Like many of us, I spend my days pivoting quickly from my personal to my work life, sometimes enough that I get a little confused. In my case there is quite a bit of overlap: I teach my children not to call each other names, to clean up their own messes and to use their allowance sensibly. Then I write a blog post about politicians who are calling each other names, too busy making messes to clean them up and most definitely do no spend allowance well.
We can try to make it more complex, but it sort of boils right down to that in the end.
Although someone more sensible might recognize that making politicians behave is hopeless, it is still my earnest belief that all those folks in Washington really need is – same as my children – just a little bit of competent mothering. And given that I’m so very busy I have a hard time getting everything done, I say it’s high time for a two-fer column. So, Senators and children, alike, take note. (Begin dream sequence here. Music crescendos, screen gets dreamy, (incredibly young-looking) mother stands in front of elected officials and her offspring and—while I know this strains credibility—both groups are paying rapt attention. She gives them advice:)
Use your magic words.
Be careful with that stick or you’ll put an eye out.
Money does not grow on trees.
You let Johnnie worry about himself.
If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you do it?
No dessert until you eat your dinner.
Don’t make that face or it will freeze in that position.
If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Never lie, cheat, or steal.
Alright, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we might want to plan to send somewhere around 100 Senators and a whole mess of Congressmen to their rooms without dinner. Not 50, 100. If we’re going to be good parents, we can’t play favorites. The remarkable thing is that if we as a people stopped falling for the childish standby “he started it” and “I’m telling” – perpetually and hypocritically played one side against the other to divide and conquer – we might just have elected representatives falling all over themselves to grow up for a change.
Just wondering… If we don’t insist that they behave, who will?
When Keith Olbermann hit the airwaves back in 2003, you could hear a collective sigh of relief among liberal-leaning America, long frustrated by their lack of voice in America’s media.
Conservatives who haven’t passed out reading my first paragraph should know that liberals sincerely believe that the media leans right. Limbaugh’s pinko “government-run media” is to a liberal the “corporate media” and comes with all the baggage and bias the name implies. (Parenthetically, the competing versions of media bias are explained in studies demonstrating a hostile media effect: The same story was simultaneously perceived as biased by both opposing camps, likely because they understood the subtleties of their own position and felt it inadequately represented… as subtleties usually are.)
As a center-left-leaner and a 2004 Howard Dean fan (a man with the nerve to tell us really early on that the Emperor of Iraq was buck naked, early enough to have avoided the whole affair were we listening I might add), I believe that in the years after 9-11 the American marketplace of ideas was pretty broken. Our collective trauma evolved into a very human need to march in lockstep with patriotic sounding bad decision-making.
So Olbermann was a breath of fresh air. I immediately bonded. My friends bonded. Veritable left-leaning lovefest ensues.
We were in. Keith Olbermann is chicken soup for the liberal soul. He was in our tribe.
I can only imagine that this is exactly how conservatives felt with the rise of talk radio inside of a culture that had moved dramatically leftward inside of a decade in the 60’s and mostly stayed there, likely leaving crew-cut heads spinning with culture shock. (University of Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt’s work tells us that conservatives are temperamentally more averse to change than liberals. That makes the 60’s quadruple crazy if you lean right, only double if you’re left.)
Trouble is that once in the Keith Olbermann (or talk radio) chicken soup for the liberal (or conservative) soul, we can barely notice the inevitable result of like-minded amen chorus groupiness. We were frogs in water brought gradually to a boil.
Ironically, Keith Olbermann is a frog too. And – while I’m having to force my fingers to type this measure of charity for a broadcaster I find hateful and factually wrong almost 4 times a sentence – maybe so was Rush Limbaugh? Could they both be victims of the sound of their own echo chambers?
Once in, the slight shifts toward unanimity are barely perceptible. Hyperbole forgiven. Insulting name-calling gets guilty snickers and knowing glances. Quirky family member forgiven. And then you look up a few years later and you can barely believe that someone you know and thought you liked – who might be a conservative “frog” to your liberal one – could see reality so differently than you do. And even if you were too polite to say it (which if you read blog comment threads, growing numbers of us are not), you might have thought that they’re dumb.
Lather, rinse, repeat… and you can see how we’re where we are now.
