoy to appear. Then when you finally run across something you love, you’ve got room for it.

This has worked for me like a charm. I have many new friends now, for the first time in years. My dear old friends that haven’t lost their minds are still here with me. And I have room for more.

I highly recommend it. Create space in your life. Don’t be afraid. If you have friends that don’t fit in your life anymore, face up to it. Take care of business.

Whack ’em. Tony would.