The Politics of Choosing

If we make caricatures of the villains what have we done to the heroes we put in opposition to them?  If we simplify the evil, making it so stark, then what is the merit in choosing the other path?  Simply formulated truth permits a too easy choice, one overlooking and undervaluing what is more accurate, if also more complex.  Unless we truly state the picture of what we oppose, we make those villains too foolish to be taken with any seriousness.  Their faults are too prominent to be real, and unless the faults are balanced with some degree of virtue there is no real choice available.  Both the evil and the good, the villains as well as the heroes, are variants of good.  The choice is which is better.  There would be no merit, no value, in choice unless there were some measure of equality, some reason to wonder if the choice were a right one.  If the pharisees are so obviously evil, what is the value in choosing what Jesus offers?  It is true of other things as well.  Political systems, philosophies, moral options.  None is so simply chosen or rejected.  All have merit.  None are really made of straw.