In the 1940s Sunny Skylar wrote the lyrics to a catchy tune named It’s Gotta Be This or That. Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Glen Grey and a lot of others recorded it. Essentially, it says that things have to be in one of two states: wet, dry; gross, net; got, get. It’s toe-tapping fun.

It also makes almost no sense. For instance, it says, “if it’s not sis…it’s gotta be your brother.” Which, of course, leaves out most of the world.

For a song, that’s not a big problem. However, it seems that people are seeing the world in the same way: it’s gotta be this or that.

This particular musing was brought on by a friend’s lecturing me about the proposed treaty with Iran. I had expressed a mildly positive view regarding diplomatic solutions rather than bombing people. “You’re no friend to Israel,” he said.

I started to react defensively: I’ve been pro-Israel since 1948 (a fact that has made absolutely no difference to Israel).

Then I started to debate: if being pro-treaty is being anti-Israel, what are those 340 rabbis doing supporting the treaty.

But I did neiither. I just asked him if he had read the treaty. He hadn’t. I hadn’t. Neither of us was really qualified to have an opinion on it. We should have been talking about baseball or cherry blossoms or something. However, in that echo chamber my friend frequents, talking heads have instructed him to be against the treaty because being against it is pro-Israel. And, like the workers in Metropolis, he and his fellows march out and make that argument.

This guy is no dummy. We’ve been friends for a long time, and he has been known to have original thoughts. It’s just that original, nuanced thinking is becoming less and less fashionable. Too much of the world is gearing up for conversation by taking a daily dose of Fox News or MSNBC, both of which are clearly and openly based on ideology rather than news judgment.

We have become the living embodiment of the old and rather lame joke: there are two kinds of people in the world; those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.

We have always had our extremists, bigots, loud mouths, and ideologues. That’s not new. What does seem to be new is that we are allowing them to set not only the tone of the debate, but the facts of the debate, repeating what they say endlessly until it becomes the received version.

An example (taken from the right simply because it was in the paper this morning and not because this particular problem with truth is exclusive to the right): A story was making it around the blogosphere a few weeks ago that Iran would be inspecting their own nuclear sites. Then the New York Times picked it up, only to publish a modified version almost immediately. They found out that the thrust of the story (that Iran would be responsible for the inspections) wasn’t true. The truth was that Iran and the international agency responsible for the inspections would both be involved. In other words, Iran would have representatives in their nuclear facilities when they were inspected.

For a couple of weeks, I didn’t see any more about this. This, in the conservative column on the AJC’s editorial page, the writer (a staff member at the Heritage Institute) makes the flat statement that Iran will be responsible for its own nuclear inspections. And this will be repeated until a large number of people accept it as the truth.

Perhaps this is a product of the age we live in, an age where the questions are just too big to be understood; so the easy answers are just accepted. An age where everybody has a microphone called the internet and can say whatever they want to, whether it’s factual or not.

Or maybe it’s that we’ve just decided to give up on thinking. In a memo prepared in the Nixon administration (possibly written and certainly endorsed by Roger Ailes), the writer said: Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you. That, unfortunately and with the addition of the internet, is where we seem to be.

I guess the fact that I’ve written advertising copy for much of my life has inoculated me from believing everything (or even much) that I read. I know that even the best intentioned writers have their own baggage of bias that seeps into what they write, and I suspect that there are few who could be truly called “best intentioned.” Too many are axe grinders.

When I was a child, you were either for the Red Sox or the Yankees. You either worshipped Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio. It had to be this or that.

But that was childish then. It’s childish today. There’s no requirement that we surrender our right to our own opinions, especially if we’ve made an effort to buttress them with actual facts. I would really be happy to have a conversation with anyone of any stripe who would do just that.