The Severity Of Our Disengagement

Defending himself against Bill O'Reilly's wacky accusation that he's a communist, Robert Reich says Fox News and their ilk are burying the nation in "doo-doo" -- an unintentional allusion to the late Seamus Romney, one assumes, since Reich adds:

The 2012 election doesn't seem likely to clarify any issue. At this moment the candidates and their surrogates are debating the treatment of dogs.

Across the nation, conservatives right-wingers and liberal or progressive lefties have stopped debating their respective views, or even listening to anyone they disagree with. They just find broadcasters and bloggers who confirm their views.

We're even sorting by belief according to where we live. Today your neighbors are more likely to agree with your politics than disagree. We've settled into like-minded enclaves where we don't need to think because everyone we meet confirms what we assume we already know.

It's not that the nation is more polarized than it's been in the past. America has been through searing conflicts, some within the living memories of most of us. The communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were followed by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage.

What makes America's current polarization remarkable isn't the severity of our disagreements but our utter lack of engagement debating them.

Shaggy Dog Stories

Every time New York Times columnist Gail Collins writes about Mitt Romney, she mentions Seamus's wild and uncomfortable ride atop the Romneymobile 28 years ago. It's the basis for the cover of the current The New Yorker, where Amy Davidson writes on-line that if a journalist as fearsome and relentless as Collins had been covering Richard Nixon's Checkers speech in 1952, the world might've been been saved from 37. It sounds as if Davidson hopes that Romney, at least, will end up going to the dogs. "There are character issues at stake here," she writes.