zlacker

"Why now" is the steady increase of news in our lives. The timing tracks perfectly the shift from newspapers to TV to 24 hour news to the Internet. We're now more aware of politics as continuous, rather than as something that happens only during elections, plus brief updates that go one-way from authority figures to us.

It has turned politics from the way we make national decisions into a national game. We treat it with the same seriousness as sports -- which we treat as if we were making each decision ourselves, despite having even less effect on the game than the pompoms. Our opinions on both are loud, under-informed, and irrelevant, but we enjoy having them. Enjoyment has become the primary goal.