Cartoons and political discourse

Rich Miller, who runs the Capitol Fax legislative information service and is easily the most incisive political blogger in Illinois, had an especially thought-provoking post today. It wasn't about Statehouse politics: It was Miller's personal reaction -- which he called a rant -- to the death of Fox Lake police lieutenant Joe Gliniewicz, who committed suicide after embezzling an estimated $50,000 from a scout post affiliated with the police department.

It was anything but a rant.

Basically Miller added his voice to other commentators who said the circumstances of Gliniewicz's life and death were too complex and nuanced for a good cop-bad cop story:

Too much about our society isn’t real. Our public discourse is too often based on way too little information and way too much ideology, all intensified by our too-quick reactions in an age when everybody has access to their own online megaphones.

Many of us in this Statehouse business got a close look at how this works when Barack Obama ran for President. He was quickly turned into a cartoon character that few of us recognized. Hero or villain, that just wasn’t the person we knew.

Cartoon versions of reality abound. Just read any newspaper comment section for two minutes (or more than a few newspaper opinion pages), or browse your Facebook feed. It’s not only disappointing, but downright dangerous that so many people choose to live in their own black and white fantasy worlds and forcefully believe that everyone else should, too.

Miller quoted Greg Tejeda of the Chicago Argus blog, who resisted the knee-jerk impulse to paint Gliniewicz as a "crooked cop" and leave it at that. "They’re human beings! Just like everybody else," Tejeda said, and Miller agreed:

We are, indeed, all just human beings. We’re all a little different and strange in our own dark little corners. Even so, most of us try to do good things. ... We should recognize that, once we’ve grown into adulthood, everybody will occasionally disappoint, some much more than others. It’s simply the reality of being an adult and part of the oftentimes puzzling beauty of living on this planet.

(I'll fight off the temptation to quote Luther -- we're all in bondage to sin -- and leave it at that.)

Miller's right about something else. We do make cartoon characters out of our public figures, and it does get us in trouble. It devalues our political discourse. He's right about Obama, too.