Since I arrived in the States the media have spared no expense to try and get me acquainted with the common practices of American politics. The 24/7 news cycle blows up every single event on the Hill regardless its newsworthiness, be it a hurricane, scheduling shenanigans, or the president farting, and turns it into an allegedly historic episode of a campaign battle on the 2012 election playing field. The non-events these days are nearly always accompanied by a poll in which ordinary people can vote on winners and losers, a comments section* for people to weigh in with their thoughts, or an itsy-blitzy twitter feed. Instead of performing basic math themselves by looking into figures made public by the government, media these days also prefer to organize polls in which they let people guess how much they think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, entitlement programs and tax cuts have contributed to the national debt. There is a rationale for this way of reporting, which tracks back to the value this country appreciates most. Having the American people make up their own imaginary budget obviously is a more democratic process, and these figures are therefore more worth publishing. This interactive way of reporting is one of two the media uses to try educate its American audience about the nation’s economy.
The other effort –and I state this from my objective view on US media– is lead by the republican party. The GOP’s most important representatives try desperately to inform the American public about the democrats’ stubborn attempts to kill every business owner in the country and feed their families’ eyeballs to wild hogs.** Republicans want to save the economy by not saving the economy but by making sure Obama will be a one-term president cause he is the Antichrist, and saving the world is more important than saving the economy. Their strategic economic policy staffers provided the republican representatives with an easy dogma they can memorize, so they can focus on the real task at hand: taking a crap on Obama’s head. The solution to all of the nation’s economic problems according to the republicans’ economists is to cut federal spending by scaling down the government. Not being bothered by any form of regulation will then make companies decide to start hiring tax-paying*** American employees again and reverse all their outsourcing efforts to low wage countries over the past three decades. They will do this because they will be more confident.
After the republicans educate the public about the choice between eyeballs and confidence, there are more polls to decide what 1,001 randomly selected people think is best for the country. On the question what would be the appropriate course of action, according to the latest CBS/NY Times poll 53% of Americans want to reduce the size of the government, 34% wild hog fans and immigrants want to increase it, and 13% said they would rather shoot their brains out than to participate in any more polls. Americans prefer small and local government over the abundance of regulations being spewed out by Washington.
As I was musing on the war in Afghanistan as part of my visiting 9/11 remembrance conferences this week, a strange question hit me. Knowing what we know about Americans’ despise for centralized government, why are American troops and diplomats trying to unify all the different tribes in Afghanistan, and build a strong central government there to control them? Shouldn’t the US government let the Afghan tribes manage themselves and give them the gift of continuing disregard for every notion of centralized power? If the US truly cares about progress in Afghanistan, then why aren’t diplomats trying to get rid of whatever government there is left in the country, so Afghani can live in peace, their economy will flourish and peasants can combat extremists themselves? Do diplomats at the State Department simply not watch television? Or have they given up on America?
* The amount of contributions to these comment sections much to my surprise often surpass by a factor of three to one the sample size of the surveys they are based on.
** They want to do this because they want to raise taxes because they want to extend social benefits to all illegal immigrants and preferably all people in Latin America because they want citizens to lose their jobs because they hate America.
*** Because companies are not allowed to pay taxes in America, the revenue side of the budget is more complex in the US than it is in other countries.
