THE LOW POST: Keep on Hatin'

Now this phenomenon is spilling into the airwaves in a successful way for the first time, where shows like Olbermann's and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are cutting into the Fox lead. I think all of those guys are funny, and in a far smaller way I'm sure I'm caught up in the same phenomenon. But I think it's time for all of us to admit that something extremely sinister is happening in the American media landscape. We are being split up into rigid camps and kept doped up on fear, hate and invective. At the end of 2006 we are a country without life-threatening economic or political problems whose population is utterly consumed with paranoia, divided into two insoluble groups, with each genuinely afraid of being exterminated by the other.

It is amazing to me that people can walk into a bookstore, see a pair of books whose titles begin with I Hate... , and still believe that the two books are different, simply because the politics of one are conservative and the politics of the other are liberal. Even though it is astoundingly obvious, I'm beginning to think that the vast majority of Americans will not realize until it is too late that this is the same shit. Hating the other guy, it's the new racism. It's imposed from above, like racism, and it serves the same purpose. It keeps the population mesmerized by irrelevant passions and distracted from their natural business of tending to their own real political problems.

And it just so happens that at the beginning of 2007, this paralyzing hatred is our biggest real political problem. It has become bigger than the individual policy issues at play in the ongoing argument between liberalism and conservatism. It has corrupted our thinking and infected us with a profound spiritual sickness. And, it has inclined us all to extremist political positions that we would never take without media figures telling us that our neighbors were secretly scheming to stamp out our very existences. But we'll never figure that out, not as long as we remain focused on who's winning in the left-right battle. It doesn't matter that Fox is down and that the other team is getting a bump in the ratings. It's the split that's remained consistent, and the split is the problem.