CARLTON FLETCHER: The American politics of absolutes

There’s the image of a man who commands a high opinion, But he hides his hatred with a sheepish grin. And beside him flanking closely are the boisterous hollow masses Who lap up whatever trickles in.

— Bad Religion

Driving home from Tifton late Saturday nights now, I’ve taken to turning the radio dial to AM and just changing from station to station to try and catch the endings of late college football games. This past Saturday, I caught the ending of the Penn State-Iowa and the (heartbreaking) Kentucky-Florida games.

During the search, I’ve happened upon several talk-radio programs, and in so doing I’ve discovered the source for a lot of the same tired and overblown rhetoric that you get from people who blindly follow the dictates of such blowhards.

One thing I’ve noticed that’s common to all of these self-proclaimed know-it-alls is that when they tell their listeners (aka, blind followers) what said listeners are supposed to believe, there are no degrees to an issue. Each is an absolute.

I heard one proclaim last Saturday: “The media know about the antifa movement, but they’ve refused to tell the public about it because it’s a left-wing group. They ignore the bad things that these people do, but turn around and condemn groups like the KKK, the neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups.”

Which is, unequivocally, one of the biggest piles of bull I may have ever heard.

(Side note: My 15-year-old asks me all the time, “How do you work at a newspaper and not know (whatever topic she happens to bring up)?” And I have to tell her that my focus is more on local issues than some of the more far-reaching ones. I relate that story because when counterprotesters in Virginia, which I later learned involved members of the antifa movement, stood up to the aforementioned racist groups, one of those true believer squawkers sent in a rant to this paper saying, “Carlton Fletcher supports antifa 1,000 percent,” which was kind of ironic because at the time I didn’t even know what the hell that was. But, hey, when you sell your soul to a political party and its politicians, you’re all in, baby.)

See, when people are trying to convince you that they have all the answers, there is no room for degrees. It has to be absolutes. Therefore, you get people who refuse to believe someone on the “opposing team” has any goodness or even good intentions in his or her heart.

Case in point: When Sen. John McCain, who was undergoing treatment for cancer, said what just about every other Republican probably thought but was afraid to say — that the health care program proposed by Republicans just to overturn the Affordable Care Act (derisively called “Obamacare” to stir up the base) was in so many ways worse even than that ill-conceived piece of legislation, he became a “traitor.”

Never mind that the man was fighting for his life and actually had an opportunity to see the flaws in the country’s health care system up close and personal; never mind that he was a war veteran who’d spent time in an enemy prison camp, and never mind that he’d been their standard-bearer in the race for the presidency a few years back. He was cursed, castigated and condemned by people who don’t have the guts or the brains to think for themselves, whose every decision is based on one thing and one thing only: the letter “R” attached to a bill’s authorship.

Not, heaven forbid, that anyone who actually looks at the mess in Washington with a critical eye — and there are only a few such people left — would think differently of Democrats in that vipers’ nest that serves as the seat of our government. That these people would defend ACA simply because it was passed by their own standard-bearer, knowing full well that its flaws need attention in the worst kind of way, makes them no better than the crowd across the aisle.

I know it’s become virtually impossible for anyone who’s engaged in our country’s politics to utter an original or intelligent thought these days — at least without checking with party leaders’ do and don’t lists first — but until we stop following D’s and R’s and start following our hearts and consciences, we are a failed nation being governed by playground bullies who have no concern about what is best for us, who only won’t to “beat” the other side.

In that scenario, it’s always we the people who are the losers.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.

Staff Photo