For all the evils that the television may bring, there are some events that cannot be expressed in writing alone. I've been following the health care debate via Google News for quite some time now, but it wasn't until I traveled to New York last week and experienced television again that I truly understood the issue. To put it as nicely as possible, an unparalleled madness has subsumed the minds of suburban America. This, by itself, is nothing new; Americans have routine panics on a regular basis. This display of paranoia, however, is unparalleled, at least in the history that I can remember, because the paranoia concerns something that does not exist in any form.
I really shouldn't be surprised by the health-care debate. Everyone knows that there are crazies out there who think Obama is either Jesus or Stalin; in fact, extremists are important because they help define our own opinions by serving as the village idiot that we can point at and exclaim, "Gosh, I'm sure glad I'm not that lunatic."
But I have never seen madness on such a grandiose scale as can be seen at the town hall meetings held across the country. The ongoing health-care debate is an almost Dadaist pageant (played by both parties) that reveals just how empty our "political debate" has become.
What do I mean by this? I mean that activists across the nation are verbally lashing out against the government in an effort to trim and hedge the corpus of Obama's administration to a more agreeable form. Mothers weep and exclaim, "I want my America back!" while the more resolute insist, "We should all fear Obama!" in an insane cacophony of tired phrases.
If you listen to the rhetoric itself, it becomes painfully apparent that there is no message in the paranoid ramblings of the town hall protestors, even one wrapped up in infinite layers of misdirection and lies. Most of the witty comebacks used at these meetings are references to Nazi Germany (a manifestation of Godwin's Law, which states that as an Internet discussion grows longer Nazis or Hitler are more likely to be brought up), communism and a newly demonized socialism, none of which are specific to health care.
To some extent, the protesters' ridiculous accusations are justified, as the bill still existed in multiple incarnations when the town hall meetings were first being held. With no definitive text to look at, who can blame them for inventing their own demons? However, now that the bill has found firm footing, the accusations are becoming more, not less outlandish. Now that they have a text to derive their criticisms from, they are attacking the bill by calling it names (like "death panels") as would schoolyard bullies. The protestors have been presented with the opportunity for reasoned debate, but the momentum behind their crazed behavior is too great to overcome. Who can blame the Obama administration for wanting to move past the town hall meetings when the attendees have become so mindlessly ravenous? Senseless fear mongering and allusions to Big Brother policies aren't new populist politics in America, but it usually isn't taken to such extremes. I don't expect everyone to have read the bill in its entirety, but how can the people so overtaken with fear of the new bill not be willing to take the time to read it? This is what I'm most worried about. Our politicians are still engaging in rhetoric that is mostly reasonable, but it seems as though the populace has become irrational and illogical. No one is willing (or maybe even able) to recognize what constitutes a valid, reasonable argument and what has no place in the national debate, in part because the people who fear the worst from the law are the least inclined to review its text. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of argumentative philosophy that one would find during the rule of fascism, whose rise is the very thing these town hall alarmists are most concerned about.
Since the time of Ancient Greece, philosophers have emphasized the importance of an educated, informed public as a fundamental requirement for democracy. I worry now whether or not America has such a populace and what the absence of logical argumentation might mean for the future of our government.
