Only liberal sometimes

My married high school friends who just bought a house and made me feel super old had their housewarming party last night. My friend Robin and I had joked that soon all we'd be hearing about would be the home improvements, as that is how we stereotype people who own houses but don't have kids. So I asked Travis about his plans right away. You know, to get it out of the way.

Travis, a former Marine who will happily take the conservative side on some issues where I would not, takes me out to the back yard and says, "See that tree in the corner? Part of it will have to go." I start to flinch in the dark. "That way I can put in a whole row of solar panels. They should catch the sun up until early afternoon."

He goes on with the other solar panels he wants on the other side of the yard, and then talks about selling the excess to MG&E (and if they won't give him a competitive rate, he'll just get himself mostly off the grid) and how he wants to replace all the appliances with more efficient ones. Oh, and then he wants to brick up part of the basement, the part with the weird fireplace, and turn it into a reading room. And if he ever had a load of money, it would be totally sweet to turn another part of the basement into an armory for all his knives.

The way he puts it, while he runs conservative on many things, he'll always be pro-choice, and he knows the country's fucked if we don't start making better choices about energy. Like I told him to his face, I think those are really great priorities if you're only liberal sometimes.

It's really nice to talk to old friends after a long time of not being much in touch and find you haven't both changed so much that you have nothing in common anymore.

There was a conversation I had with an Air Force sergeant who was in town with an F-16 demo team for the annual air show, which I was writing about for the paper. We were sitting around waiting for the show to get going, and conversation strayed into fuel consumption/costs/etc. I had no idea that airplanes burned so much. Especially stunt planes (he estimated 50-70 gallons/hour) and highly maneuverable fighter jets (up to 150 gallons/hour). I mentally stagger at the carbon footprint, he stays firmly in financial territory. “It’s all money spent in the defense of freedom.”

“So is the military looking into alternative fuels at all, given worries about supply?”
“Absolutely. There’s this process involving coal…”

Trying to stay neutral as possible, I wandered tentatively into BP territory: “It’s interesting, don’t you think, the extra attention it’s bringing to energy issues?” And he dismisses. “People forget that nearly everything they own is made from petroleum. Focus on fuel is short-sighted. Unless they find a way to make glass more cheaply, we’ll be using oil for a long time.” True, but it ignores the central question of what we CAN do, and the long-term concerns (opposing, in some ways, the short-term concerns of the military) that would make it worth pursuing.

It was an interesting anthropological moment. One of those where you say, Ah, the values here are very different, but they are held together by a certain kind of logic.

I went to that same air show “for fun” the next day. I have other thoughts, maybe for later, about air shows and America, the land where we go to events that boast about “turning fuel into fun,” the land where the deafening roar of a jet engine passing you at 650 mph is “the sound of freedom.”