Sports talk radio and television has a tired old pattern. Some obnoxious guy has an opinion, gossips a bit, speculates a lot, and has a prediction. Get two or more of them talking and the fireworks commence. Two guys at loggerheads take pre-outlined counterpoints and the match is lit. They usually have a woman bookending the conversation by starting it and ending it by taking them to commercial. Woman are also typically cast as sideline commentators with the more “human” story from a “closeup” perspective of the heartwarming human interest story. The men, the generals, get to sit back from afar speculating on tactics.
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The men take their turn being right. These shows names say a lot about them – First Take, First Things First, Undisputed – all of them trying to one-up the other on the leader board. Their ratings score points, their clairvoyance in the realm of sport assures the listener that they are the best, most authoritative sports pundit. Sports fans in barbershops, at the docks, in warehouses, offices and mechanics shops debate the sports pundit’s talking points like instructions from their own field general. The goal – to have the superior opinion and be champ at decoding the hierarchical supremacy of the sport via proxy. To predict who the champion will be asserts powers of poignant prognostication. Part of the winning rubs off on the most astute. In any exchange you will hear, “I told you from the beginning of the season so and so.” And “This series is over.” And “The greatest of all time – the G.O.A.T. – is so and so.”
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Political punditry has a similar origin. The PBS News Hour’s Shields and Brooks segments have a similar format, a woman presiding over the ritual chest thumping of supposed experts. These shows have proliferated to a stunning degree in the last decade or more. The expansion of editorializing events, leaving no area of the news untouched by the sway of strong opinion. As news veered into punditry, the internet has become a vessel for all manner of political rage. It’s hard to believe that a Trump White House would have manifested in the pre-wired era. It’s both a phenomena and a brand of politics defined by the character limits of the snide angry tweet. When meme politics owns the day, when instant hot takes and gaffes fill out the news cycle and the Googleverse, who has time for nuanced investigation?
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The court of strong opinions has spread to the arts. Social media’s given platform to new pundits on film and television. Viewers sharing their own opinions on everything from Orange is the New Black supporting character arcs to the color grading of the Battle of Winterfell on Game of Thrones. What did or did not work for them in each aspect of each show, as if it was made just for them. The cacophony of amateur film and television reviewing, blow by blow, episode by episode, turns everyone into an armchair director.
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There’s something deeply cynical about the entire culture of instant evaluation. Turning everyone and everything into an instant judge, a cybernetic node in a gossip-hungry cyber mob. It’s telling that the famed movie review website is called Rotten Tomatoes rather than Fresh Tomatoes. The name itself frames our experience in the negative, prepared to “swipe left.”
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Opinions sound rational and objective to us individually, but when taken form a long view, we can see that these supposedly individual judgments of rationality reveal collective irrational results. Most people think that whatever they think at any given time is right. They might change their opinion later, and then the new opinion is correct. Another absurdity in the human comedy revealing that the axiom it still true, opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one.
A Fragile Dignity 