Four Angles On The Current State of The Political Dialogue
Thinking about the state of political dialogue in this country circa 2009 brings to mind the story of the blind men and the elephant, particularly the version in an old National Lampoon cartoon wherein one of the blind men, crouched beneath the elephant’s rectum, declares the elephant soft and mushy. Offered here are four possible takes on it, in some ways related, though presented in no particular order.
1) The American political dialogue has become a much less funny version of the Monty Python Argument Clinic sketch, with one side engaging in an intellectual process while the other automatically gainsays everything said without any reference to reason whatsoever. Senator DeMint (R-SC), among other Republican leaders in both the house and Senate, have gone on record couching their opposition to health care reform, to pick just one example, as simply a nifty means of sticking it to the President politically. That seems to be the entirety of the Republican opposition—the mere act of opposing—though in fairness they are remaining true to the traditional Republican principle that those who make huge amounts of money (particularly those who pass some of it on to the Party and its candidates) should be allowed to continue to make huge amounts of money regardless of circumstance, doctors and insurance executives included. The actual health, physical and financial, of their constituents? A lesser consideration, and one that is in any case addressed by the Greatest Health Care System in the World, as represented by the aforementioned doctors and insurance executives.
2) Free speech isn't free. Our political discussion in this country is dominated by lobbying, advertising and public relations professionals, aided and abetted by state of the art opinion research and psychological warfare professionals ("consultants") and a lazy media that swallows whole and blanket rotates anything that they deem newsworthy (which is usually a synonym for "controversial") without the least regard to its factual content. All of this costs money, meaning that the viewpoints of those who profit from the status quo, and are able to funnel some of those profits in the direction of this sort of manipulation get their viewpoints heard and repeated, and you don't. Per their decision in Buckley v. Valeo, this is just fine with the Supreme Court.
3) Given the last eight (oh, all right, thirty. Oh, all right, sixty. Oh, okay, fine, two hundred thirty three) years of American political history, we have become so crabbed by our constant exposure to lies and secrets in the public sphere that some of us wouldn’t recognize a straightforward political discussion if it were occurring in our pants. Healthy skepticism has in certain quarters metastasized into a malignant cynicism, a kind of terminal inability to accept the obvious where the convoluted will do— all motives are questioned, all statements parsed for hidden meaning, all rational explanations weighed against truly outlandish ones. The result? A sort of regurgatative phase of late stage bullshit poisoning, combined with a nasty social tendency towards political coprophagia.
4) One whole side of the conversation-- the Republicans, the conservatives, call them what you will-- is proceeding in a near constant state of bad faith, from false, misleading, and obfuscatory statements on the floors of the House and Senate to the cacophonous shit stream of talk radio and right wing media all the way down to the phony grass roots of the bussed in, corporate sponsored "protesters" who have been disrupting congressional town hall meetings of late. This latter group's lobbyist-generated marching orders contain what might be a fitting slogan for the entire movement, top to bottom: "Try to rattle (them), not have an intelligent debate." Rattle them with fear mongering. Rattle them with distracting lies. Exploit the diverting antics of the mentally ill. Avoid, at all costs, any situation that might expose your blinkered, received view of things to rational scrutiny. By all means, don't engage the "enemy" in a battle of wits. You're unarmed, and will lose. And that would be bad for business.