I admit that I still really like Keith Olbermann. He often makes a lot of sense to me. But my new Village Square center of gravity often leaves me uncomfortably having to forgive a bit more than I’d prefer. And it has me stretching to understand people who aren’t in my tribe. My message isn’t that Olbermann is bad/evil/at fault. It’s that he – like us – is human. As is everyone outside of my tribe for whom I have tended to not offer any forgiveness at all.
Keith Olbermann + a bunch of liberal viewers and liberal guests + 10 or 15 more years might just = right wing talk radio, the liberal edition. And if you think there is something about conservatives that makes them jump the shark when liberals can somehow magically avoid it, I’d like to suggest that you might want to hop out of the water.
(Visit our Purple State of Mind friends who continue to be kind enough to host the Village Square once a week on their blog.)
The recent passage of the healthcare bill in the Senate brought with it some need-to-take-a-bath-right-now details on how the legislative “sausage” was made. Now dubbed the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback” by conservative commentators, two Democratic Senators (Landrieu and Nelson) seemed to have snatched possible electoral defeat from the jaws of what initially probably looked to them as consummate legislative dealmaking victories.
Whether you’re on the left or right side of the aisle, there are real signs of good news in the general public’s negative reaction to Nelson and Landrieu’s actions, most wonderfully in their home states – the people who were supposed to be delighted at the booty the Senators had brought home. Good for them.*
You would have a hard, hard time finding .5% of the population who support this sort of legislative ugliness. We should probably take a moment to revel in something that is finally bipartisan.
Moment over. Hope you enjoyed it though.
Right now “we the people” are acutely aware of the apparent failure in moral standing of our elected representatives. Half of them anyway.
We seem to be only capable of perceiving moral failure in those we disagree with. The exact behaviors that we rail on endlessly about in our political enemies get a big yawn – or even an ovation – when they’re practiced by our political allies, if we even ever perceive they’ve occurred. If we bother to see the inconsistency, we usually use an uber-rationalization for it, such as the old standby that “we” stand for goodness and light, “they” are out to get you.
Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.
This dubious achievement may have inspired Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama. In any case, Mr. Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.
We have become a nation of people who so love the warm bubble bath of only ever perceiving things that make us feel good. And apparently hate, finger-pointing and lobbing stones from our own glass houses is really yummy feeling right now.
The tragedy here is that if we could only momentarily throw off our blinders, we’d see that we could change what none of us like by holding everyone to the same high standards. Elected officials can only play their hypocritical childish games as long as our nation is a playground full of children with no adults in sight.
It should be perfectly clear by now that we can’t wait around for our leaders to grow up. So we’d better go ahead and do it ourselves.
If we don’t like legislators holding out for home state payoffs, we’ve got to be equally offended when our “side” does it. On the day that we wake up to that reality, when the politicians hold their finger up in the wind, it will have shifted.
So often we whine that we have no power. The irony is that we have all of it.
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*On a side note, there is some reporting that the Republican Governor of Nebraska asked Senator Nelson to strike this deal, who is now – in an utterly ridiculous irony – the opposition candidate who Nelson’s action has put him 31 percentage points behind in the polls.
According to the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach: “Citizenship is hard. It takes a commitment to listen, watch, read, and think in ways that allow the imagination to put one person in the shoes of another.”
While he’d be too polite to agree with me, by his own measure Jim Leach is the quintessential citizen.
We had the distinct pleasure to spend a day last week learning a thing or two about citizenship from this man who’s had a lot of practice at it, 30 years in Congress and all. Taking a page from Paul Revere – although with a gentlemanly preference toward intentionally less fanfare in the ride, possibly more of a William Dawes (who I admittedly would know nothing about were it not for Lea Marshall and Malcolm Gladwell.… bless them both…) – Leach is setting out to visit every single one of these United States to tell us a thing or two about the high bar that citizenship demands.
While he will be characteristically gentle in the telling, it just could be that a test of citizenship is coming, a test of citizenship is coming.
Leach served at a time when tense work week Congressional fights were followed by weekend signs of friendship across the aisle and probably a bipartisan backyard bar-b-que or two and then, in turn as a democracy demands, another round of philosophical fighting. He served when relationships among legislators were what Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart, refers to as “cross-cutting.” These public servants could be on one “side” here and another “side” there as they went about the business of building a country (which they understood to be their job)… leaving noticeably less room for the evil “they” that seems to have so effectively eclipsed the common “we” just about everywhere these days.
