Perhaps against my better judgment, I've been watching my way through the second season of The West Wing (in my opinion the best season of television ever). What's so good about the show? It gleefully flees from reality. Everyone is supernaturally smart, committed, and just plain good in a way that is downright impossible in the real world. It's inspiring and depressing at the same time.
Teller, of Penn and Teller, once said that the practice of magic is lying in a way that people desperately want to believe is true. And what's television, what's POLITICS but an elaborate magic trick? At the end of the day, though, magic won't feed you, or give you health care, or stop a war.
All that said, two links.
First, one of my favorite general-purpose bloggers writes a scene in which characters from the West Wing discuss the modern political climate of lying to the world until people actually believe it's true.
And second, a neuroscientist's take on why facts don't matter in politics.
Put 'em together, and you begin to understand the yawning chasm between things as they should be and things as they are. We may say we want real change and real progress, but most people (and in a democracy, that's all that matters) just want their own ideologies confirmed.
But there's always hope, right?
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