Wingnuts

I rarely post anything even slightly political on here. I find a lot of discussion about politics to be frustrating. Especially on facebook. Cause it’s not really discussion. It’s more like people gather talking points that their chosen party supplies and then they just repeat those over and over again. I think a lot of people surround themselves with people who think exactly like they do so they can further convince each other they are right (Mormons don’t do this though….). Then they talk AT and sometimes yell AT the other side as though that’s going to convince the opposing side to understand and convert to their side that I don’t think they even really understand themselves that well to begin with.

It’s a nice feeling to feel like you can participate in political discussion. It makes people feel like they are informed and intelligent. It’s pretty easy too; you just choose a party and let that party tell you what to think. They even give you clever talking points and sound bites to use and some of them are even cleverly crafted responses to the known talking points of the other side. It’s nice. It gives us a nice comfortable feeling that we are involved and informed and right (or left, I guess). It also gives us an identity with a role to play so we don’t have to worry about coming up with that for ourselves. We can feel like we are involved in the political process and helping it move forward. Cause we’re talking. At people. About things we don’t really understand. But we have sound bites. So it’s all cool.

WHAT??

I occasionally watch The View. I used to watch it religiously, but I’ve scaled back. The current panel consists of the following cast of characters: Elisabeth Hasselbeck. She’s the token conservative. She basically regurgitates whatever she saw the night before on Fox News. You don’t even really need to listen to her because you can pretty much guess what stance she’s going to take on any given subject. Joy Behar. Joy is the same as Elisabeth, but on the other end of the spectrum. She regurgitates from the other side and is very predictable. At least she can be funny sometimes though. Sherri Shephard doesn’t fit either of those molds, but prior to being put on the panel a couple of years ago, she didn’t pay much attention to politics.

Then there’s Whoopi. She’s harder to pin down. And I like that. Granted, she probably falls more towards the liberal end of the spectrum, but the woman usually provides a fairly nuanced and well thought out response to any given topic. She’s much less predictable than the others. And I like that. She seems more apt to consider all sides of an issue and weigh each one. Perhaps this is why I had the dream about her helping me find my office when I was appointed to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court.

A lot of these thoughts bubbled up after listening to Doug Fabrizio interview John Avlon about his book Wingnuts on RadioWest. John’s book is about how the extreme right and extreme left are hijacking the political system, making it difficult for real discussion and progress to occur. It’s a great interview. Check it out.