Things were a lot simpler when I was a kid.

Politics, for example. More to the point, professional wrestling.

If you happened to tune into the World Wrestling Federation on a Saturday morning, you pretty much knew what to expect. There’d be a good guy and a bad guy. The good guy, called, in trade lingo, a “face,” short for “babyface,” would often be blond-haired and athletic. The bad guy, or “heel,” would often be hairy and have bad teeth.

The match would unfold as a kind of morality play. The face would either be physically or morally superior, or both. The heel, unconstrained by the rules of civil combat, would do anything to win, especially if it involved a metal folding chair. There’d come a time when the heel, thanks to some dastardly deed or other, would get the upper hand. The fans would howl with indignation.

But the face, through strength of will and purity of purpose, would somehow manage to get back on top. Perhaps he’d lose a battle or two along the way to build suspense and provide a revenge motive. But he always won in the end. Just as the detective’s job at the end of a mystery novel is to restore order to a world destabilized by a crime, the face was there to reinforce the virtues of sportsmanship, patriotism, and the supervised use of steroids.

These days, it’s much more complicated. Wrestling has been fractured into ever-smaller sub-genres. There are variations upon variations, including so-called “hardcore matches,” with names straight out of the Roman arena: “First Blood Match,” “Last Man Standing Match,” and the ever-popular “No Rope Barbed Wire Deathmatch.”

Why do I bring this up? Well, last Thursday, I tuned into the president’s health care forum. While it’s true that the country desperately needs health care reform, and also true that I’ve written about the plight of the under-insured in these very pages, I’ll admit that there was a part of me that was hoping to see some mortal combat. Given the recent intensity of partisan rancor, I figured there was a decent chance that the health care forum would degenerate into, say, a Doomsday Cage match, or at least a good, solid Boiler Room Brawl.

Imagine my surprise! There, sitting in an awkward but fiercely negotiated order, were our president and key members of Congress, doing a very fine impression of lawmakers debating a thorny issue.

While there were the inevitable asides to the audience back home, with long lists of evening-news-ready soundbites, there was also an interesting dynamic in the room. Elected officials from both sides of the aisle were managing to agree on some key points:

1. Health care in America has a lot of problems.

2. The American people expect these problems to be fixed.

3. The American people are really angry that the problems aren’t fixed yet.

There were other important corollaries, such as the fact that people don’t like paying taxes; big deficits are bad; fraud is a drag on health care, as are frivolous lawsuits; and a newborn with a cleft palate shouldn’t be denied coverage for having a pre-existing condition.

Nothing earth-shaking, but at least a good start.

The tone of the conversation was remarkably civil. The president did a good job of pushing lawmakers to find consensus. I was honestly surprised by the amount of agreement in the room. Nobody tried to hit anyone over the head with, say, a ladder or a pitcher of water. No one tried to hurl an opponent into a huge pile of fluorescent light tubes. There was no tearing off of masks or shaving anyone’s head.

The worst sportsmanship I saw was actually on the part of Fox News. In the spirit of bi-partisanship, I decided to watch CNN for a while, and then flip over to Fox.

CNN seemed pretty neutral. They identified each speaker with a straightforward computer graphic. From time to time, they’d pull a quotation and present it as a caption, but the quotations weren’t meant to be controversial. Occasionally, they’d define a technical term, such as “reconciliation,” for the viewer’s benefit.

The coverage on Fox was a different story. There was a steady text crawl at the bottom of the screen. Those things typically drive me nuts. I can’t seem to keep my eyes off them, which I suppose is the point. News programs often run them as a way of feeding the viewer late-breaking headlines.

But in this case, the text crawl was being used to undermine a rare serious and thoughtful debate. These were not neutral comments, designed to help viewers understand the issues and the process; rather, these comments were meant to reinforce a negative view of the president and his efforts to date to improve a dire and worsening national problem.

It was a strange mismatch: if you listened to the debate, the politicians in the room seemed to be feeling their way towards reluctant consensus; but if you’d glanced at the screen in a noisy restaurant, you’d have thought they were locked in the same old Loser Leaves Town Brawl that has dominated Washington for years.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 04 March 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com