I was doing a search on something and came across a website called The Ornery American. I quickly learned that it is produced by a favorite author of mine, Orson Scott Card; creator of the novel series based on one of his first books, Ender's Game (Link to Amazon). I don't know a great deal about Mr. Card, but I believe he is a devoutly religious man, but one that doesn't believe in forcing his views on others. In fact there is another article, his most recent one, that I will point out in another post that shows basically where his beliefs lie in how he feels others should think about him and the world at large.
This article is actually the Afterward of one of his most recent novels, Empire (Link to Amazon). I've not yet had a chance to read it, but saw it in the bookstore the other day. It's the story of how a 2nd American Civil War gets started and the men in the military caught in the middle. As I said I haven't yet read it, but after reading this article and knowing his personal writing style, I'm more inclined to do so. It should be noted that the book was written at the request of a software publisher looking to create a game franchise.
Again, I have not yet read the book and don't know if it is any good or not. Amazon's Editorial from Publisher's Weekly decries him basically has a hypocrite for writing a book that pits the Red States against the Blue States, making the Red states champions the hero of the book then writing an afterward (what follows below) about how intolerant both sides have become in the political debate. So while I don't know the reason why the messenger sent the message, I like the message.
It was, sadly enough, all too easy.
Because we haven't had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think we can't have one now. Where is the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line? When you look at the red-state blue-state division in the past few elections, you get a false impression. The real division is urban, academic, and high-tech counties versus suburban, rural, and conservative Christian counties. How could such widely scattered "blue" centers and such centerless "red" populations ever act in concert?
Geography aside, however, we have never been so evenly divided with such hateful rhetoric since the years leading up to the Civil War of the 1860s. Because the national media elite are so uniformly progressive, we keep hearing (in the elite media) about the rhetorical excesses of the "extreme right." To hear the same media, there
But any rational observer has to see that the Left and Right in America are screaming the most vile accusations at each other all the time. We are fully polarized -- if you accept one idea that sounds like it belongs to either the blue or the red, you are assumed -- nay,