Purple State of Mind: The business of polarization
Purple State of Mind’s John Marks calls polarization “the most inscrutable American growth industry of them all.”
“…the industry that depends for its survival on your constant sense of outraged alienation from fellow citizens, neighbors and family members. It’s the industry that pits you in competition every waking hour of your day and in every walk of your life against complete strangers as a means to generate profits.
Never heard of the polarization business? That’s because the polarizers don’t want to be seen as a business. To continue to thrive, their domain has to be seen as a marketplace of ideas, a savvy, street-wise entertainment, a spirited debate. In fact, at its heart, it’s none of those things. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, and every other pop culture gangster who ever lived, when Newt Gingrich calls Judge Sonya Sotomayor a racist, it’s not personal. It’s not even politics. It’s business, plain and simple, and it has been for years.
But here’s the catch. It’s a business that depends for its success upon journalists, bloggers, and the general public buying and selling the product under the guise of politics. The price of entry is believing the lie. That’s the part that Tony Soprano would most appreciate, I think, the beauty of a perfect deception.
Once we’ve shifted our focus a bit, it’s easy enough to see how the polarization business works. Like anything large and complex in nature, it functions as an ecosystem.
Provocative, offensive, incendiary statements are best seen as rain. They must fall for the crops to grow. Without offending statements, the bloggers have no opinions, and the twenty-four-hour cable networks have no stories, unless a child is savagely murdered, a good-looking woman vanishes or a storm kicks the groin of a coast line…
Here’s the deal. We are being stimulated by a colossal, nerveless, anger machine that doesn’t care whether we whip ourselves into a frenzy or blow ourselves apart. It lives only to gorge itself on the proceeds of our rage, and yet we have begun to think of this machine as if it were somehow synonymous with our democracy.
One last time: It’s not. It’s mostly just big-ass business. Wake up, America, and smell the coffee–or is that the smell of your own manufactured fury making someone else rich?”
Add comment May 30th, 2009
