Last night I watched coverage of the 2010 Elections on ABC 7 News. Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos sat at their giant blue podium and gave mostly useless commentary on the election data and projections as they were made public. The network also plugged their partnership with Facebook in creating a joint chat forum online for voters to weigh in on the political issues being raised by the election.
Excited for some good grassroots debate I hurriedly logged on to ABC 7's website and quickly found the chat board and began reading the posts. Shocking! I think I'll respond to that! Oh, I've got a retort for that! Oh really? Well how about this! And so, I got sucked into the heated political commentary wizzing back and forth. About four or five people, including myself, actively responded to each other while hundreds of other viewers would interject with a miscellaneous comment either to us specifically or no one in particular.
After a while I started to notice our conversation circle. Each person brought up the same complaints over and over and each opposer would retort over and over. But it was the same basic Obama's doing his best/Obama is Hitler, Ta-ta Nancy Pelosi/Nancy Pelosi's not lost yet, We need to eliminate food stamps and welfare/we need more New Deal-esque government support talking points being raised again and again... and around the loop we went. It was nearly impossible to stop too because each comment, although the same as the one before, was still just as provocative.
After a while of fierce typing I looked up and realized that no one was really even paying attention to the news anymore and my wrists were starting to get stiff. I then thought of poor Alice when she arrives carried on a tide of her own tears and finds herself sucked into the traditional Wonderland caucus race. What a wonderful political allegory Lewis Carrol constructed within Alice's narrative. Here the United States is at this moment bogged down by rabid political polarity, we've arrived here on a tide of our own tears: upset over the fear of a post-9/11 era, apprehension over middle eastern wars our journalists are hardly able to scrape the surface of due to post-Vietnam media restrictions, and disappointed with a president that the country collectively and blindly placed so many hopes on forgetting in a panic that our president after all is just man and like each of us flawed and beaten down by the bureaucracy of the administration and the complexities of foreign affairs. "No one can EVER get dry this way!" exclaims Alice in
Disney's 1951 film, the voice of reason, to the Dodo bird. America wont get dry this way either.
