If American politics in 2012 had a soundtrack it would have to be The Sound of Silence, the evocative song written by Paul Simon after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
”People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening,” Simon sang. That’s exactly what it’s like in America at present: what needs to be talked about is being ignored in favour of endless babble about irrelevancies. The sound of silence in America today is the conservative ideology that ignores economic realities while it lays down an atavistic social agenda.
This is true on the campaign trail, where the men who want to be president rail against contraception, abortion and gay marriage and other non-emergencies but have no credible proposals for how to deal with the economic catastrophe that has befallen their country.
