Well, here we are on the eve of Obama’s inauguration and I’m trying to be hopeful. Not because I think the Obama administration is going to screw up the country, but because I fear that the country is already too far gone, fighting a Cold Civil War that it can’t give up.

The outrageous things that the political right has said about the political left and vice versa have escalated to the point where they are impossible to parody, to the point where we are on the brink of something ugly.

Every source of information has been polarized in either red or blue light; there is very little consensus. If Obama manages to magically save the country, the bright-red voters will only believe that it is part of an elaborate conspiracy to lull us into subservience, just as the bright-blue voters were willing to believe that Bush had orchestrated 9/11.

It’s like two brands of nationwide paranoia woven together throughout the country; like a Pepsi/Coke split gone haywire. By this time the mind of the average American is like a badly spelled web page with a black background and over-large multi-colored text with too many exclamation points.

I’m not sure what the total cure would entail, but I do believe that humility would be one of the active ingredients. There’s a lot of pride behind a conspiracy theory—a belief that you are important enough to hoodwink, that your opponents don’t just disagree with you but are super-villains to your super-hero, that somehow only you are subtle enough to see the truth.

This country has some major problems facing it, and people need to give up their hobbies of heterodoxy and deal with reality. To pull together as a nation. Or else.