There's so much about which I could bitch. I've got thirty-five years of pent-up frustration ready to be blogged with what you will come to find elegant verbiage. I have an interest in a wide variety of things, all of which piss me off to one extent or another.
But where to begin? Let us start with politics.
I have the debatable privilege of listening to talk-radio political pundits in the course of my day. Some of them are quite entertaining and enjoyable; others make me want to shoot blood from my eyes. Take Glenn Beck, f'rinstance - he's not only well-informed and insightful, he's bloody funny, funny enough that I can overlook the times I disagree with a thing he says. And he's polite to his callers, unless they're total idiots. He doesn't ignore them, change the subject, or wilfully act like a pigheaded bully.
Unlike Sean Hannity. The Leprechaun makes me so mad I almost drive off the road. It's one thing to be extreme. In many ways I am just as extreme. It's one thing to have political views. In most ways, our political views coincide, so that's not the issue. It's that Hannity gives real pundits a bad name. He's a brute, an anti-intellectual, and a boor who could neither think nor debate his way out of a moist paper bag. In debate, he does not respond thoughtfully to his opponenent's statements; he bludgeons his opponenent with ad hominem attacks. When he is debated into a corner - which happens more often than he'd like - he takes one of three tacks: he either insists on asking the same barely-related question over and over, issues an ad hominem attack (or simply surlily calls the caller names), or hangs up the phone.
Does he succeed as a radio host? You betcha! He keeps people tuned in, earning his salary and advertising money for his sponsors. Does he succeed as a political and social commentator whose thoughts are worth a damn? Not on your life.
It's people like Hannity driving political discourse in this country into the realm of worthlessness. According to people like Hannity - who exist on both sides of issues - the other side is The Enemy, either a villain or an idiot who must be defeated at all costs. There's no middle ground, no place for statesmen to exercise polite discourse and arrive at some sort of compromise that, while pleasing no one completely, at least somewhat resolves the issue in question.
Where are the statesmen in today's America? Whither Lincoln? Whither Jefferson? Whither Franklin, Washington, Adams (all of them), et al? These icons of American politics would be either laughed out of today's political climate or run out of DC on a rail, unless the pundits were too bogged down with holding the tar and feathers to carry the rail.
The unfortunate circumstance is that each of the above had foibles which would make someone like Hannity steam if they came on the scene today. Lincoln? A rube with a speech impediment, set against capitalism's exploitation of the poor. Jefferson? A landed aristocrat of old money who slept with his (shudder) slaves. Washington? Ditto. Franklin? Globetrotting narcissist who would have sex with anything not nailed to the floor.
Moreover, all of the above men had histories of compromising in order to facilitate a greater good for the nation. People like Hannity believe that any compromise at all dilutes their principles, weakens their moral mandate to utterly crush their foes; there can be no compromise, for compromise makes any victory hollow and unworthy of making the effort.
That's why, instead of working together to make a better country, regardless of political ideology, we have Deomcrats voting to cut funding for our troops in Iraq as a gesture of dissatisfaction with the President. That's why we have Hannity blaming Senator Clinton for the sins of President Clinton.
It's funny, actually. It's like the family reunion, where Aunt Martha won't speak to Cousin Billy because of what he said to our Susie in 1967. The needlessly complicated and factionalized groups of people make the reunion difficult to organize, almost impossible to successfully execute, and absolutely no fun for anyone involved.
Politically, we need to grow the hell up.
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