Tuesday, November 19, 2002

The "Bickering" Debate People who wonder why so few Americans are engaged in political issues need look no further than the way that media - particularly broadcast media - have taken to trivializing differences between the parties on substantive issues as "partisan bickering." Count how many times in the last 48 hours you've heard the phrase "partisan bickering is holding up passage of the Homeland Security Bill" as opposed to "Democrats are taking issue with key provisions of the bill and engaging in legislative debate with Republican supporters." Just now I heard that Bob Woodward's new book describes "bickering between elements of the Bush foreign policy team" on the matter of Iraq - as if the conflicting views on committing US forces to war were due to Colin Powell getting up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Yes, "bickering" has become just another annoying media cliche, but the devaluation of the word has a more insidious dimension. "Debate" is the activity of a healthy democracy in search of consensus. "Bickering" is a pointless clash of egos, usually over something insignificant, and it cries out for a strong hand to separate the two sides and impose a solution from above. When democracies begin to lose faith in the fundamental value of pluralism by denigrating the entire activity of policy debate just because it sometimes gets ugly, unseemly, or just plain mean, it prepares the ground for some very unpleasant alternatives. There is room to criticize the way our government functions without indiscriminately characterizing every policy difference as some kind of schoolyard squabble. That way we can preserve the perjorative connotations of "bickering" to apply in cases where it's really deserved. 11:01:13 AM    Emphasize This! []

Thou Shalt Not While channel-surfing last night, I paused for a moment, despite my better judgment, to observe the nightly train-wreck of logic known as The O'Reilly Factor. The barron of bombast had a bug up his butt about the recent court decision to ban the ten commandments from an Alabama courtroom, and his subject of interogation was a young woman representing the Americans for Separation Between Church and State. After a surreal exchange in which Reilly first disputes that the ten commandments are related to religion ("they're historical documents - what's wrong with that?") and then leaves aside the crucial issue that it was the stated purpose of the Alabama judge who put the shrine to the commandments in his courtroom to prostelytize his religious views, we come to the heart of the matter. "What I wanna know," blusters O'Reilly, "is what makes it sooo wrong for someone who believes in his faith, which happens to be Christianity, to display something like this in his courthouse?" (quotes are from memory, not verbatim). The young woman, who obviously has yet to master the art of concealing her shock at the stupidity of these kinds of questions, falls back on some rehearsed answer about the First Amendment protecting religious expression by prohibiting government involvement in religion. She's assertive, but her point isn't quite strong enough and she knows it. It's too narrow, too technical. I keep waiting for her to come up with something devestating - about how the ten commandments are supposed to be God's law, and the courtroom is about human laws, or that the commandments demand faith whereas the courtroom is a temple of reason: something that makes clear that the First Amendment is about keeping the inquiry-blunting, authoritarian demands of religious belief out of the deductive, empirical requirements of civil jurisprudence. However, if these words are on her lips, she doesn't say them. Someone must have told her to be careful what you say on a network like Fox, and that there can be no real winning of arguments with rock-headed dopes like O'Reilly. She continues on about the importance of respecting the individual religious beliefs, but not imposing those views on others through the power of government. Cool, but not great TV. Where's James Madison or Thomas Jefferson when you need him these days? O'Reilly soon loses paitence with the canned, timid argument but realizes that shouting down this woman, which he really wants to do, will make him look like a bully. So he wraps up the interview in that condescending dismissive tone that reassures all Fox viewers that "hey, these crazies can have their opinions, but we all know better." The segment ends and once again the day is saved, thanks to the chowderhead guy. 7:46:38 AM    Emphasize This! []