Musings on "America's Great Divide", Frontline, PBS

There were a several fundamental problems and fatal flaws with the interesting Frontline documentary, "America's Great Divide". First, the US, apart from a very brief period from the Great Depression to Nixon, and then only on a surface level, has been disunited. I give you the Revolutionary War with its loyalists and revolutionaries. I give you the Civil War with its "free states" and slave states. I give you the battles over Jim Crow, the civil rights movements, the counterculture, and I give you White evangelicals to note a few examples.

Second, there is the blame the Russkies  nonsense. I don't doubt that Russia, like every great power before them, is engaged in several forms of subterfuge against the US just as the US is engaged in several forms of subterfuge against Russia. And while "America's Great Divide" recognises that the Russians are simply playing on the faultlines already evident in American society and culture it doesn't explore the role mainstream mass media has played in the great American divide, let alone the great Australian and British divide. In reality, in fact, it has been the media, with their limited historical memories and their penchant for sensationalism, that has played a more central and important role in dividing the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom than the evil godless commie Russkies. I give you the penny newspaper, Hearst, Murdoch, the Sun, News of the World, page three girls, Hillsborough, right wing radio which arose after the demise of the fairness doctrine, and Fox. And I give you PBS's News Hour. The News Hour, with its moronic practise of giving us demagogues on both sides of the issue, has not only helped divide America and Americans but undermined notions of facticity.

Third, the notion that the post-truth era started with Sarah Palin and those of her ilk, is rubbish. Apparently, the talking heads on "America's Great Divide" who make such arguments have never heard of William Randolph Hearst and his post-truth Spanish American war and the various delusional conspiracy theories that stretch back very far in European and Western history and culture. Post-truth sensationalism, particularly of the mass media variety, has, in other words, been around long before Sarah Palin, Barak Obama, and Donald Trump came on the scene.

Fourth, Obama did indeed reflect and symbolise for many Americans a changing and more diverse America. He was not the first symbol of this culture war, however. I give you nineteenth century American nativism and its impact on late nineteenth and twentieth century immigration policy, restrictive policies that were not overturned until 1965. 

This "great American divide", which has been around in some way, shape, or form, and has often moved around issues associated with race and ethnicity, is not going anywhere. America was and is divided and those who are currently living in this divided America are living out a bad marriage. It is, in my opinion, time to end this abusive marriage before it is too late.