Except we isn’t common at all when it’s part of “We the People,” it is something we should treat with reverence and care. According to Leach, “[c]ertain frameworks of thought define rival ideas. Other frameworks describe enemies.”
It isn’t just anybody who can commit to our historical tradition of complex cross-cutting relationships to serve a greater end. It isn’t just any country that builds itself on such a challenging principle.
There are those who are bonded to our founders because our founders were angry, chafing at authoritarian British rule for freedom.
They were.
But the big audacious and nearly-insane-had-it-not-been-so-wildly-successful essence of our founders was so much more than angry. These were men of profound ideas who believed that, despite all of human history before them, “we, the (plain old average) people” could be the boss.
They were willing to sit uncomfortably at the crossroads of ideas, where the comfort of convictions stood regularly challenged and the luxury of entirely dismissing rival ideas probably edged you a wee bit closer to being hung by the king. They had to sit at a knife’s edge, weighing one idea against another in constant struggle for excellence and results. These men had to bring their “A” game to their revolution, and indeed they did. And by challenging ideas as they stayed connected to each other, they made something magnificent.
They made America the City on the Hill in the world no matter what anyone says (thank you very much).
And it is public servants like Jim Leach who carry on their tradition. Please listen to his speech. What is 20 minutes when a country you love may depend on it?
The bad news is that “We the People” cannot be the boss if we’re unwilling to do the hard work of citizenship. The good news is that we come by it naturally.
You can probably tell why we kind of like our friends at Purple State of Mind just a little from this post by John Marks. We think they do such important work that we moved heaven and earth to bring them to Tallahassee last spring. So why not go on over to Purple and find out what we mean.
…the idea of a Purple State of dialogue, in which people could speak their minds across ideological divides and yet still respect their opponents, ceased to be a nice idea about politeness and became an urgent attempt to reverse the national meltdown. One clear sign of the urgency has been our discovery of like-minded projects around the United States, whether the folks at the Village Square in Tallahassee or the people behind the website Science and Religion Today, who recently reached out to us.
It’s no coincidence that our project has a special relevance in Florida. Municipalities and counties have been dealing with ferocious political and cultural confrontation non-stop for at least a decade, and lots of people down there are exhausted. We saw strong signs of a new push to improve the terms of combat, but we also know they have their work cut out for them.
This coming March, the Republican primary contest for a Florida Senate seat promises to be a donnybrook between moderate conservative Governor Charlie Crist and conservative darling Marco Rubio. That contest shows all the signs of becoming a civil war within the state Republican Party, but it’ll be a national test, too, a measure of how good or bad things are state-wide.
Thank goodness, Tallahassee has its angels. While spending time in the state capital, where the local film festival honored the movie with an award for audience favorite, we met the ingenious and inexhaustible Liz Joyner. Her organization, The Village Square, hasn’t indulged in wishful thinking, ala Rodney King. It jumped into the fray. This year, while we wrung our hands about the decline in civility, Joyner jumped into the lion’s den and hosted a series of discussions about healthcare, doing everything in her power to bring both conservative and democratic voices into the room.
By her own account, it was exhausting, and she didn’t manage to get the ranks to fall in love with each other, but there was a dialogue, and there will be more.
Thanks to Liz, we got to Tallahassee. Thanks to Wendy Abberger, president of Leadership Florida, we began to see ramifications of our project that had never been obvious before. Wendy is extremely well-connected throughout the business and political communities across the state, and after seeing our presentations at St. John’s Episcopal Church, she invited us to speak to her organization’s annual meeting in Orlando.
In preparation for that event, she told us that her group would be less interested in the religious aspects of our conversation and more interested in the notion of civic dialogue. She also let us know that Leadership members liked their speakers to offer practical advice and asked us for a kind of tool kit for dialogue. I wrote an essay for the event that became the blueprint for what you can now read on our About page.
As important as that conversation was, the Leadership event itself turned out to be the real turning point of the year. It was mid June. Earlier in the year, Texas Governor Rick Perry had made noises about secession, a perennial political flower as reliable as the bluebonnets in spring, and yet scarier somehow in our current climate. The Wall Street Journal ran a big take-out piece that weekend on what secession would look like. Meanwhile, the healthcare town hall meetings had started to get extremely ugly.
