And Yet... by Christopher Hitchens Page B

to all sides, might we not place a higher value on those who seek to make the differences plainer and sharper?
    Yet we seemingly dread controversy, almost as a danger in itself. The consequence is that there are large and important topics that the electoral “process” is almost designed to muffle or muzzle. Let me select three important topics that everybody knew in advance could not break the surface in an election year: the “war on drugs,” the death penalty, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s quite simply assumed, across the political class, that no candidate interested in forwarding his or her own cause would depart from the presumed consensus on all three—which is that we must persist in the “war on drugs,” come what may; that the death penalty is a necessary part of law and order; and that the pledge should recognize the Almighty. Each of these “issues” is symbolic of a greater one—the role of the state in the private life of the citizen, the posture of the United States toward international legal norms, and the boundary of separation between religion and government—and there is good evidence that the extent of apparent agreement on all three is neither as wide nor as deep as is commonly supposed. In any event, could we not do with more honest and more informed disagreement on these subjects? Is not the focus on the trivial a product, at least in part, of the repression of the serious? In much the same way, the pseudo-fight over Senator Kerry’s valor in the Mekong Delta is a distorted and packaged version of the “debate” over the conflict in Iraq, in which both parties pretend to agree with each other on the main point, while in fact not even agreeing genuinely with themselves. The general evasiveness and cowardice surely call for more polarization rather than less.
    Just as hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, so, I sometimes think, the smarmy stress on “bipartisanship” is a tributeof a kind to American diversity. A society so large and plural must depend, to a great degree, on the observance of an etiquette of “non-offensiveness”—to give this affectation the off-putting name it deserves. In fact, that very diversity demands more political variety rather than less. The consensus that slavery in America was too toxic and divisive an “issue” to become a political subject only postponed the evil time when it became the cause of an actual civil war.
    That reflection, on its own, puts paid to the vague, soft view that politics used to be more civil in the good old days, and that mudslinging is a new invention. Leave aside the relative innocuousness of the supposed mudslinging that now takes place; it is simply flat-out mythological to suppose that things were more polite in the golden past. Yes, there was Adlai Stevenson in the mid-twentieth century saying that he’d rather lose the election than tell a lie, but earlier in the century there was also Ed “Boss” Crump of Memphis, Tennessee, charging that his opponent would milk his neighbor’s cow through a crack in the fence. When I was a boy, the satirical pianist-and-songster duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swann made several excellent albums. One of their hits was a rousing ditty about the basking habits of the hippopotamus. The refrain went as follows:
    Mud, mud, glorious mud!
    Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!
    So follow me, follow—down to the hollow
    And there let us wallow
    In glorious mud!
    Michael Flanders’s daughter Laura is now a punchy presenter on Al Franken’s Air America station, where people can say whatever they like about Dick Cheney and Halliburton, George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, the Carlyle Group and other elements of the invisible government. Bring it on, I say. Where would we be without the tradition of American populism, which adopted for itself the term hurled as an insult by Teddy