With the election approaching, the air is thick with political dogma from all manner of media outlets and individuals.  As I endure the increasingly unavoidable political advertisements and commentaries, I can’t help but think of two paragraphs from Walker Percy’s book The Moviegoer:

After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library — where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals.  Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.  Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other.  In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.  This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point.  Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval.  Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counterattack.  Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated!  And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.

I do hold a variety of (mostly) firm opinions on a small variety of political issues — opinions which I choose most often not to air in this venue, as I don’t wish to join the internet’s chorus of painfully self-important rhetoricians — but I easily grow weary of the either/or, left/right, conservative/liberal climate of political expression.  So, while I do not necessarily share the character’s ambivalent enjoyment of political commentary, I do find a certain amusement in his use of that commentary: rather than being swayed by the vehement arguments of either side, he is buoyed by the vehemence itself; rather than caring wholly about the positions they are advancing, he cares more that they are advancing them with vitriolic passion.