Standing before that crowd of 300 or so business leaders, we didn’t need to talk about god to get anyone’s attention. All we had to do was hold up a newspaper…
Why not jump on over to Purple State of Mind and read this post there? They are especially hospitable to differing perspectives, so you should pull up a chair and visit a while…
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I’m liberal politically.
And I believe that Conservapedia, a right-wing answer to the supposedly biased lefty Wikipedia, is right up there with war, pestilence and – oh heck in for an inch, in for a mile – locusts and plague, as a scourge of modern humanity.
And I’m only slightly overstating my dislike for the flourish.
But I’d argue that my problem with Conservapedia has nothing to do with my tendency to lean left. Even more than I believe in progressive ideas, I believe in the American marketplace of ideas where the best ideas rise from the flying fracas of ideas that sometimes leaves us ducking. We make each other better by bringing our best arguments from each side of the aisle to the table and having it out. Occasional bloody noses and all.
I dislike Conservapedia so deeply because for something supposedly established to fight bias, they sure trade in truckloads of it.
I spent about 2 hours tonight trying to sink my teeth into the site. I found way too many pages that had been locked for edits (characterizing people who might edit as “vandals”), thin sourcing, articles written by only a handful of editors when editing was even allowed, and a heavy reliance on Fox News, Limbaugh, Beck and The American Spectator. It is rife with biased language, like referring to former Vice President Dick Cheney as “American Patriot Dick Cheney” and adding into a news piece on the Episcopal Church a reference to homosexuality as “perverted relationships.” And I haven’t even gotten to the what I find to be a thoroughly despicable article on Barack Obama (it begins “Barack Hussein Obama AKA Barry Soetoro (allegedly [2][3][4][5][6] born in Honolulu Aug. 4, 1961)”).
Wikipedia is nothing like Conservapedia. Sure, you can cherry-pick problems that any large effort has, but as a whole, they’re shooting for ascertainable, verifiable fact.**
I’d like to suggest that if their goal is to increase their “side” by even one (1) voter, Conservapedia might want to re-strategize. (If their goal is to bathe in a warm fuzzy bubble bath of righteous indignation damn the facts or the consequences – which admittedly seems to of late been the goal on both sides of the partisan divide – they’re cooking with grease.)
With friends like Conservapedia, I think conservatives don’t need enemies. In fact, I think liberal-ole-me is a better advocate for conservatism than they are: I want to hear conservative America’s best head-firmly-out-of-the-sand arguments, not the product of a deluded echo chamber.
Now that you have the backstory, here’s the other shoe dropping: I caught the founder of Wikipedia on The Colbert Report this week. And I liked him. He was like one of my favorite neighbors, or even my Grandpa (and Grandpas are very hard to hate). Maybe more importantly, I am certain that he is quite sincere is his effort to fight liberal bias (unfortunately, I believe, all the way to conservative bias).
You can’t be any more honest with other people than you are with yourself. Repeat: You can’t be any more honest with other people than you are with yourself.
When we lie to ourselves we lie to others, but we really don’t know we’re lying. And that should matter. And we all do it at one time or another, and that should matter too.
From now on, I’m calling quits on insinuating that I know someone has lied. I don’t and even if I did, that’s for – uh – Someone Else to sort out. I’m just going to go with calling them factually wrong.
Maybe then we can start a real conversation. I believe that conservatives – lose the Conservapedia more often than not – have a solid argument to make.
Bring it on. Our country will be the better for it.
—
**Subjective argument, to be sure, has its place even if it isn’t encyclopedias. Note The Village Square on concepts of mythos and logos both having different but important places in wisdom HERE.
(My weekly blog post for our friends at Purple State of Mind. Why not go right on over and read it on their site, and visit a minute or two while you’re there.)
I have a new hero. (Sorry John & Craig, you’ll have to share.)
The most I could say before 2 days ago about former Republican Congressman from Iowa Jim Leach is that I had heard of him.
Leach served for 30 years in Congress and is currently the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He’s launching a 50 state civility tour. Need I say more?
