When I first converted to conservatism, one of the people I was 'responsible for' was Phyllis Schafly. People would ask me how I could possibly stand behind this excreble woman. I had no idea what or who they were talking about.
So I did a little research and found what she was all about. Apparently, she had a big part in writing the official platform for the GOP at that year's convention, and she had complete control of the abortion plank. Well it turns out that like most Republicans I had not read the platform and like most Republicans the detailed wording of one plank vs another made very little real difference, only symbolic difference. Not long afterwards, I found myself reading the platform of Texas Republicans. It was painful. I had already decided to become a Republican and perhaps even move to Texas. What was I getting myself into?
These days I am very wobbly on politics itself. I have been thoroughly disgusted with the pettiness of the 08 campaigns and exhausted by their length. As I'm going through this process of trying to de-politicize myself and my writing I'm getting a handle on what, in particular, is annoying me. Hot button politics.
You see most people don't require 18 months to decide anything. And it's truly ridiculous to think that one needs that long to decide something that only lasts 4 years. The worst marriages in the world are about that bad, I think. It doesn't take 18 months to decide which house or apartment to live in. It doesn't take 18 months to make a baby. It doesn't take 18 months to pick a college or buy a car. Why should it take that much thought to vote? The fact of the matter is that it simply doesn't. There is excess information being splattered out there which is totally irrelevant to an honest decision making process. So this week we are talking about how many houses.
Even when you take a reasonable period of time on big issues, you'll find that few of them change much over the course of a presidency. Take abortion for example. People will talk about it to death - all kinds of nuance all kinds of fire and passion, but what really changes? How about the death penalty? There are clear positions that can be summed up in 20 minutes - not that you're likely to get such clarity at such a length in the broadcast media - on both sides. Yet people will talk for months about giving their proxy to something with which they have no experience or judgment. The insanity of this appears to me in the following way. You have 100 million voters energized to pick a candidate who is for or against the death penalty and they debate this hot button issue (among a dozen others) for months and yet the chances that they themselves will be involved in a capital crime is 1 in 500,000. It's not really the vote or any government action that determines capital crime in America, it's what we citizens do in our own lives.
There's another way of looking at this which I considered even when I was Progressive. We all know about expensive hammers and toilet seats in military procurement. These are legendary pork barrel topics. I worked out some math way back when to calculate how much people spend debating the cost in tax dollars vs their proportionate share of the tax burden. People would almost always want to debate the issue more that it was worth. For example, let's say you think that the Department of Education should be eliminated and its budget is 2% of the Federal Budget. If you were being proportionate in your tax anxiety you would realize that 2% of your, say 15,000 annual Federal tax bill - basically 300 bucks is 'wasted' on that entire enterprise. So how long would you argue over $300? Now you have the formula, try to figure out how much money you would save extracting gays from the military or how much more you would pay to mandate pre-school. Not bloody much, and yet we suffer the cost of mass bloviation on these subjects day in and day out, and very little changes in the bureacracy.
Now there is some comfort to be taken in the understanding that Americans overthink all of the political issues and that some permanent fraction of our population is clinically wonky. But the ability for all that fresh wonky goodness to remain distilled and get distributed is way beyond our collective means. There is way too much noise in our national communications and the signal to noise ratio shows no signs of increasing. In any case, what is required is some quiet hard thinking done by citizens which is unabetted by an economy of blather consumption brought to you by... There is an entire class or two of talk radio and talk television that never gets to the point, that entertains for the entire season of 18 nerve grinding, mind-numbing months. Nothing speaks to the enormity of this noise machine than the amount of dollars candidates must raise in order to spin it in their direction.
But you know this.
The solution is actually rather simple, which is to spend your hours and make up your mind firmly, then shutup. I can't do it, but I try. I think we all feel an obligation to come up with 100 reasons rather than simply a dozen, because everybody else is doing it. Besides, it's still going on and we still haven't heard debates. (I'll process transcripts of Saddleback today).
Recent Comments