Hey, have you noticed that the level of political discourse in this country has achieved the level of sophistication usually reserved for feuds between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump?

Well, of course you have. Last week’s disgraceful attacks on Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old kid who advocated for SCHIP insurance for children of families who couldn’t afford health care, pretty much underscored the fact that we’ve crossed the point of no return when it comes to partisan bickering. The idea that pundits will ever attempt to struggle thoughtfully with the issues has been abandoned in favor of ever more shrill rhetoric – “To heck with the particulars of our argument,” one side will screech, “the other side are stupid and ugly and drug-addicted pederasts!”

George Saunders, a particularly clever short-story author (“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “In Persuasion Nation”) – he’s a master at explicating the endless machete-ing through petty mounds of red tape – recently released a book of nonfiction (more or less) essays, “The Braindead Megaphone.” The title essay examines the current level of the punditidiocracy.

What Saunders has to say won’t be mistaken for a news bulletin, but it is an artfully sculpted argument, nuanced in a way that TV and radio’s talking heads never are. He names his antagonist Megaphone Guy, a guy who ventures out in public, starts shouting so that it’s tough to hear yourself think; his words may be gibberish, but since he is not smacked down for annoying the public with his gibberish, that makes it OK to do it some more, and suddenly we’re on a slippery slope to dumber public discourse.

Herewith, a bit of it:

“Last night on the local news I watched a young reporter standing in front of our mall, obviously freezing his ass off. The essence of his report was, Malls Tend to Get Busier at Christmas! …

“It sounded like information, basically. He signed off crisply, nobody back at NewsCenter8 or wherever laughed at him. And across our fair city, people sat there and took it, and I believe that, generally, they weren’t laughing at him either. … Although what we had been told, we already knew, although it had been told in banal language … we took it, and, I would say, it did something to us: made us dumber and more accepting of slop.

“Furthermore, I suspect, it subtly degraded our ability to make bold, meaningful sentences, or laugh at stupid, ill-considered ones. …

“And next time we hear someone saying something like, ‘We are pursuing this strategy because the other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,’ we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and if he or she does not, we’ll feel a bit insane, and therefore less confident, and therefore more passive. …

“Now, why aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing discourse should prove more profitable than its opposite is a mystery. Maybe it’s a simple matter of drama: ranting, innuendo, wallowing in the squalid the exasperation of the already-convinced, may, at some crude level, just be more interesting than some intelligent, skeptical human being trying to come to grips with complexity. …

“In any event, the people who used to ask, ‘Is it news?’ now seem to be asking, ‘Will it stimulate?’ And the change is felt, high and low, throughout the culture.”

That’s why the cable-news networks still persist in granting people like Ann Coulter air time, to spew nonsense about the Jews or 9/11 widows: What she may say may lack the requisite level of pundit insight, and in fact may be patent nonsense, but it’s inevitably a cheap bid to get our attention, just like a grisly murder will on “Criminal Minds” or a graphic sex scene on “Tell Me You Love Me.” Coulter should be popular on the lecture circuit; she could even play a comedy club or two if she had the yen. But clearly, her punditry has devolved from hack partisanship to desperately jumping up and down and wailing, “Look at me!”

Saunders addresses this, as well: “To stay in the game, one must prove viable; to prove viable, one has to be watched; to be watched, one has to be watchable, and, in the news business, a convention of Watchability has evolved – a tone, a pace, an unspoken set of acceptable topics and acceptable relationship to these topics – that bears, at best, a peripheral relation to truth. …

“There’s a little slot on the side of the Megaphone, and as long as you’re allowed to keep talking into it, money keeps dropping out.”