I’ve spent an eyeball-rolling hour deciding how to deftly convey his wisdom at the same time as I woo you with my cleverness. But, you know, sometimes you’ve got to know when it’s time to just get the heck out of the way and let someone else’s brilliance shine. So here goes. Jim Leach making it abundantly clear why my new motto is “Jim Leach, Jim Leach, Jim Leach…”
Jim Leach on what he calls “Reality 101:” “9/11 has taught that thinking must change not simply because of the destructive power of the big bomb, but because of the implosive nature of small acts. Violence and social division are rooted in hate. Since such thought begins in the hearts and minds of individuals, it is in each of our hearts and minds that hate must be checked and our way of thinking changed.”
Leach on “Sports 101:” “The temper and integrity of the political dialogue are more important for the cohesiveness of society than the outcome of any election. The problem in politics is that there are so few rules and no referees. The public must be on perpetual guard and prepared to throw flags when politicians overstep the bounds of fairness and decency.”
Leach on why Congress sucks (my words): “Approximately 380 of 435 House seats are designed or gerrymandered in such a way as to be safe for one of the parties… Institutional polarization is the inevitable result.”
Leach on why Congress sucks, part 2 (again, my hero is too classy to say “sucks” but I’m not): “On the left, the problem is frequently evidenced by those who assume that increasing social spending for almost any compassionate cause is the only moral choice; and on the right, by those who assume that the moral values of one or another group should be written into law to bind society as a whole.”
Leach on why Congress sucks, part 3 (so much material here): “…What is so confounding about today’s politics is the break with a central aspect of the American political tradition. Historically, legislative decision-making has been based on what might be described as a Hegelian give-and-take between the parties—the thesis being one party’s perspective, the antithesis, the other’s, and the synthesis being legislation that accommodates concerns of each… a trend has developed where legislative compromises are being made almost exclusively within whichever party controls Congress… Far better it would be for all legislators to consider themselves responsible for governing and for both sides to recognize that the other has something to say and contribute. “
Leach on why he is my new hero: “Unlike natural physics where Sir Isaac Newton pointed out that action equals reaction, in social chemistry reaction can be greater than action. Name calling in the kindergarten of life can lead to a hardening of attitudes and sometimes physical responses. Hence civil discourse is about more than good manners. To label someone a “communist” may spark unspeakable acts; to call a country “evil” may cause a surprisingly dangerous counter-reaction.”
Best ever Jim Leach-isms:
1. “Vacuous citizenship”
2. “Citizenship is hard.”
3. “Civilization requires civility.”
4. “A civility crisis at home and a civilization crisis abroad.”
5. “Wisdom that isn’t shared is noiseless thought in the forest of humankind.”
I’ll be damned if Jim Leach’s wisdom is left noiseless.
Hop on over to our friends at Purple State of Mind to read this post there, and I’d recommend you do some general visiting while there…
Last night we met the bright, young and politically diverse high school seniors participating in The Village Square’s very first Teen Square. We invited a moderate speaker on our next Dinner at the Square topic: “Global Warming, Cap & Trade, Dollars & Sense.” Our speaker, Barry Moline of Florida Municipal Electric Association, walked us through sensible arguments on both sides of the global warming divide (and apparently they do exist). He charted a potential middle ground: We spend 2% of our energy consumption budget – a huge increase of investment – on development of alternative green technologies. Effectively we take a step toward the predominant thinking that mankind is artificially warming our planet, but we don’t bet the whole ranch on it just in case we’re wrong.
Barry left our students with thoughtful advice: Try disagreeing starting with the words “Consider this.” And he shared a quote written by Daniel Boorstin: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance it is the illusion of knowledge.”
After our speaker finished and left, I asked the group of students a question: What would have happened to our discussion had I, as a conservative Democrat who believes in manmade climate change, invited a speaker who agrees with me and filled the room with students who see it my way? How would the discussion have gone?
Well those seniors are smart as whips and possibly brighter than the average 40-year-old; they knew right away that the discussion would have helped us all feel quite superior to the rest of the human race, but we would have been fantastically partly wrong. They even knew that like-minded groups create extreme thinking. (Dang we found some smart seniors.)
Now could we possibly find an eighteen-year-old to run things starting tomorrow?
Until then, those of us over –er – (cough, cough) we’ll say thirty, better turn our attention to the reality that – more and more – the fabric of American society is made of rooms full of people who see it the “our” way. Sometimes our “rooms” are political or social groups, sometimes they’re radio or televisions shows, and they can even be our churches, some of which are breaking apart into like-minded factions.
