Bacon Will Bring Us Together / Joel Stein






 People are so fascinating that I love to sit alone at my computer and learn about them. So I was excited when Facebook gave me access to the beta version of Graph Search, which allows users to run searches on its 1 billion members. It's sort of like Google, only instead of sorting through facts, you sort through people pretending to be much happier than they really are.

The results of my searches were astounding. Eight members of Mensa like Donald Trump! Fourteen TIME readers smoke weed every day! More than 1,000 people who live in Los Angeles like books! Facebook Graph can also be incredibly useful, as with my searches for "photos of people I went to high school with," which saves me the trouble of going to my next reunion, and "photos of women who live in Los Angeles who like Russell Brand," which saved me the trouble of going to a porn site.

But after a few hours, I figured out Graph Search's real purpose: to find, in this age of political polarization, the reasonable people in the middle. Instead of having to listen to loud, angry people, I could now get answers from the quiet and rational. My first search: people who like both John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi. There are more than 1,000 of them. None of them was John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi.




Illustration by Tomasz Walenta; car: Getty Images 

I chose Robbie Rist, who told me that he's a liberal who listens to Rush Limbaugh every morning, since both parties often have good ideas and he needs help waking up. He thinks both House leaders do an admirable job trying to solve problems with no easy solutions and are underappreciated, like cops and dentists. "Even after this last election, Boehner has held the party line down. That must be an incredible amount of pressure all the time. No wonder he cries," Rist said. He thinks the only solutions to our debt crisis are long-term systemic changes like investing in our education system. I was so impressed with Rist that after we talked, I went back to look at his Facebook page, where I found out he played Cousin Oliver, the adorable kid in the final six episodes of The Brady Bunch. If people who endure that kind of trauma always emerge this thoughtful, I regret that we did not elect John McCain as President.

I was equally impressed with Brenda Bailey, one of the 131 members of the group One Million Moms for Gun Control who also like the National Rifle Association. Bailey grew up hunting, carried a Ruger in her car when she lived in Arizona and recently went to a gun show with her brother. But she also had a stalker break into her home and hold a gun to her head. She believes people should be able to own guns but only after background checks and a 30-day wait; she also thinks ammunition should be far more expensive. She was so well informed that she had just watched the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun control on C-SPAN. Unfortunately, in a move that was incredibly extreme for any of the moderate people I talked to, she decided as we spoke that the NRA had become so unreasonable that she was going to unlike it.

To be frank, I had hoped that people who liked opposing things would be idiots who just press the Like button a lot. But these people seemed to have solutions the country could agree on. Even January Thomas, who likes both People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and bacon, very reasonably eats meat just twice a week and makes sure it's humanely raised. She wears leather and has a vintage fur coat. Thomas works for Dr. Bronner's soaps, whose CEO is a vegan, and she's a marijuana-legalization activist, so most of her friends are vegan. And sometimes they drive her crazy. "When vegans start arguing about cows' milk, I think, I grew up on a dairy farm, and those cows were treated really well," she said. "I believe animals have souls and spirits, but who cannot love bacon?" If that statement can't bring our country together, I do not know what will.

I was sure I had harnessed technology to solve all our planet's ills. Then I searched for people who liked both Israel and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Let me first state that Baltimore horror novelist David Dickens is a polite, optimistic man who now has my home phone number. Dickens has some moderate solutions, saying Israel should both give up some territory and stop using Ahmadinejad as a scapegoat to increase its military. Then Dickens spoke for quite some time telling me the following: 9/11 was an inside job, a silent military coup has already occurred in the U.S., and the euro is about to be replaced by a gold-backed currency. So the Graph Search function might need some slight tweaking to work on Middle East issues.
But there is a moderate, gun-owning, bacon-eating middle who clearly should be leading our country. The problem is that they're spending way too much time on Facebook.

 

TIME