The Purpose of Fox News

Here's my theory. Stay with me on this.

Fox News, radical rightwing critics, and other noisy voices from the extreme right, have an agenda underneath their spoken war of words: to create and enforce and imaginary split in America.

Much has started to be written about the "Two Americas" - every single issue that reaches the news is now interpreted in two, exactly two ways. There's the Democratic viewpoint and the Republican viewpoint. The "left" and the "right". Once commentators get ahold of it, we're all told what our arguments are to be and, because we simply have too much information coming at us to process it all, we spit those same talking points at each other.

This is an illusion.

America is NOT split down the middle and there are NOT exactly two ways to see every issue. As many perspectives exist in this country, in this world, as exist people.

But here's the tricky part. In framing every argument as "us vs. them", those who control the political process are tricking us into putting ourselves into one of two buckets - the extreme right and the MODERATE right.

The logic goes like this. Bush says "We need to invade / liberate Iraq!" (Or rather, he moves his lips for whoever is actually speaking.) So there's the official "neocon" line of thought. All conservatives, including Murdoch's media empire, fall in behind it.

Kerry says "we must be SMARTER about fighting in Iraq." Since we have only two sides to every argument, all democrats and everyone else who doesn't like Bush and company fall in line behind Kerry.

The problem: we shouldn't fucking BE in Iraq!!! We never should've invaded them. We never should've invade Afghanistan. (As a matter of fact, we never should've starved Iraq with a decade of sanctions, Clinton.)

By forcing the debate into only two directions, the party leaders force a win-win for their corporate donors. And American consumers, mindless sheep that we are, go along with it because at this point, we only see two colors. We only see two options.

What kills me is that this entire debate, in fact EVERY debate, has moved to the right of the ideological spectrum. When the people we detest (O'Reilly, Cheney, Bush, Hannity, Ashcroft, etc, etc, etc) rail against a particular issue, we are tricked into supporting that issue. What those smug bastards never let on is that they're usually only slightly to the left of their own opinions, which still leaves them far too conservatives for how I truly believe most Americans really feel. Similarly, if I say "I support Hillary Clinton and I love purple donuts" then conservatives are suddenly going to hate purple donuts, because they sure as hell hate Hillary. That's how habitualized we've become.

I promise you this: if Bush stood up tomorrow and said "I don't like orange. I think orange looks French. I just think the color orange is un-American. This country is founded on red, white, and blue. And that's what God wants for us." I promise you if he made a speech like that, you would have millions of conservatives all over the nation falling over themselves to build bonfires, hold anti-orange rallies, destroy every scrap of orange they could find. They'd boycott oranges altogether and anything they thought LOOKED orange. Then you'd have millions of Bush-haters with jerking knees who would take up banners of orange, go on orange-only diets, wear orange head-to-toe.

The rest of us would be scratching our heads in utter bewilderment, wondering how the hell we got to this point. Oh yeah - we're already doing that. I've been scratching my head over this whole Vietnam debate for weeks now. (WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT KERRY'S FUCKING MEDALS!!)

This is called manipulation. And right now, we are being shamelessly manipulated into supporting pro-corporate, anti-compassionate policies regardless of which candidate or party we associate ourselves with.

It's so sad to see true progressives being forced to support Kerry because that's the only chance we have to get bush the hell outta there. This is the result of our deplorable winner-take-all system of elections. If we were to establish a more sensible electoral system, I believe we would crack open this two-sided fallacy and introduce some much-needed sophistication to the debate. In fact, we might discover we have opinions of our own.

I, for one, don't really care for orange. But I have to admit, if Bush hated it, I'd probably like it a lot more. Guilty.