Cut his mic

Last week, I had a bit of an argument with a friend of mine.

You might or might not know that the television show “Battlestar Galactica” went off the air during spring break. This was a totally meaningless event to me because I honestly didn’t know until recently that such a show existed. Evidently a relatively large number of people watched it.

Anyway, the whole thing blew up when he referred to it as “the best show in television history.”

Honestly, I really don’t care what other people watch on TV. I’ve long since become resigned to the fact that most of the shows I love will either be canceled way before they should be, like “Arrested Development,” or will become too trendy for their own good, like “The Simpsons.” I’m never going to get what I want from TV because I’m too picky. People can watch what they want and enjoy it. I honestly don’t care.

What I do care about, though, is the assignment of objective superlative statements in situations where they have no business being used. TV, along with music and movies and art and things like that, is in the realm of taste. There are parts of art where objective quality of the work can be assessed, but in the wide view, it’s really inappropriate to try to do stuff like this.

It seems to me that it says something about our culture. We argue a lot these days about everything from politics to sports to TV. But in these arguments, we – for the most part – don’t really try that hard to make points or to convince the other party that we are right.

The way to win an argument these days is just to overpower the opponent. If you’re right, it’s because you can cut the other guy’s microphone like on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” or because you can yell louder than the other guy and then cut his microphone, like Bill O’Reilly. It really has nothing to do with rhetorical strength or debate skill – it’s all just noise.

And that’s what I ran into. Because when someone says a TV show is “the best one ever,” there’s no way to beat that in a real debate, should you try to have one. You can offer what you think is a better candidate, but at that point you’re just playing a game that can’t be won.

Questions of taste can’t really be argued, because you can’t convince someone to stop liking something. If you try, do it rationally, not with a sledgehammer.

Maybe we should argue less about things that don’t matter. And maybe when we argue about things that do matter, we should try to do so based on merit rather than volume.

And it would probably help if we stopped calling one another socialists, because that’s the political equivalent of “you and what army?” It would be a lot easier to get things done.