Fri 12 Sep 2008
I normally stay away from writing about politics. I’ll give you two reasons.
- The noble reason: I like to think I’m above the fray, and I’m not interested enough to stay on top of every issue.
However, I don’t really consider this a political post. Because American politics is no longer political, it’s cultural.
For your consideration, here are a few snippets of so-called political discourse culled from Twitter in the last couple of days:
“Please keep coming back to Philadelphia, jackhole”(in reference to McCain)
“…if Obama was white, he would have been laughed out of the primary runoff.”
“Talking Barbie said ‘Math is Hard.’ Talking Caribou Barbie says ‘Foreign Policy is Hard.’”
What is wrong with you people? What is wrong with all of us?
Why do we act like soccer hooligans when it comes to politics? There is no civility any more, no critical thinking. Both sides see in black and white. Listen to the pundits on TV or read the bloggers. They cannot say a single good word about someone on the other side. The “strategists” have an excuse; spin is their job. But for the rest of us: has our diet of sound bites made us so intellectually lazy that we just swallow all that?
Everyone on the left is a hippie, a terrorist, or an anarchist. Everyone on the right is evil, stupid, a hypocrite, or just plain out of touch. Are we that different from each other?
Or are we just preaching to our own choirs in our own echo chambers, having forgotten how to have intelligent discourse with someone who doesn’t think just like us? We hide in our red-state or blue-state tribes, and we have lost the ability to relate to people outside of our little boxes. The ideals of those on the other side are lunacy to us, because we don’t know anyone who thinks like that.
We surround ourselves with people who think like us, talk like us, look like us. Thanks to the Internet, if we don’t live near anyone just like us, we can still be friends with them on Facebook. We don’t have to talk to the neighbors next door if we don’t like their bumper sticker. But on Twitter, or the blogs, we can be pretty certain that we’re among “friends” and everyone’s going to agree with everything we say. If not, well, it’s easy to call people names with a keyboard.
So much for the marketplace of ideas.
I promised you two reasons I don’t like to write about politics, didn’t I?
- The honest reason: I’m afraid it would alienate me from 99 percent of the people in my tribe. I have a college degree. I write and I build Web sites. I use a Mac (and you can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers). You tell me who I’m supposed to vote for.
The problem is, I have a few too many Red Tribe values that, as far as I can tell, aren’t shared by the leader of the Blue Tribe.
But you know what? Who cares?
In truth, I’d take either candidate at this point. All four people in the race are amazing human beings with admirable qualities: courage, dignity, wisdom, spunk. Or do you have so little faith in our political system that you think only one side of the machine turns out decent products? George Bush is the worst president ever. No wait, Bill Clinton was. No, I’m pretty sure it’s the next guy, whichever one it turns out to be.
Besides, this country is not a dictatorship (no, not even after the last eight years). One President does not make or break the country. People complain that it’s hard to get things done in Washington. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s why I hold my nose and cheer for the two-party system.
America needs people that stand up for the little guy and make sure everyone gets their fair shot at the dream. America also needs people that want the government to get out of the way so that individuals can achieve the dream.
I swear it’s a coincidence that I started writing this post on September 11, but God help us if it takes another one of those to put us all back on the same side of the fence.
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I understand and respect having “red tribe values.” I would love to have heard more about them in the speech’s at the GOP convention. I would have loved to have heard more policy and less of this divisiveness that you speak of. Yes, both parties do it. Fox AND MSNBC but I have to say I was hopeful for awhile after the Democratic Convention and Michele Obama’s words about respectfully disagreeing. When I tuned into the Republicans I didn’t see much of the unity. I saw some smug slander and very little of anything else in Palin’s words. And from others there were attempts to pit us against each other and fire up their own party. I was disappointed. I hope you find this comment to be a “respectful disagreement.”
Hi, Candace!
I think respectful disagreement is a wonderful thing. I just have a problem with the disrespectful flavor. And as far as I can tell, you didn’t disagree with anything in my post. Did you?
As far as which side is nastier, I have only this one bit of anecdote: I searched Summize for “palin” and then “mccain” and got all those results in the first page or two. Searching for “obama”, I had to dig down to like the 18th page to find anything remotely negative.
Regardless, I really think comments of the “my side / your side” variety are off-topic. I won’t delete them, but I won’t debate them either. That’s not what this post is about. With that said, welcome to the blog!
SRC: Come for the rant, stay for the raving. Or something.
I think you might have a point insofar as what
people write on the internet, but what it comes to “official” channels I think the “conservative” (in quotes because I’m not sure this type of thing counts as real conservatives) side has the edge in terms of both nastiness and extremism. Sure, there are crazy extreme left-wing people (Ward Churchill is one that the other side loves to bring up) but for the most part they aren’t well known and don’t have a large sphere of influence, whereas people like Ann Coulter (to pick a particularly egregious example) publish national bestsellers. And I think a lot of people are really fed up after 8 years
of Bush and feel like the stakes are incredibly high in this election, which sometimes comes out in harsh and uncivil ways. And going along with the 8 years of Bush thing, I think a lot of people who lean more toward the Blue side feel like they have been told for the last 8 years (and longer) that they aren’t “real Americans,” “real Christians” or “real patriots” because they don’t subscribe to a lot of things that Red Heartland America supposedly believes. On the other hand, I have a lot of connections on the Red side, and I do get upset sometimes when I feel like my Blue friends are reflexively painting them as stupid. On the other other hand, I don’t email forwards from my Blue friends comparing John McCain to Hitler or the AntiChrist. Guess what I do get from conservative family members–on a regular basis?!
Sorry, that got long.
Erin, thanks for stopping by!
I knew when I wrote this post that any comments would probably be of the “but they started it” variety. I think that’s representative of the “us vs. them” thinking that I’m griping about in the post. But we have Republican Lee Atwater (and Karl Rove in his footsteps) to thank for popularizing the “politics is war” mindset that we seem to be stuck with. Mudslinging works because it takes the other side off message to deny the negative claim. I wish the public were smart enough not to buy into all that. It’s just a job for them, but it’s our culture that pays the price.
What I really hate is that it’s not enough anymore to claim that you have the best idea for running the country. Now you have to have moral superiority as well. Both sides paint the other as just plain bad people: hypocrites, terrorists, warmongers, the devil. I mean, seriously people, do you hear yourselves?
Since you read my short story (which I may post here in installments, btw), one of the subtexts is along the lines of: we’re so quick to throw out the “evil politician” label, would we know it if a really evil politician came along?