Purple State of John

2010-06-11 06:36:11

The Village Square: My love letter to Purple State of Mind

Filed under: Featured, Uncategorized, Village Square
Posted by: John

Like all good teacher’s pets, The Village Square studies hard ahead of our dinners on whatever topic we’re about to discuss. Next up: The Culture Wars.

It seemed only natural that I was living and breathing culture wars when I was told that my friends at Purple State of Mind were about to take a Purple Summer Siesta to emerge technologically bigger, better, purple-er. After all, it was the Purple Pair who had long since plunged right smack into the middle of our cultural battlefield, camera in tow.

Turns out that most academic examination of the culture war suggests that we don’t exactly have one. Well sort of. Morris Fiorina explains in Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America that the American public is far less divided in our attitudes than the American political class and politicians think we are, want us to be and are themselves. And as Fiorina puts it “political activists are not normal people.”

Fiorina also implicates the media that rides the waves of hostility to ratings and ad revenue.

Cumulatively we’ll call them Divide & Conquer, Inc. (Now I’m stalking you Glenn Beck.) They’re the people whose personal livelihoods rely on us thinking we dislike each other. There is big money in Divide & Conquer, Inc., we’re talking eight figures if you can manage to foment the biggest baddest epic generational hatred.

So if academia is correct then Divide & Conquer, Inc is selling you swampland because underneath it all, Americans tend to agree about far more than we think we do. But whether it started out there or not, Fiorina warns (as we instinctively know) these folks and their heated words may create a self-fulfilling prophecy where Americans really are as divided as Divide & Conquer, Inc.

Fiorina supports all this with lots of fancy graphs and charts and numbers and probably years worth of work.

He should have just asked John and Craig.

For them that same conclusion was intuitive and obvious and rooted in music and movies and friends and college dorms and it was about how they are the same despite how they are different. Maybe John and Craig remembered earlier than the rest of us did that this – whether we’re Republicans or Democrats, whether we’re Christians or Jews or atheists – this is the stuff of our lives.

Divide & Conquer, Inc can accomplish a lot quickly. Tearing things apart is always easier than building them back. Their job is simple since they play to what’s worst in us and usually easy to tap, when the best is always there but it can require a bit of an archeological dig to find. You’ll recognize Divide & Conquer, Inc when you ponder the question “who makes a good living on us hating each other?”

All-in-all business is good for Divide & Conquer Inc.

Still, for me, I’m placing my long term bet on John and Craig. Because I think that, ultimately, they’re the ones who really know where our hearts are.

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