Last night my roommate and I wasted an hour and a half watching the greatest video that has ever been created. It was the most anticipated event in human history, the meeting of a force of true evil and a short Jewish man from New Jersey with the intellect of most small American towns. It was…. the long-anticipated debate between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart. Covering everything from health insurance coverage for birth control to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, this debate is the best hour and a half of illegally uploaded YouTube that you’ll ever watch.
So, what actually happened? For me, it was an eye-opening experience. I realized that Bill O’Reilly isn’t actually stupid. He really isn’t. Neither of the debaters were. Both of them just have very different beliefs about what we should and should not do as a country. It’s an honest ideological difference that has been covered over and masked by stupidity over the past several years. Some people believe that the government can do things better than individuals or the private sector; others believe that the government should be small and that individuals and companies should do some jobs instead of the government. Take health care, for instance. Jon Stewart believes that a single-payer (government-run) system could provide better coverage to more people at a lower cost than private insurance companies could. He does not believe that someone’s health should be left in the hands of a profit-driven entity. O’Reilly, on the other hand, believes that the best way to drive down costs is through competition. There is no competition in a government-run health care program.
Now, what about this involves rhetoric or civic life? Politics is basically the art of rhetoric on a massive scale, with a sprinkling of corruption and a squeeze of freedom juice. Stewart and O’Reilly gathered up a huge audience of politically motivated individuals and had an honest, fact-driven debate about what the correct direction of our country is. I believe that this is a great example of a group of people getting together and doing something to benefit the community, which is our definition of a civic duty.
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I missed the debate, but whenever I have some free time, I’m definitely going to watch it! It’s so funny how everyone expected this big intellectual debate from the two presidential candidates, and instead the debate turned into over an hour of interruptions and smirks. I expected the comedian and the ultra conservative to have a completely ridiculous debate, but in reality, many of my friends told me the debate was more civil and intellectual than the presidential debate. I wonder if the expected level of rhetoric affected the perceived quality of the debates. The presidential debate might not have actually been the train wreck that many think it was; people just expected more from the potential leaders of our nation. The Rumble in the Air Conditioned Auditorium might have been so successful, because people went into the debate expecting more entertainment than discourse.
When I read the first paragraph, I got so scared. I come from a strong Republican background, so while I try to separate myself from political identification (in my heart of hearts, I think I’m an anarchist), I have heard the positive side to commonly mocked right-wingers like Bill O’Reilly. When my dad has it on in the car, there are times where I can’t stand listening to him at all, but every once in I hear something thoughtful in his show. I have to take it as a political show primarily for entertainment purposes rather than thought-provoking purposes–shows don’t make money if their audience disagrees with what’s being said.
And I think this points out something about our country–politics is no longer a tool for solving problems. It’s a way to gain power and popularity. The kind of discussion you observed is atypical–it doesn’t happen as often and not as many people pay attention. While it encompasses (what I think is) the true, ideal purpose of rhetoric, more common rhetoric is not a discussion but a harsh competition to say the right thing to make something sound good.