armchair pundit

Things are ugly right now.

After the healthcare bill passed, we all heard how a few so-called tea baggers hurled racial slurs and other insults at Democratic lawmakers, broke windows of party offices and engaged in other such foolery.

Yesterday, I saw Mitt Romney’s new book on display in Borders. It’s called “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” – an obvious swipe at Obama liberals for acting as if the United States is something short of infallible.

Glenn Beck absurdly compares progressives to Hitler and Stalin, and warns us that universal healthcare will take us down a slippery slope to tyranny.

On the other side, countless voices on the left dismiss the tea baggers entirely as the wingnut fringe and draw as much attention as they can to the most outrageous, classless antics of its most extreme members.

When Bush was president, the left portrayed him as an idiot, a manchild, a cowboy. Cheney was Darth Vader. They and their cohorts were bent on destroying everything America stands for. The Bush Administration and their supporters in turn portrayed the left as unpatriotic, soft, weak, elitist.

I admit I’m pretty squarely on one side of this ideological divide, but I’m tired of all of it.

For a decade now, we’ve all been fooled and misled into hating each other. Kids in their teens and twenties must think America has always been this divided, this polarized, and that’s sad.

The saddest thing is how it distracts us from all the things we have in common.

The tea-baggers are mad at the government, whom they perceive has been bought by Wall Street. The anger over the healthcare bill is about money (unemployment, the deficit), and it can be seen as a proxy for their anger at Wall Street – whose robber barons broke the economy, stole from the American people and then walked away richer than before. But guess what? Progressives are mad at Wall Street too. So why are we attacking each other? Wall Street must love watching us fight amongst ourselves. They could not have engineered a situation that better enables them to keep on doing what they’re doing to us – or maybe that’s exactly what’s going on. Either way, I really don’t want to let them win.

As much as it pains me not to argue with climate change deniers, Sarah Palin lovers and Fox News watchers, I hereby call for a truce. We will continue to disagree about global warming, same-sex marriage, Sarah Palin, President Obama and a host of other things. One side will make a little headway, then the other. What little progress is made by either side will be so full of compromises that it won’t satisfy anyone.

Conservatives don’t think we should all pay hundreds of billions of dollars for universal healthcare. Liberals don’t want to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to wage war in Iraq. How about we call it even now and agree that we’ve all been screwed.

Let’s not let our disagreements stop us from making real progress in the areas where we agree. Like Wall Street. Congress is finally getting ready to debate legislation to regulate the financial industry. Let’s pay attention to this, and let’s refuse to allow the political parties, the media pundits and the lobbyists pit us against each other. Let’s not blindly listen to supposed experts whose impassioned arguments invent an enemy – a “them” – that isn’t Wall Street itself. Let’s think critically for ourselves, and give each other credit for doing the same, instead of shoving each other into knee-jerk categories like “tea-baggers” and “progressives”. Let’s assume good intentions in our fellow Americans.

And after we’re done with Wall Street, there are a lot of other things we agree on. Chew on these statistics:

A recent poll found that 60% of Americans feel that improving treatment of women in other countries is “very important” and that 30% feel it’s “somewhat important.” Despite all our other differences, that’s 90% of Americans who agree on something. That’s huge. And it’s something we actually have the power to change.

Here’s another example… I was working in Southeast Asia in 2004 when the tsunami devastated the region. Despite our differences, Americans stepped up and donated 1.2 billion dollars to tsunami relief. 30% of American households contributed to the cause – across all the ideological lines that seem important enough to divide us so much of the time.

These are just a couple of random examples, but the point is let’s ignore rhetoric that would turn us against each other. Let’s be careful about how we listen to the Karl Roves and Glenn Becks on the right, and the Bill Mahers, Olbermans and Moveon.orgs on the left. Better yet, let’s take a break altogether from listening to people who would persuade “us” to oppose “them.”

Let’s not get so sidetracked by the things that divide us that we become unable to make progress in the areas where we share common ground.

I have a somewhat irrational affection for Costco. The selection is good, the prices are low. They have a generous return policy (my friend just returned a printer he bought there four years ago and exchanged it for a new one). The folks who work at the one in San Francisco always seem to be enjoying themselves.

But many of my green-minded friends see Costco as a perfect embodiment of modern-day consumer culture and all that is wrong with America.

When you think about it though, one giant jug of laundry detergent requires significantly less plastic than the same amount of detergent sold in six smaller bottles. And buying a mega-bundle of toilet paper means fewer trips to the store than buying six rolls at a time. Plus, they sell recycled paper products and phosphate-free detergent.

I’m just sayin’

I just finished watching the second season of Mad Men, and I’m left with a familiar bittersweet feeling. The same one you get when you finish a great book. I don’t often get this feeling from a TV show, so I’ve begun to reflect a little on what it is that makes the show so good. One thing, of course, is the place and time.

1960 in America

Setting a show in 1960 was a stroke of pure genius. America, having recovered from World War II hit it’s stride in the 1950s. The country was enjoying an unprecedented era of era of prosperity. The big companies that created the machinery of modern warfare reinvented themselves as purveyors of household magic. Plastic revolutionized packaging and changed the whole concept of disposable goods. Chemicals emerged to ensure everything from green lawns to wrinkle-free clothing. A proliferation of new gadgets promised to erase every inconvenience from our lives. This is when Modern America was born. We were seduced by technology, and we never looked back.

At the same time, there was so much about America in 1960 that seems so quaint and primitive now. Often comically so. There’s a voyeuristic joy in watching kids play spacemen in front of their parents by putting plastic bags over their heads. Seatbelts didn’t even exist yet. Pregnant women smoked and drank. Everyone, for that matter, smoked and drank constantly – even at work. Every executive had “a girl” to take care of all the minutiae of meetings and phone calls (plus coffee, dry-cleaning and sometimes other “perks”). “Homos” were perverts, and “negroes” were only fit for household help and operating elevators.

Looking back on this era is to witness the fascinating disconnect between what Americans in 1960 believed about themselves – and their culture and their country – and what we now understand to be the reality. This makes for many gasp-producing, head-shaking moments. But I believe there’s also something much more personal going on. I suspect that in 2009 there is a similar disconnect at play in America.

1960 as a mirror

The Internet has resurrected our reverence for technology and our faith in technology’s ability to solve our problems (if it ever went away). We constantly crave the next new thing – then we adopt it, adapt to it, become disillusioned by it and discard it. This whole cycle can happen over a few months or even weeks.

Today, for example, everyone seems to be excited about Twitter’s third anniversary. At the same time they’re wondering if Facebook’s home page redesign is a harbinger of impending decline.

Women and minorities have come a long way of course. There are whole categories of things we consider unjust today that were acceptable in 1960, but there is still plenty of injustice in the world. And for the most part we still coast through our lives, blissfully untouched by it.

So partly, we love Mad Men for the same reason we love most great stories – because we recognize ourselves in the characters, and we see our world in the one they inhabit.

Remember when you were a kid and you’d overhear grownups talking about insurance and taxes, IRAs, mortgages and interest rates? Remember thinking to yourself, do they really understand that stuff? Remember how boring it all sounded and how frightening it was to imagine that someday you might have to know about it too, that someday you might actually find yourself talking about it…voluntarily?

Anyway, since I left my last job, I’ve been forced to think about where to invest the money that was in my 401k. I don’t want to unwittingly pad the pockets of Haliburton or Tyco, so I’ve been looking at socially responsible mutual funds and the 100 Best Corporate Citizens according to Business Ethics magazine. I’m so PC, don’t you think?