His judgments hurt. Pete didn't want pleasure, he said. He was a fighter. "There are more important things in life than love!" Pete reminded me of the serious man in The Little Prince by St-Exupery, who only had time for serious calculations on his very serious planet, and no time to grow a rose. "You don't understand and there is no time to explain," Pete was saying. "We have a job to do, and we’ll finish it!" "Who is "we"?" "Republicans and American groups unknown to you, but are very angry, -- very, very angry," he wouldd insist. He was gathering his information from the Republican Circle, the Christian Coalition and the NRA via e and snail-mails. Plus, The National Review and The American Spectator magazines were piling up on the coffee table. Once in a while, I would browse through them to see what they were saying. The spite, hatred, biases, demeaning jokes and caricatures found in their pages appalled me. "Why are you feeding your spirit with such literature," I’d protest. "This is propaganda. This is trash! And you claim to be Christian?" The columnists sounded just like the angry priests of my childhood, who had threatened me with excommunication for reading the Existentialist philosophers.