Bring the Popcorn There was a time when Hollywood screenplays were treated as sacred Scripture. “I’m willing to risk my professional reputation to defend this film!” The audience would cheer. “You are not risking anything! Nothing is at risk! This is just what the story requires. No other conclusion could possibly be drawn.” But even the sacred doesn’t last forever. In the age of the internet, no one, literally no one, is willing to defend anything against those who dissent. Everyone is shouting from every hilltop, that the whole thing was a vast Leftist conspiracy. There was once a time when Hollywood screenplays were treated as sacred Scripture. There were those who argued that a good story is worth saving; that no matter what happens, a film or play should be about something. If the story requires two children being blown up so that the grownup can leave the room without noticing it, then there was nothing that could be done about it. It was the story. No other conclusion could possibly be drawn. But these days people are demanding answers; no one is willing to risk his reputation on defending it. What does that mean? It means you can’t sit back and watch whatever is happening because you think the only way to oppose it is with reason. We’re so worried that it’s all one gigantic leftist plot, and that if we do or say anything, we’ll only be lending credence to it, that we’ll miss what’s happening right in front of us. We should get up every day and go like it’s an important meeting at work where you have to say something. I mean, when something really is important and people are actually depending on us, don’t we have to say something? Because if we don’t, then we don’t care. And if we don’t care, that means something important is actually happening, but we’re not going to do anything about it. Because we’re busy watching the next YouTube clip. We like to imagine the world has gone mad, but no one wants to say out loud that this must be the moment when reason finally gives up the ghost. This is why when somebody tries to say something that suggests there may have been one or two points in the last election where reason could have won, he gets shouted down and he ends up losing. Because it’s too close to an admission that the last four years didn’t actually mean nothing, that we went into it with all the right intentions, and that maybe the reason it didn’t work was that we never considered the possibility that it could be a sham. In other words, it might actually mean something if someone is actually willing to stand up and say that you just never know, and that there might be real reasons for what we thought were insane policy choices. The danger, I think, is that we become paralyzed by the fear that the media are so right and they’re all that stands between us and unreason. And that’s just what they want us to think. That’s the way our system works. I can’t give a good speech to Congress, even though I know I’d be an amazing public servant. I won’t quit my job. There are people who will argue, “Yes, you should take on the establishment and fight!” But then, if you actually go out and do it, what you find is that most of your colleagues are terrified of saying something that may be controversial or that the media doesn’t like. That’s how things work. That’s the way our system works. I can’t give a good speech to Congress, even though I know I’d be an amazing public servant. I won’t quit my job. There are people who will argue, “Yes, you should take on the establishment and fight! But then, if you actually go out and do it, what you find is that most of your colleagues are terrified of saying something that may be controversial or that the media doesn’t like. That’s how things work. Which is the way our system works. Look, I’m not a conservative. I’m a liberal, which is to say I’m a little to the left of center, but that’s not the point. I spent years supporting the Democratic Party. And for much of the time that I’ve spent in Congress, I was on their side. I fought for an end to the War on Drugs. I fought against the bloated Pentagon budget. I spent years opposing George W. Bush. What he and his band of cronies were doing was so obviously wrong, you could hardly look away. Now, a lot of people, including people in my own party, will admit that maybe at the beginning, this whole thing didn’t feel like it was coming out of nowhere. But now, all we do is howl about how the CIA was behind the attacks on 9/11. And then, when we do finally find out that there were warnings that this was a massive clusterfuck waiting to happen, what does our response always become? That it’s all a plot by the Bush Administration. Or the Obama Administration, which may have been involved, too. For God’s sake, it’s not like they’ve been quiet about it. The Obama Administration said repeatedly that there were no good options in Iraq. That was the reason it always came out “We were attacked because we did the right thing?” But what we do, and what we’ve done is to go to war and to spend hundreds of billions on war in Iraq, on spending for the military, on giving incentives to the Afghanis so that they would do everything we ask, only to find that the Afghans would look at the money and decide, “Oh yeah, I’d rather be paying back a gang that gave me a free pass from my opium crops” and decide to quit. There is nothing about Obama or any of his policy decisions that you can possibly make a rational argument for. But in our system, where you just don’t talk about it because that’s too scary, where you never want to say anything that would suggest that maybe some things aren’t working and they should be changed, we don’t even get to say that anymore. That’s the system in which we are trapped, which is why people get so angry with people who were against it, before it was cool, before it was Obama-approved, because we dared say out loud that maybe, just maybe, some things were wrong and need changing. It’s the same argument that the president made about Gitmo. He won. And then, because that decision was as unpopular as anything he has ever done, he went ahead and let it out into the wild, where it’s going to remain forever. Now, imagine that the guy that you voted for in the 2006 election told you what he was going to do right before the election. Imagine that, in the last days of the 2006 election, someone from the Obama Administration appeared on a cable television network and said, “Hey, so yeah, you think Gitmo is such a good thing? You know, I personally don’t think so. But the important thing is, there is no way in hell that a Republican will win if he opens up Gitmo again.” A lot of people would have taken that in and thought, “Well, if the thing I want really badly can’t happen, I guess I have to take what I can get.” Because maybe we can’t get everything we want, but we could definitely do better than this. Maybe we can’t say that everything Obama has done is wrong, but maybe we could do a better job of helping people. There are all sorts of issues we haven’t even touched on. The healthcare bill: why couldn’t it have been more cost-effective? Why couldn’t it have been a single payer plan? Obama, if he actually gives a speech like that, he could change the entire political climate on health care, if only he thought to do it that way. The reason you can’t say things like that is because of what I call Obama’s Law: no one is going to be interested in it if there isn’t anything scandalous about Obama or something that happened on his watch. The question shouldn’t be, “How do we stop this from happening?” but rather, “How do we make it not happen again?” Instead of focusing on why all this stuff was so wrong, it’s focusing on whether the people who are in power are bad guys. And if they’re not bad guys, they should just keep doing what they’re doing. This is the law that drives our politics right now. I know that none of what I’m saying makes any sense whatsoever. But none of the people who are shouting at me right now seem to think that what I am saying makes any sense, either. I spent the first two years of my career working to get a piece of legislation passed through the Congress. But I don’t feel like any of the people who are currently railing against me would have been willing to listen to a word I said. So what is it that we have here? A political system that’s designed to put the brakes on any attempts to change things for the better. The Democrats got some control of the House, and the Senate, and now they seem determined to stay there forever. Even though the people voted for change and they got