A few weeks ago I had to take a business trip to the west coast and while I was there I decided to kill two birds with one stone and visit my long-lost cousin Bob. Bob and I are about the same age and share similar origins and many experiences; we were pretty close as kids and as young men, so although we were only distantly related I was really looking forward to seeing him again. We lost track of each other about twenty years ago, and since we both have very common names, it was difficult to track each other down. But eventually, through the internet, contact was established and we made arrangements for me to stay with him while I was in town.

Bob was always a striking figure, tall and athletic, very dark but with startling blue eyes. The years had not treated him too badly, he had put on weight, and he still has most of his hair, although it is almost completely white now. His politics and philosophy were not too dissimilar to mine either, although he was always quite a bit more doctrinaire and committed than I was. His first job out of college (GI Bill, of course) had been as a reporter for a major radio station in our home town, and he soon became a popular and respected (and feared!) journalist, specializing in local political and business affairs. Eventually, he became too good at his job. A local businessman was the object of one of his stories, one with political connections and, more important, a heavy advertiser on the station where Bob worked. To make a long story short, his story was buried and he was fired.

Finding it impossible to get any other work in his field, he found employment in the construction trades. He found the work challenging and interesting and developed a knack for it, as well as a fierce loyalty to the men who worked alongside him. After a long apprenticeship he quickly progressed up the hierarchy of his craft, and participated heavily in union activities. Before too long, he had become a man with some influence in the local industrial scene, with a reputation and experience throughout the southeast, both on the job, as an organizer and at the negotiating table. Along the way he managed to pick up a graduate degree. He was even asked once by one of his management opponents if he would consider coming to work for them. He did not sell out.

Eventually, advancing age and the physical demands of his work led him to early retirement and to other work, including software sales and systems integration, and eventually he became a schoolteacher, a position he has recently retired from. Today, he works part time as a college professor. Because of wise investments, his work experience and his wife's income (she is an administrator with the school system), he is a prosperous man, who by his own admission "lives like Pharaoh". But he has never forgotten his working class roots. We both spent our early years in the projects, and I was amazed how quickly we both slipped back into the street slang and Spanglish accents of our youth.

I got a chance to sit in on one of his university classes--the topic covered was the history of the American labor movement between the Civil War and World War I. His presentation was magnificent, and if it is a sample of what his students get every day, they are fortunate indeed. The story was covered clearly and forcefully, in just 50 minutes, illustrated with period slides he had gathered in libraries and the internet. The whole bloody story was there, the rise of finance capitalism, mass production and mechanization, strikes, urbanization, the origins of Labor as a political force, the reaction of capital, international influences and consequences, the role of foreign trade and movement of capital: the transformation of society from agriculture and light industry to massive industrialization; more from an economic and social rather than ideological or political point of view. The major events and personalities were all included, all from a Marxist perspective, but without the tiresome jargon, clichés and generalizations usually associated with that analysis. He flew very skilfully right under the radar.

A biased presentation? Perhaps, although he did not really have the time to get into ideology or causes, the litany of events and social changes that passed through that turbulent period spoke for themselves. Much of what he described was painful, and hard to accept as reality, except for the pages of period newspapers he flashed on the screen, from both sides of the street battles of that time. I consider myself a critical observer, and he spoke nothing that is not already common knowledge, although it is often interpreted in very different ways. And remember, these kids were either business majors, already indoctrinated with an opposing viewpoint, or liberal arts students with little interest or preconceptions in the field. This was a perspective they rarely get in today's college classroom. At any rate, the students were attentive, or as attentive as college undergraduates can be expected to be, and from their questions it was clear they were paying attention. They got their money's worth.

But the long talks I had with my cousin also revealed a growing shift between us, one that been widening since we had last met and talked at length. Bob seemed surprised at how many of my ideas were not as partisan as his, and even where we agreed how I did not seem as angered or as certain as he was. It was almost as if he could have accepted a purely reactionary and conservative stance from me more than one that still partially overlapped his, in general, but not in detail. He stopped short of accusing me of making excuses for the "other side", but I think he felt somewhat betrayed that my politics and his had drifted apart. I preferred to think he had been doing most of the drifting, perhaps influenced by his own personal struggle and experiences over our lost years. Then again, maybe I do not evaluate myself objectively; but to my mind, he had gone further left, I was firmly planted where I had always been.

Our disagreement was most bitter over the war in Iraq, which I saw as primarily a failure of execution and a triumph of incompetence, based on ideological fantasies and perpetuated by the failure of its perpetrators and their apologists to recognize and admit their errors . His take on it was more predictable: economic imperialism pure and simple. We disagreed on Israel, Arab terrorism, and the spread of Communism in Latin America. Chavez I know little about, but his defense of Castro was incomprehensible to me. He had been to Cuba recently, he had talked to people, they were happy, the government there cared for its citizens and they were forced to adopt a hard stance to frustrate imperialist designs. I didn't buy a word of it. I told him there was no reason a government couldn't be founded on the right principles and still evolve quickly into a corrupt dictatorship. He felt astonished that I could put together a synthesis that agreed with many of his assumptions but still refused to accept all of his conclusions. And of course, I haven't been to Cuba since childhood, so I could not argue with his authority. But I know authority, particularly scholarly authority, is not altogether trustworthy when filtered through ideological lenses.

He was obsessed with what he felt was an upcoming stock market crash, the final validation of his economic ideas, and was engaged in a program to shelter his assets to better survive it. Unlike others who feel it hypocritical for those with progressive ideas to take advantage of and manipulate the economic system, I did not begrudge him this. Everyone is entitled to do what they think is best for their own family and fortune, and no one need make excuses for their own prosperity simply because they are critical of the institutions that made it possible. But I could still see the contradiction (used in the Marxist sense of the word) of how someone in his position, a project rat like me, had done so well in a society that he felt was so fundamentally flawed and unjust. I also did not expect the economic collapse he was predicting to materialize as soon as he expected it either, the resilience of an economy can be quite astounding. Even though I agreed with him on many of his macroeconomic evaluations, again, I did not necessarrily accept all his extrapolations from them.

We parted, I felt, under what I suspect was a cloud on our relationship. I feel he felt betrayed, that somehow I had let him down, and that he was almost more troubled by the fact that I disagreed with him on some issues than the possibility that I might have disagreed with him on all of them. An ideological opponent is predictable, his motives and maneuvers are to be expected. But when someone shares many of your values and STILL confronts you it is a threat to everything you believe in. It hints that maybe you haven't got it quite right, that you have missed something. No one wants to hear that from an ally.

I hope he's not angry with me, I hold nothing against him and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations. I did not feel threatened by them, or disappointed by what I now feel to be his extremism and intransigence. I suppose this ideological split that has divided our country can appear anywhere, between almost anyone, in any family. It's just a sign of the times.