How Long Has This Been Going On?

My 16-year old son and I got into a big fight this afternoon over the previous post.

Partly it was his exhaustion after a hard week of school. (Afterward he took a 3 hour nap.) Partly it was his natural inclination to play Argument Clinic over just about anything.

But he got me to thinking. Just how long has this been going on?

Unlike many trends this one -- calling the other candidate a danger to the planet -- can be dated precisely, at least in terms of mainstream use. The ad above ran once, and Lyndon Johnson was heavily criticized for calling out Barry Goldwater as an ignorant, war-mongering nutcase who might blow up the world.

But Johnson won, and the ad tapped into something in our lizard brain. Republicans, who had been thinking such things about Democrats since the era of Joe McCarthy, saw the ad as legitimizing the tactic, and have been impugning Democrats' patriotism ever since.

Today, of course, even Democrats use it against one another. Ads like Clinton's 3 AM ad are pernicious because they end discussion. They do not further debate. They call all those who disagree illegitimate, unworthy, and call their supporters traffickers in treason. Beneath that any kind of corruption may freely hide, since there is no such thing as legitimate dissent from its premise.

The excuse commonly used for attacking another candidate's legitimacy is that it's always been that way. The 1800 campaign of Thomas Jefferson and the 1860 campaign against Abraham Lincoln are often used as antecedents. But the candidates didn't do it in their opponents' faces, and the attacks weren't considered legitimate at the time. (Picture from City University of New York.)

Now they're not only legitimate, but de rigeur. They're expected, demanded even, by a press corps which has become so obsessed with playing referee they've forgotten their job is really just to witness. This, combined with the overt politicization of much of our media (conservatives buying media outlets specifically to twist news coverage in their favor) has made our political campaigns a cesspool.

My point to my son, which was not taken, is that it doesn't have to be that way. We can reject those who engage in that kind of tactic, reject the journalists who engage in that kind of coverage, and slowly, over time, regain civility and balance.

It is possible.

But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. This election offers that opportunity. People across the political spectrum are worried about their own lives, their country and their world as never before. We're engaged, and we want this to be about us. Not the candidates, and certainly not the supercilious media.

Barack Obama tapped into this, and the counterattack has begun, with this desire being called a mere tactic, or phony, not just by his political opponents but by the cynical among us. Well, if it is, and he governs cynically, we can deal with that.

But before we can have civilization again, we need civility. We need to stop assuming that other Americans are evil, or consort with evil, that they have evil intentions or evil hearts. They don't. They're just different is all. Their assumptions may differ from ours, their philosophies and beliefs may be radically different from ours. That does not make them bad people. Just mistaken, in our eyes.

Returning to civilized discourse starts with telling both the candidates and those who cover them that this pageant is not about them, that we're not cheering them.

It's about us. We're cheering us. An American election is the greatest miracle this nation has ever produced. It's our most important export.

Stop polluting it.