Maybe it is because I was much younger and my TV time was limited. Maybe it is because I had baseball to play and a trip to the other side of the neighbor planned with my buddies on our bikes. I never knew much about the people on the TV, whether they were actors, athletes, singers, or the President. It was good to be uninformed about the real lives of people in the spotlight. More that that, it was good that now and then the cameras were turned off and we didn't have to dissect every action made by a household name. Now the spotlight is so big, you almost have to seek refuge to stay out of it. Even though this makes for a more transparent society, I think that it's actually hurting the world of politics.
I'm not saying that I want political games to go back to the shadows, where it once was in my mind. My problem with everyone being on camera is that it's made us all shortsighted. This is especially true for a world where professional hustlers have to convince us of their worth every 4 years. Nobody cares to make a "New Deal" or create "the Great Society" because in order to fix what is broken, something else has got to give. Also, everything that is broken was a fix to someone else's problem. In order to be someone's hero politically, you almost have to become someone else's bogeyman. That spotlight is in HD now, and everyone looks like a bogeyman in HD.
I'd love progress to a time where law-makers can form an opinion, express it, and then receive feedback that didn't include slowly clubbing them to death with their own words for two weeks or until someone says something else. (It doesn't even have to be something better or worse that what the last guy said. It just has to feed the hungry spotlight.) Maybe then they could start concentrating on what's good for the nation in the long term, and not just what's serves their party and image in the short term.
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