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By Anna Quindlen
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When I was a kid, the games people played could be divided into those of the body and those of the brain. Stickball and bocce, poker and chess. I had kids of my own by the time the dominant form became that hypnotic hybrid, the videogame. Hand on the joystick, mouth ajar, moving warriors and wizards around the screen. Some had two versions, designed for the comfort level of parents: blood or no blood. To win, someone had to die.
The political game today parallels that change in the form. In 1992 the media agonized about the character issue, about whether the fact that Gennifer Flowers said she'd been Bill Clinton's mistress meant he was somehow unfit for the highest office. In only a dozen years the bar has been lowered, from the character issue to the character-assassination issue. Mortal Kombat, the election version: the more you shoot, the more you score.
Too much of the national dialogue has stuttered and stopped at what might be called "bad people" issues. Those who oppose legal abortion and gay marriage attack those who favor both as bad people, immoral and profligate. And vice versa: those in favor consider the other side bad people, bigoted and close-minded. The rights of immigrants, the war on poverty, the war in Iraq: it's not a difference of position, it's an undebatable divide. When I get mail from a reader who cogently disagrees, I fall upon it like a drowning woman upon a spar. The rest falls neatly into two camps: you're a genius; you're a moron. Keep writing; go back where you came from. (Where I came from is Philadelphia.)
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This brinkmanship requires that to win, someone has to die, at least metaphorically. Thus the authentic anger some Vietnam veterans feel about John Kerry's opposition to the war after he returned from combat had to be morphed first into the baseless accusation that his medals were suspect, then into the preposterous charge that his wounds were self-inflicted. It's easy to tell how much people hate Democrats/liberals/ Kerry/all of the above by how fervently they embrace that last bit of utter lunacy. On my own side of the ideological aisle, I have heard the word "evil" used in political conversation more than at any time in my memory to describe the Bush administration. As someone who works in prose, I wince when I hear words of that octane used casually. Hitler was evil. Bush is just wrong.
Jon Stewart has become the perfect TV tour guide for this election because, with his raised eyebrow and deadpan delivery, he telegraphs effortlessly the question of the moment: have both sides lost their tiny minds, and are news organizations running the asylum? For a week the CBS blunder with forged documents overwhelmed the story of the president's National Guard service, which itself had overwhelmed the really important story of whether the Iraq war had become a disaster of critical proportions. Civilian beheadings or the future of Dan Rather: let's see, which one should lead the news? Can media self-examination (and self-flagellation) really mean much to a single mom with a mortgage and three kids who is wondering about interest rates and gas prices?
If George W. Bush and John Kerry are really interested in providing moral leadership for this country, they could do it in the opening statements of the first debate by joining together to pledge to change the toxic tenor of this race, and by ordering their operatives and urging their supporters to do the same. Then the serious and substantive campaign could begin, airing the very real differences in ways of looking at the country, its future and its place in the world. Of course, both men would have to be really confident in the merit of their positions to agree to such a thing. Everyone keeps saying that this is a historic race. Right now it's historically nasty. But how historic could it really be if two presidential candidates were brave enough to reach across the divide and say the people deserve better than this? That goes for the press, too. It's cheap and easy to say the public cannot handle anything more than sound bites. It's worth remembering that the press decided to make the Gennifer Flowers scandal a story, but the voters decided not to make it an issue. They know how to pay attention if they're offered stories to which attention must be paid.
Boring, I can hear some of you thinking, and of course that's the problem. Chess is cerebral; videogames are visceral. It's clear which one drives up the adrenaline. The downside to that approach is the endgame. When someone has to die, even the killers suffer. People ask why there seems to be such a division in America today, a Red State/Blue State polarity that turns the nation into two countries as different as France and England. After a campaign this toxic in tone, an election in which voters routinely talk about hating the guy on the other side, what is left after Election Day are mortal wounds to the body politic. The universe divides neatly into good and evil. The net effect is a country involved in a civil war without even acknowledging it. No one really wins.
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