My friend Katz, the right-wing shlemiel

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Katz had the ball. God knows who passed it to him. He couldn’t dribble. Katz was a kid who couldn’t talk and adjust his glasses at the same time. He was the least coordinated kid in our gym class. If he tried to dribble, walk, talk or take his eyes off the ball, he would fumble it away, or kick it to the other team, or pee his gym shorts. I came up beside him and said, “Katz, f’Chrissake! Gimme the ball!” Sighing with relief, Katz handed it over. We were thirty feet from the hoop, playing three-on-three gym-class basketball. I wasn’t much of a dribbler myself. Nor a shooter. But the third kid on our “team” was standing beneath the basket, hands on hips, sneering at Katz and me piteously. We were like Chico and Harpo plotting a coup. So I muttered, “What the hell” and fired a two-hand set-push shot, a relic of the peach-basket era. It went in. Katz and I won the game. Otto, our gym teacher, staggered with hilarity. 

Katz was among the brightest kids I knew, but he was a putz. Mean boys picked on him. Girls picked on him. He lacked even a vestige of charm, he was awkward and wrinkled, outspoken at the wrong moment and mute when he should have pled for succor. Other smart kids did our best to protect him, despite his social ineptitude and his antediluvian politics. When we thought at all about Katz, we saw him as a tolerable kook with tunnel vision and a tendency to bore people to the verge of death. 

At a time (the LBJ administration) and in a city (the People’s Republic of Madison) that was fiercely liberal, Katz was ultra-conservative in a strangely refreshing way. Unlike the vast legion of closet Republicans I’ve encountered in the years since high school, Katz stitched his right-wing loyalties to his sleeve. He was a member, at least at heart, of the John Birch Society and he frequently launched right-wing tirades in the midst of a thoroughly non-partisan English class. He openly and gloriously spouted Goldwateresque absurdities and bizarre conspiracy theories about Commie recruiters in the boys room and oleomargarine that had been smuggled in from Castro’s Cuba and spiked with LSD.

As we muddle through life, we tend to be surrounded by stealth politics. Most people contrive to veil their beliefs. Beneath a bourgeois facade, as we’ve learned in the Trump era, vanilla-toned neighbors can harbor secret prejudices and passions that are irrational, counterfactual, paranoid — even violent — and rigid, permitting no contradiction, condscension or discussion.

Not Katz. He was pretty much crazy, but you knew where he stood. You couldn’t change his mind but you didn’t take him too seriously, because you knew he was powerless to change anyone else’s mind. Katz might be nuts but he could never harm anyone. He might always vote for the wrong candidates, but you could kid him when he lost and put up with his childish, hyperbolic and ridiculous gloating when he won. 

Besides, he couldn’t dribble the ball and he never got a girl. (I wonder if he ever did.) I’m still sort of in touch with Katz, by way of a slim social-media thread, and I’ve gotten the impression that he remains a knee-jerk reactionary with a jones for tinfoil-helmet conspiracies. But we’ve never exchanged greetings. I don’t think any of us has set eyes on Katz since the end of the Sixties. 

When I remember Katz — and I haven’t done much of that since we both graduated — I think how lonely he must have been. The kindest kids among us sensed Katz’s loneliness and granted him as much solace as we could spare, but only at our convenience. If Katz had an actual buddy, he (or she?) didn’t go to our school.

Katz, nowadays, has a community of sorts. Although perhaps still physically isolated, he’s bonded to a network of fellow conspiracists and right-wing shlemiels who share and reinforce his every delusion. On the Web, you can choose your neighbors not by their next-doorness, not by the happenstance of alphabetical order or the next desk over, but by a union of shared prejudice, by common fear and mutual fantasy. Katz’ very nature destined him to inhabit the planet Silo.

I suspect, however, that Katz, glued to his keyboard and deafened by his echo chamber, locked in his cloister with the shades drawn, is still lonely. It’s been said that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. It’s even truer that, on the internet, nobody’s your friend. 

If we had known Katz solely onscreen, through his words and fringe beliefs, we might have “unfriended” and ostracized him completely. He was, after all, enthusiastically in favor of a war 10,000 miles away in which he was physically unfit to fight but which threatened teenage death to almost all his male classmates. This alone was ample reason to despise and revile Katz. 

But we encountered Katz every day in the halls and in class, bumping into people and dropping his books. We knew his quirks and foibles. We laughed with him and at him — and helped him pick up his books. The general response to Katz was a mixture of patience and humor, a trace of pity and a smidgeon of love. We knew the whole Katz and we had common cause with him that mitigated his intellectual weirdness. We were all kids of a common place, a common age, a common school, common loyalties and a common plight. Seen as a whole and forgiving his offbeat convictions, Katz was one of us.

Friendship is not just a meeting of the minds. It needs bodies. It involves touching and jostling, reading one another’s expressions, sensing another’s needs and responding sensitively. Friendship is sharing, arguing, kidding, accommodation, encouragement. 

We did that somewhat — my sidekicks and I at La Follette High — for Katz. Not enough. We were considerate, after a fashion, but we were not chums. We did precious little to appreciate and relieve his isolation. We are less guilty, perhaps, than the bullies who insulted and ridiculed, struck, shoved and abused Katz. But we were sufficiently put off by his right-wing religiosity and his total uncoolness that we never fully included him. We never invited him along. He never sat with us at the game. We forgave one another our oddities but not Katz. Hence, we who knew him best were complicit in consigning our classmate to his solitude. 

Looking back, I wonder. If I were in school today, would I be aware of Katz? Or would a 21st-century Katz, with access to a million fellow believers on the Web, have occasion to express himself to me, my friends, or anybody in school who might not agree? Would he feel any need to engage the people around him? Would anyone in his classes have any idea what was going on in his mind, stirring his emotions, reinforcing his fears, propagating his faith? Would he subject himself to questioning, disagreement, to correction, to kidding? Would he even be in class, or would he stay home, clicking only on the sources that tickle his fancy, tweeting venomously to Nancy Pelosi and associating exclusively with pseudonymous comrades who might be dogs?

Would Katz be there beside me, in person, among a jeering cluster of kids in smelly gym shorts? Would he understand that I wanted to help him? 

Would he give me the ball?