Denver Post columnist Michael Booth observes that politics is becoming pop culture:

The huge box-office take of Fahrenheit 9/11 is the occasion but it is only the latest in a string of recent culture war skirmishes that have made the jump to the entertainment industry, including Clinton’s memoirs, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Passion of the Christ. Booth stretches the thesis abit in enlisting the Reagan funeral campaign event and the Janet Jackson and Howard Stern brouhahas to his cause, however. But is this really the first time mass-marketed pop culture is joining in the ideological struggle? Hardly. The spate of antiwar films of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era including Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and of course Apocalypse Now; the anti-nuclear The Day After; the 1988 Scorsese/Schrader film of The Last Temptation of Christ that was so much in the Catholic Church’s face — these are just recent examples in one artform that come to mind. As long as the country has been polarized, mass culture has capitalized on sectarian appeal. Many major political upheavals spawn bestselling books; think of All the President’s Men, which was a massive publishing event.

Booth so wants it to be unprecedented that every man on the street has an opinion on the events of the day. Perhaps it appears more dramatic now because we have never been as emphatically split right down the middle as we appeared to have been in the 2000 election; or because the urgency around getting the confounded muggins occupying the White House out in November is so intense. As one commentator notes in the article, what may appear to be pop cultural appeal may be the nascent reawakening of the disenfranchised voter instead.