Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities” is sadly forgotten in the modern American political system. Instead we now face ‘A tale of two parties’.
In Dickens’ book, the horror of living during the French Revolution is brought to life and the unspeakable conditions of the Reign of Terror are meant to warn other countries of the dangers of tyrannical rule.
We, as Americans, have missed the point.
What we have come to as a nation is that our two-party system (and let’s face it, that is exactly what it is despite the woefully beguiled believers in the Independent Party) has been reduced to a showdown (or should I say circus show) for the public to witness through a feeding frenzy of social media posts and re-tweets in the White House.
We have become a nation that is brought to her knees because of our dependence on the ‘entertainment factor’ and end up completely missing the issues at large.
The leaders of both of the Democratic Party and Republican Party put on a show for the masses on Tuesday when President Trump called a meeting with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. What ensued? Entertainment. According to some reports, President Trump misled the Democratic leaders into thinking that the meeting would be private and the goal of the meeting would be to prevent an impending government shutdown.
Now the actual happenings of the meeting were not so private.
Media outlets and cameras filled the Oval Office to record and document the shameful display of political up handedness. Again what actually happened was live entertainment at its best. Arguments, sarcasm, belittlements, and over all disrespect occurred on both sides of the aisle, but hey, that’s good ratings and equals exorbitant amounts of views, likes and re-tweets.
Were any of the issues solved by this so called ‘meeting’? Nope. Not the first. It was at its very simplest, a show to see which political leader would get the trophy for ‘big man on campus’.
Well, folks, I don’t know about you, but when I go into the voting booth, I cast my vote for the person that I believe will best serve the country with rational thoughts and conduct themselves with dignity. I don’t cast my ballot for the person I think will get the most ratings during sweeps week. But hey, with everything else moving toward live entertainment, why shouldn’t matters of state? Maybe next week we can tune in and see live coverage of all the details of our next military campaign.
I mean, Nick Saban summed it up perfectly when he was at a press conference before the Alabama-Georgia showdown for the SEC Championship game. He was questioned on his plans for defeating a very complete Georgia team. His response, “I'll call Kirby and tell him exactly what we're going to do so…”
Now, I know we Alabamians tend to bring everything back to football, but maybe it’s time our national leaders did so too.
Let’s keep entertainment as what it should be, entertainment. Let’s keep political ‘pissing contests’ off the television and maybe our Party leaders will start to actually compromise. Maybe we will actually see results.
Not to bring it back to football, but after all, Alabama did win the game.