In this one room on this one night, it was obvious that our discussion – and any solutions potentially springing from it – would have been severely compromised had we all agreed. If only it were so stunningly obvious to the rest of everyone else outside of that room.
We brought a prop to the evening’s discussion: A bowl full of cherries. The cherries were meant to remind us that on any given topic, there is a whole “bowl” full of facts we need to understand if we want to make informed decisions. The fleets of political cherry pickers want us to believe there are only five, and they want to pick the five we’re going to pay attention to. That’s why you can flip back and forth from Fox to MSNBC and think it looks like they exist in alternative universes. (They do.) They’re grabbing onto different fistfuls of cherries and they’ll be darned if they’ll let them go…
Well not this one group of students, not on this one night. They saw the bowl.
Our Purple State of Mind friends Craig Detweiler and John Marks have scored top ten in religion videos of 2009, according to the American Library Association. Well, duh. We’d go top 1.
Congratulations, gentleman. Keep on pushing Purple.
Mozy on over to our friends at Purple State of Mind if you want to read this there or otherwise generally visit with them (which we wholeheartedly approve of).
This semester my middle school daughter Rachel is taking guitar. Her newfound interest has come with an unexpected gift to her mother, a piqued interest in all things Beatles.
(Enter a good excuse to walk down memory lane with your daughter, mostly while she is kicking and screaming and telling you that you looked really scary in bellbottoms.)
Yesterday I was waxing away on Beatles memories (to snoring 7th graders) when I remembered the “Paul is dead” rumor that was rampant when I was just about their age. The ensuing years of not thinking about this (so very much) left me with no memory of which song said what and which you had to play backwards to hear the fateful news, sent out like an arrow straight to the hearts of all the thirteen-year-olds who oh-so-loved Paul. So I Googled it.
The song I remembered turns out to have been “Strawberry Fields”, which supposedly said “I buried Paul.”
I remember the conversations we had, the records we played backwards, the teeny-bopper bonding over what was clearly obviously ultimately a falsehood. (Unless, of course, the actual hoax is the whole Heather Mills – Paul McCartney marriage/lawsuit fiasco and goodness knows Wings, which did seem stunningly unreal even at the time and certainly in retrospect. Hmm, I’ll have to get back to you on that.)
The point here, as I am finally forced to reluctantly leave my adolescent angst rewind behind to make, is that the Wikipedia “Paul is dead” entry nearly knocked the air out of me, it bore so much resemblance to our current crop of breathless conspiracy theories. Positively brimming with logical fallacies launched in careless dedication to wishful thinking over – well – thinking.
Conspiracy v.2009 was launched by birther conservatives and tea-bagging populists sure that our duly elected President is here fully intending to burn the whole American joint down. Before liberals get smug, note that Conspiracy v.2002 was the steadfast belief that Bush was behind 9/11. Earlier whacky incarnations included yarns spun over the Lindbergh kidnapping (for which my grandparents were actually stopped and questioned because my infant uncle was about the right age), widespread speculation unraveling Kennedy’s assassination facts-be-darned and a bizarre story of a sitting president ordering a break-in of a Pentagon employee’s psychiatrist’s office. (Oh, wait.)
I can tell you with every fiber of my former middle school girl-ish self that conspiracies are great for entertainment. Conspiracy theories also foment hatred masterfully, supporting the Dr. No cartoon version of good and evil we seem to prefer to reality.
But conspiracies blow as a basis for governance.
How in the world do political parties create policy based on understanding of a conspiracy theory? It leads them to crazy dead-end wrong-headed solutions to problems that are brutally real. I’d say this go round it has led conservatives away from making a much-needed real-world argument on health care, preferring instead to bend to conspiracy-fueled town hall fury. To be sure there are people who are right about seemingly crazy things and no one believed them (uh, round earth), but statistically those moments are unicorns, not horses. We can go round and round amusing ourselves to death with our conspiratorial cohorts, fighting Darth Vader’s forces of darkness that don’t buy our thinking, or we can grow up and get on with the work that grownups do.
If we don’t move smartly toward coping with the world of the big and real problems we have, we risk making big bets on our future that the record says “I buried Paul” when it was really – according to John Lennon – (I kid you not) “cranberry sauce.”
For kicks I replayed “Strawberry Fields” a bunch of times and I swear to you, Paul is dead.
