Manufacturing Dissent

or, Why Yankees vs. Red Sox is a Red Herring

If the Bush years weren't enough to prove out Chomsky, then the Obama years seem like they will be. It's one thing when a self-identified "conservative" delivers corporate handouts, wiretaps its citizens, sells national parkland to oil companies, and actually tries to construct "legal" arguments for torture and offshore detention camps. At least, in those moments, the dissenters can fixate on the term "conservative," and try to align themselves at the other end of the assumed spectrum. But when the self-identified "liberals" return to power and continue the same policies, then one must begin to wonder: is there a spectrum at all?

("There is no spoon.")

I still argue against people who claim that the Left is indistinguishable from the Right, and I think the recent "health care" "debate" is a good example—though I've put each of those terms in quotes for separate reasons, and I think "health insurance" "posturing" is closer to the truth. Still, one side of the aisle lobbied diligently to get health coverage for many disenfranchised people (while also promising to fill the coffers of private insurance companies); and the other side sat on their thumbs—which is presumably what they would have done on this particular issue even if they had been in power.

That is a not-insubstantial difference.

Yet... we're led to believe that the Democrats and Republicans are polar opposites, and that just isn't true. It strikes me like the belief (held widely in these parts) that the entire world of sports is contained in the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox, two of the oldest American League professional baseball teams, both based in large metropolitan areas on the East Coast of the United States, each with vastly high payrolls and rabidly loyal fans. On the most substantive issues, these two rivals are nearly interchangeable; and the rivalry is manufactured by the media that purports to cover them. The inflation of this rivalry leaves everyone else out of the dialogue—the other 28 teams in the MLB, the intense and exciting "grassroots" stick ball in the playground by my apartment, the Wiffle Ball I play at picnics—not to mention the athletes who compete in hugely popular (socialist?) sports like soccer and cycling around the world.

On the most substantive issues, the Democrats and Republicans are nearly interchangeable; and the rivalry is manufactured by the media that purports to cover them; and the inflation of the rivalry leaves nearly everyone else out of the dialogue.

I am not a cynic. Not even a little. I have no interest in trying to take the vigor out of good things. But I believe it's important to fight against those who try to inject false vigor into lifeless things with ideological Botox.

Media, in most of its current popular forms, exists to sell things: to sell movies, to sell iPads, to sell more media. When it sells political ideology as if it were a reality show or a sports rivalry, what it is selling is a contrived competition: Obama and the Republicans, locked in a heated battle, and only one can win! Just like an episode of Top Chef.

What if the result of this contrived competition were of no more substantial value than Top Chef? What if, no matter who wins, there will be corporate handouts, wiretapping, drilling in parkland, and torture in secret prisons?

If you're looking for a more substantial choice: "God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose," said Emerson. "Take which you please: you can never have both."