You know how bad the political climate is in this country? I didn't used to mind talking politics with folks. Nowadays, I can't stand it. I can't even read Doonesbury anymore. Everyone makes as much political hay as possible, whether the sun is shining or not. Since the hay-makers (maybe manure-slingers would be more appropriate) never stop, there's little time for anything else: nothing constructive, no analysis, and certainly not much consensus. By any other name, it stinks.
Right next to today's Doonesbury is a column by Ann McFeatters. One could argue that her column isn't constructive: she's mostly pointing out the poor tenor of current U. S. political dialogue (read "monologues"). However, writing as the Washington bureau chief for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she does try to analyze the problem, and I think you'll find a high level of consensus with her editorial on a "political climate" she describes as "uniquely chilling."
The only flaw I see in her essay: she describes the past month as "terrible." A month? That's just weather, not climate. The possibility of real climate change is another polarized, political issue; and it's probably more likely than any real improvement in U. S. politics. Ann uses the right term; she just doesn't take it far enough. The climate in the U. S. for real discussion and tolerance -- not the PC mealy-mouth stuff -- has been absent for a long time. It drives people out of any meaningful issue described as political: just about everything these days. Why else would everything be so politicized and divisive when no one votes and no one cares? Most people can't discern the few good trees in the District of Columbia's forest of deadwood. If one of them falls, good or bad, no one hears it. You know the metaphors as well as I do: Coke and Pepsi; Bud and Miller, Marlboro and Winston. We think we have a choice. But when we exercise our franchise, we find we're deciding between a pile of hay and... a pile of hay. Or maybe two piles of manure. It's all the same.
So, Ann, I agree with you. And I don't think I can fix it either, so I don't blame you for not trying. It doesn't even feel like my country any more, whether she's right or wrong on a given issue. Just now I tried to put part of Stephen Decatur Jr.'s famous quotation in a couple of search engines, hoping to make a link quickly. What I found were self-serving manglings of Decatur's quotation, twisted to point "correctly" in someone's perception of prevailing political afflatus. It was faster to pull out my copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. In today's United States, no one knows and no one cares. It reminds me of another quotation, a more recent one my Bartlett's and Wikipedia both seem to omit: "The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference."
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