I’m sure glad that I have something to keep me occupied these days. If it were not for my obsession with music, and the knowledge that I cannot possibly live long enough to learn all the material I’d like before my time is up, I’d have probably paid more attention to the festival of glad-handing and self-absorbed displays of maudlin excess known as the presidential inauguration.

Please don’t be the next person to tell me you wept as some portion of the quadrennial flotilla of sludge drifted by on its way down the tubes. It will be impossible for me to ever again respect you as an adult.

The names change and the corners flip, but that’s about it. Every few years we replace one paradigm of rah-rah and magical thinking with another. Strip away the pageantry of the inauguration and all that’s left amounts to switching one brand BS for the only other brand available. Then waiting to see if it works any better than it did the last time.

I’ve a wager for you. Queue up some footage of the inauguration, line up a few Irish car bombs, then down one every time someone disingenuously utters the word “unity.” You’ll be in a different space within five minutes. Guaranteed.

Unity is the last thing that the vast majority of people on either side of the partisan divide in this country want. What they want is to have their way, which is exactly why we don’t have much unity. We’ve been, for some time, conducting a grand national experiment in how far partisans are willing to go to shove their ideas down everyone else’s throats. The answer, it turns out, is pretty far.

Before going any further, let me make clear that I think that some amount of political disunity is unambiguously good. Politicians are supposed to argue with each other. Ideas are supposed to compete. As long as everyone plays by the rules, dissent strengthens democracy.

The problem, at least as I see it, is that both sides have abandoned playing by the rules. The only rule now is win, at any and all costs. The immediate corollary is winner takes all.

On a related topic, I’ve been interested in various analyses the police response to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. President Joe Biden made his view clear when he stated that he’s convinced that the response would have been quite different had it been Black Lives Matter descending on the Capitol.

President Biden is entitled to his point of view. The problem is, of course, that as president, if he’s wrong about this, and I suspect that he might be, it has potentially unfortunate consequences for everyone. It’d have been nice if instead of using the Capitol attack to pander to his base, he’d have encouraged everyone to wait until a proper analysis had time to take shape.

No such luck. How is this substantively any different from the shoot from the hip approach of his predecessor?

The most interesting analysis of the Capitol riot I’ve encountered is that of Detroit Police Chief James Craig. Chief Craig, who is Black, has pushed back against the idea that there have been clear, systematic, disparities in the treatment of BLM protesters and the Capitol insurrectionists. Craig points out that BLM protesters met little resistance in Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia — all places where rioting and looting broke out. BLM protesters set up “autonomous” zones in Seattle when the police were ordered to stand down by the the city’s mayor.

Once again, to be clear, I don’t approve of any of this. Protesting is fine; rioting, breaking laws and murder are not. I would be willing to bet more than I can afford to lose that “unity” is not what either the Capitol Hill insurgents or the BLM want. They want to force their views on the other side because they don’t like them. Like they say on the commercials: “It’s not complicated.”

But possibly the only thing related to any of this that I approve of less is the insistence by many that any equal disapproval of these protests amounts to conjuring up a false equivalence. Perhaps the most ridiculous defense of this proposition that I’ve encountered was in a Politifact analysis by sociologist Michael Sierra-Arévalo: “Looting stores, starting fires, those things are illegal as is the takeover of the Capitol, Sierra-Arévalo said. But he said observers should ask if there is a legitimate gripe at the heart of the violence that occurred. In this respect, Sierra-Arévalo said the two events differed. Police brutality is real, voter fraud is not.”

Well, I’m glad he cleared that up. The next time that my feelings tell me that I have a legitimate gripe about something I might have work it out by rounding up some of my headbanging buddies with pipes and a blowtorch and go visit the sociology department at UT Austin.

The problem, of course, is that the notion that unjustified police force is widespread and systemically racist has about the same amount of evidence supporting it as that for the last presidential election being stolen from Donald Trump.

Is there some “fill in the blank” out there? Undoubtedly. Is it as big of a deal that critics think? Not a lot of evidence for that at all.

But that’s a world of nuance and shades of gray. It is, unfortunately, not the world that we find ourselves in. And the fact of the matter is that many of us in the middle feel that the partisans on both sides of the great political divide are full of crap. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

It’s well known, for instance, that Joe Biden and his left flank want to have mechanics, roughnecks and welders subsidize the debt taken on by people who got expensive college degrees (in things like sociology, where high-paying jobs are difficult to come by) by forgiving a big chunk of student debt. Everyone expects him to move on this soon.

What’s less well-known is that Sen. Joe Biden, always a friend of the financial services industry, was instrumental in passing legislation several decades ago that made it nearly impossible to discharge student debt through bankruptcy. You can draw a line directly from that to where we are now.

You can get your BS in red, or you can get it in blue. It smells the same either way.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, consultant and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising children, llama farming, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars. His video blog, “Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I,” may be found at facebook.com/HowlinattheMoonin251 and on YouTube at bit.ly/2SN745k.