Our Civic Life

The novelist George Saunders - a must read

George Saunders is a multi-award winning writer of fiction. Probably his best known recent book was Lincoln in the Bardo which was published in 2017 and won the Booker Prize.

In the wake of the election, The New Yorker magazine shared reflections from a number of its staff writers and contributors, including Saunders. Under the title “Five Thought Experiments Concerning The Underlying Disease. Our civic wells are poisoned. Why?” Saunders suggests some ideas not too dissimilar from ones I’ve offered here before - but with greater creativity and development. I strongly recommend this piece for your consideration. I’ve copied it below.

Matt

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Thought Experiment No. 1

Imagine a baseball stadium. Fill it with twenty thousand Americans. Require Democrats to wear blue and Republicans red. At a podium at second base, have a person make a speech about, say, immigration.

Soon enough, fights break out.

Rewind.

Same twenty thousand people. Let them dress however they like. Instead of the speechmaking guy, put two baseball teams out there. Instantly, it’s a different energy. Among the fans for Team One will be both liberals and conservatives, suddenly united in common cause. Ditto Team Two. There will be disagreements, sure, but because we’ve been taught about acceptable baseball-game discourse, these will tend to be relatively good-natured.

Questions for Discussion:

Regarding the first example:

Who put out the order to wear red or blue?

Who dragged that podium out there?

Who selected the topic? And from what list?

Is it possible that “politics” has come to mean arguing percussively about a short list of pre-approved topics (immigration, abortion, cancel culture, etc.), these topics having been provided, somehow, by (let’s say) certain distant powers, who have also provided a rigid framework within which to discuss them, a framework designed not to solve anything but to insure perpetual disagreement, with agitation as the goal, agitation being, let’s face it, a big money-maker?