Years ago I had a subscription to The Nation. Online, they pop up in Google with this description: “Weekly journal of opinion, featuring analysis on politics and culture. Founded in 1865.” I must have subscribed sometime in the very early 80s because I know it was around the time Ronald Reagan was President of the United States (January 1981 to January 1989).
I thought it was a left leaning magazine and that roughly reflected my politics at the time. And it was. And it did. Roughly. (I’ve no idea what they are like now – I haven’t read them in close to 20 years.)
I quickly came to hate it. While it did, in broad terms, reflect my views, it did not even remotely come close to reflecting how I thought issues should be debated, questioned and considered. It was a cranky child spewing hate and spite at anything and everything it despised – not disagreed with, but despised.
The cartoons they had, especially the caricatures of Ronald Reagan and the accompanying captions, were so juvenile and so removed from anything that was true the magazine was unreadable.
It was pretty much everything that today is associated with the far right, the extremes of conservatism that we see, for example, in the absurdities of the healthcare debate in the U.S., or the nonsense we’ve seen for the last decade or so.
It was all that, only the inverse of it. Over time, with conservatism becoming increasingly strong and more vocal through the 90s, and with the liberal responses to it, it became clear that in all these dubiously named “debates,” everyone becomes the thing they hate. They’re on different sides of a fence, to be sure, but they are the same thing.
I’m frustrated, annoyed but also often amused when I see items on the creation-evolution controversy. On the one side, given the tone and rhetoric, those on the creation side sound utterly detached from God, or any deity, sounding more like little boys who want the football. On the other side, again given the tone and rhetoric, those on the evolution side sound as if they’ve never heard of science, or the scientific method, and are simply interested in asserting, “I’m right!”
(I’m not a creationist but in the interests of objectivity I find the Wikipedia article linked above interesting in that it refers to the debate as, “… between those who espouse the validity and/or superiority of literal interpretations of a creation myth, and the proponents of evolution, backed by scientific consensus.”
(The “creation myth?” Doesn’t that make an assumption? Wouldn’t a word like “explanation” be, objectively, more accurate in that it makes no assumptions? By the way, I personally think this debate has nothing to do with the ostensible issue. It is really about who gets to tell young people what to think – not how to think, but what.)
I suppose what most annoys me with politics is the abuse of rhetoric and the constant use of false arguments and the misrepresentations of opposing views. Here in Canada, we are constantly getting messages from both sides that have been laundered through polls, studies and public relations people so that what actually comes to us is utterly meaningless, completely devoid of information or, frankly, truth. The two major parties have the same position, though each is the inverse of the other. The Liberals should be supported because they are not the Conservatives. The Conservatives should be supported because they are not the Liberals. Rarely do they actually represent anything you might actually want to support – thus the dwindling voter turnout.
And both, in my opinion, place the country second. Their number one priority is their own party.
Not only is it incredibly depressing, it defies logic. The left cannot always be wrong. Sooner or later, they must be right. The right cannot always be wrong. Sooner or later they must be right.
But you would never know that because each must be opposed, misrepresented and slandered.
In a sense, politics is intellectual abuse. And as we see constantly in politics, abuse is okay as long as you abuse the right people.
My favourite political statement comes from Ray Davies of The Kinks in a song called, “Uncle Son”:
Unionists tell you when to strike,
Generals tell you when to fight,
Preachers teach you wrong from right,
They’ll feed you when you’re born,
And use you all your life.Bless you Uncle Son,
They won’t forget you when the revolution comes.
Follow Writelife on Twitter
