Let's Break Some Silos

or keep eating crap

And now we see how important it was to spend a few of the finite moments of our lives listening to an exchange of ideas between Mike Pence and Chris Christie so we could make an informed choice at the….sorry, what was I talking about?

The spectacle of campaign season has increasingly little to do with the purported purpose of the spectacle — the alleged project of self-governance in a constitutional republic with increasingly democratic features — and is probably even developing negative efficacy. Quick, make your political choices on the basis of Vivek Ramaswamy’s eagerness to denounce white supremacy to the HR commissariat.

Ron DeSantis did the “full Grassley,” meeting voters face-to-face in every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties, with a killer ground game and a superior system of “caucus commits.” It’s another topic that kept the national political press busy while real things happened elsewhere. Political coverage is reminding me of bear spray, which is often described on trails in grizzly country as a psychological tool that gives your mind something else to focus on in the final moments of your life.

We have months of this empty noise ahead of us, and I propose that we just ignore it. Political coverage is gated and slotted; it goes through particular cultural sluices, then runs down particular channels until it evaporates into meaninglessness.

What if, instead, we tried to use alternative media to open a series of wide-ranging and category-defying real discussions? The Democrats didn’t caucus in Iowa, because they love democracy and are fighting to protect it and so don’t need to engage in any form of debate or voting. Why bother pretending to notice their declared-for-now candidate, who appears to barely have the capacity to notice himself most of the time?

Why bother debating within the lines that the national news media paints on the ground to mark the artificial lanes?

But what if, instead, Ron DeSantis could sit for a discussion with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., joined by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, for an open and minimally moderated examination of the lessons learned from the governmental disaster of Covid policy? What if we could sit Donald Trump down with Scott Walker and Rick Perry to talk about the threat of political lawfare? What if we could gather people who live and work on the US-Mexico border to freely discuss border policy with a few of the people who are running for office in this cycle, calmly and without reportorial filibustering?

What if we could break the forced categories and imposed boundaries and just get people to talk to each other? Let the first lightly moderated panel be about Afghanistan, and feature people who fought there in open discussion with some of the people who sent them there.