Copeland's Corner: January 25, 2024

Why I made the difficult decision to end a 40-year friendship.

Happy New Year and welcome to the first COPELAND’S CORNER blog of 2024. I hope that you had a joyous holiday season and I’d like to thank you for your support of this blog over the past year. It’s much appreciated. I also wanted to mention, in case you weren’t aware, that there is a COPELAND’S CORNER podcast that drops on Thursdays that features me along with two or three other professional comics going over the news of the week. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes heavy, and always informative. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on our YouTube channel. My team is currently trying to see if there’s a way that we can send the feeds through Substack so that you can access them easily from your mailbox each week. Stay tuned!

Now, on to this week’s essay.

The start of a new year is when many people take stock of their lives and think of ways to improve their quality. Some determine to lose weight. Some promise themselves they’ll develop better self-discipline. Others decide to declutter and remove things from their lives that are not conducive to their health, happiness, well-being, or success. I chose the latter. I made the difficult decision to end a 40-year friendship.

I met Bill (not his real name) when I was a 19-year-old fledgling comic. He was a comedian in his early 30s and took me under his wing, teaching me everything from joke construction to stage presence to how to talk to the hordes of young women who followed us comics around from gig to gig. We were there for each other’s weddings, and we were there for each other’s divorces. My children call him “Uncle Bill” (again, not his real name). If there was one difference between us, it was in political philosophy. He is conservative. I am not.

Bill is a white man who is today in his early 70s. I mention race because it’s relevant to the discussion as you’ll see later on. Over the past four decades, we’ve argued over Reagan versus Mondale, Bush I versus Dukakis, Clinton versus Bush I and later Dole, Bush II versus Gore, Obama versus McCain and Romney, fossil fuel versus alternative sources of energy, the justification of the war in Iraq and much more. They were spirited debates but, they were among friends and never interfered with our genuine affection for each other. Then Trump got elected.

I never discussed Trump with Bill because I was afraid he’d supported him and I didn’t want that to be true so, I didn’t want to know. We’d talk, but it was always about comedy and other things. We kept discussions of world events out of it. Then Trump got impeached for the first time and Bill railed about how unfair the impeachment was (it was for holding up vital aid to Ukraine that Congress had already appropriated) unless the Ukrainian government dug up or manufactured dirt on Joe Biden, Trump’s presumed 2020 rival.

“He did nothing wrong,” Bill raved.

“Aside from breaking federal law, he lied. He’s on tape making the demand.”

“Obama lied too!” Bill ranted.

“Give me one example of Obama telling a lie,” I said.

Bill hung up on me. Like most Trump supporters, when you confront them with facts or contradictions to their narrative, they either obfuscate, employ “whataboutism” or they run.

As time went on, we spoke less. As we did, I noticed his Facebook feed was getting crazier and crazier. Denying Covid was dangerous. Decrying the wearing of masks during the pandemic as a way for liberals to take away their freedom and eventually their guns. It seemed as if the “information” didn’t come from Fox News, OAN or Newsmax, it wasn’t worthy of repeating. The more I saw of this, the more I tried to remain in denial. This was my friend of decades. I had to look the other way. I did, until I couldn’t anymore.

After Trump took Latino babies from their mothers at the southern border (many of whom have still not been reunited with their parents), decried poor nations filled with people of color as “shithole countries”, proclaimed that there were “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, egged on the January 6 Capitol attack with the aid of white supremacist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, perpetuated the lie that two African American poll workers in Atlanta had conspired to commit fraud in the 2020 election thus opening them to harassment and death threats from the thugs who follow him, he abandoned all pretense of not being a White Supremacist by echoing the words of Adolf Hitler when he said that foreigners and people of color were “poisoning the blood” of “real Americans.”

On that day, Bill posted a Photoshop picture of Trump sitting by a still pool over the caption, “All will soon be calm again.”

That was it for me. I didn’t understand how Bill could claim to love me and my children yet support an unapologetic racist and make excuses and rationalizations for the bigotry Trump has not only opened up in this country, but the permission he’s given those with hatred in their hearts to openly express that hatred. I decided then and there that the friendship was over. The friend I had was dead, replaced by a soulless cult member.

People have asked me, “How can you give up a friendship over politics?”

This question always infuriates me. Can you not see that this isn’t about politics? It’s about morality. It’s about the difference between right and wrong. If you can’t see that, you’ve got some deep soul searching to do. Or, you’re a member of the cult too.