You and me and the chasm in between
By Charlene “Charlie” Fern
Former speechwriter for Laura Bush

 “It’s all over but the shouting,” my dear Aunt Gloria might be saying about now.

One of the most alarming shouts I’ve heard recently came over the National Public Radio airwaves as Terry Gross interviewed an editor from the New Yorker – who wanted to give his account of the great divide between Americans that we’ve all been hearing so much about.

“My country is divided bitterly…bitterly…in a way that is at least as serious as it’s ever been in my lifetime. I can only compare it to the Vietnam period, but there was something warmer about that period than there is now. The division now is … cold.”

All this talk about a bitter divide is hogwash. It’s based on nothing more than headstrong opinion. In my corner of the country, my lifelong dem friends haven’t disowned my right-wing friends. We get together every week, business as usual. We, like most Americans, are inclined to focus on the many things that we have in common, because that’s the glue that seals our friendship.

I suspect the perception that our nation is divided was created in part by the political process and in part by our nation’s opinion leaders and mainstream media.

“Are you feeling alienated from your country?” Gross asked him.

“No, but I am feeling alienated from half my countrymen and it’s distressing,” he said. “That a candidate like Bush could be elected…there’s got to be some explanation…I don’t really understand where they’re coming from. It’s a failure of imagination on my part, I suppose, that I don’t really understand …”

It is a colossal failure of imagination – and a failure to live up to his responsibility as an opinion leader. We should be alarmed when a man of his caliber has no idea what the other half is thinking. As a leading intellectual, as a contributor to one of our nation’s top magazines, it’s his job to know.

Even I can wrap my brain around the so-called “other half.” That’s because I share many of the same values. The editor describes himself this way:

“I live in a big cosmopolitan city. I have lots of gay friends. I don’t see why they shouldn’t get married if they want to. I like art and music. I like country music, but I like lots of other kinds of music too. I guess I believe in progressive taxation …I’m a solid bourgeois citizen. I served my country. I work hard in my job.”

Save a word or two, that describes me at various times of life – and most of America. Does that make us all cultural elites? Does it mean that we will always prefer the same candidate over another?

The election cycle is designed to emphasize the difference between the candidates. The campaigns battle to make one candidate seem completely right and the other totally wrong.

In the process, news organizations, especially those with a 24-hour news cycle, tend to regurgitate campaign rhetoric, which deepens the perceived divide. And opinion leaders have been busily digging the divide for so long that they – and readers and listeners who allow the media to think for them – are actually starting to fall into the fictional gap.

If our New Yorker editor can’t see the similarities that the rest of us can see, then he has not only failed himself, but he’s also failed his own constituency.

Consider the source, and then reconsider the divide. This guy doesn’t sit at a typewriter in a basement cubicle. He sits at the editor’s desk.  He helped the magazine decide to jump into the political fray and formally endorse John Kerry.

Now, more than ever, Americans must be wary of the fear-mongering, misguided prophets on both sides of the spectrum.

As the interview drew to a close, Terry Gross asked the mourning man if he might seek solace in history or literature after the election.

He replied, “I’m feeling a very cold kind of grief right now and I’m going to look for that kind of comfort where I can find it.”

He can find hope in our entire body of history and literature. It proves that humans have a unique way of prevailing through the best of times and the worst of times.

However, if the misguided prophets don’t stop proclaiming opinion as truth, then we all might as well turn to a chapter on Roman history, which reminds us that a nation divided against itself cannot stand.