Post-election musings: On the value of words

I can’t quite wipe the smile off my face.

I’ve been kicking around ideas for a couple of posts dealing with the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, but none of them are coming together. I tried to articulate one of them to my 20thC U.S. novel class, as the election is quite germane to our subject matter—we’re focusing on issues of race and identity in American fiction—but didn’t quite manage it. Perhaps I will come back to these thoughts when the dust settles a bit more.

Suffice to say however that Tuesday night was a night to remember. I had an election night party, and my living room was crammed full of people glued to the television as the returns came in. Never before have I seen, or would really have ever dreamed of seeing, such an extraordinary international response to an American election. Here we were, a group of Canadians who had watched our own recent election pass with barely a murmur, mesmerized by this spectacle and joyful at the result. The posts I had been kicking around all speculate on the reason for Obama’s extraordinary international appeal, and the passions he has managed to excite both within and without the United States. Those thoughts, still embryonic, will wait … I will keep this one personal.

I imagine it’s an occupational hazard, combined with too many viewings of The West Wing and eight years in the wilderness of Bush malapropisms, but the mere fact of an exceptionally intelligent and articulate candidate who speaks to his audience like adults was like intellectual ambrosia. Still, I was skeptical about Obama’s lack of experience, and sat the fence for the first stretch of the democratic primaries. As things progressed however, and the Obama campaign showed its true mettle against one of the most ruthless political machines this side of the Potomac, I became more and more impressed. It wasn’t just that he was articulate—it was that he was calm, cool, and utterly unflappable, and seemed genuinely to hold himself above the fray.

And then there was this:

And I was sold. The revelations of Jeremiah’s jeremiads against America should have been the end of things for Obama, and for any other candidate in a comparable position, it probably would have. Though Obama had so long succeeded in keeping the issue of race out of his campaign, the appearance of Reverend Wright’s intemperate (though for any halfway serious student of race in America, hardly surprising or exaggerated) sermons effectively made continuing in this regard impossible. So what does he do but address the issue head-on, in a speech that will one day be read alongside Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Negro is the Fourth of July?” and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” as pivotal moments of great oratory. If you haven’t already, watch the speech above or read the text of it here. It is at once honest and straightforward, and exceptionally intelligent: it threads an impossibly difficult needle and addresses an historically divisive topic in a way that respects its audience and challenges them to rise to the occasion.

I’d say that I’m a sucker for great oratory, but that would be at once understating and simplifying things for me. I am an English professor, a career choice that has not been arbitrary or accidental: it is rather one that proceeds from a deep and abiding investment in the belief that language and discourse are not only among the most powerful tools we have, but are the measure of what it means to be human—in both the positive and negative senses. Obama’s detractors have frequently attacked him for offering “mere words,” even suggesting that his eloquence and articulateness somehow disqualified from high office because they signified that he was a man of words and not action.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I consider the whole words vs. action equation something of a false dichotomy; once upon a time the advertising slogan of my alma mater, the University of Western Ontario, was “Leading. Thinking.” As one of my favourite professors there was fond of observing: haven’t they got that in the wrong order? Thought (ideally) should precede action, and, as I tell my students, unarticulated thought exists nowhere but in your own mind. The larger our shared vocabulary, the more nuanced and subtle our understanding of the world is.

On the other hand, words and action have run in opposite directions in the Bush Administration. Besides “terrorist,” “freedom” and “liberty” were among the few words Bush could reliably wrap his lips around, but he effectively emptied them of content by mouthing them endlessly while suspending habeas corpus, endorsing domestic wire-tapping, and manufacturing evidence for a fraudulent war; his fulminations against “evildoers” lost whatever traction they might have had when the photographs from Abu Gharib surfaced.

Al Gore accused the Bush Administration of waging a “war on reason”; I consider that synonymous with a war on language. To be well-spoken was to be elitist. To be articulate was to be ineffectual. To be intelligently critical was to be anti-American. When I watch or read an Obama speech, I am reminded on one of the basic tenets of my discipline: language taken in all its subtlety and nuance moves toward inclusion, to the expansion of vocabularies of understanding; language reduced, simplified, and delimited excludes and divides, and infantilizes those who use it.

George Orwell taught us that. I’d like to think he’d be wearing a smile today, too.

Causes for celebration

1. As of Monday, Newfoundland is no longer a have-not province. Ontario, on the other hand, is -- and I just want to say to all those lazy-ass financiers and bankers and hedge-fund managers in Toronto that I am sick of having my tax dollars siphoned off to support their lives of indolence

2. On the upside, now that Ontario is a have-not province, experts predict that Ontarians will become folksier, friendlier, and funnier

3. There was something else ... something else to celebrate. I can't quite think of what it is ...

Election day musings

On the day of the most momentous and pivotal U.S. election in recent memory, I ponder the question undoubtedly on everyone’s mind: I wonder if Bill Kristol ever gets tired of being wrong.

There are a handful of thoughtful and intelligent conservative writers and commentators I regularly read because it makes little sense to only ever read the stuff you know you already agree with; to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, it is far more intellectually productive for left-leaning thinkers to argue with smart conservatives than to agree with mediocre liberals.

William Kristol—NY Times columnist, founder and editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, chairman of the Project for the New American Century, and general all-around neoconservative mouthpiece—is not one of them. I do eagerly await his Monday column, because it so frequently offers the kind of laugh that goes well with coffee in waking me up to a new week. I usually follow that up with dropping into Andrew Loman’s office to ask, “Hey, did you read Kristol this morning?” … and the hilarity continues.

Hilarity tempered with disgust and irritation, mind you, as Kristol is celebrated as a bastion of the intellectual right and has possessed in the past a very influential voice within the neoconservative movement. Except that he has effectively been wrong about everything. Not just most things: everything.

He said, for example, at the beginning of October that Obama could be beaten if the McCain campaign would “take the gloves off” and let Sarah Palin go after Obama about William Ayers. And she did … and we saw just how well that worked. Just a week later, Kristol was opining that McCain should “fire his campaign” and go back to being himself, eschewing the kind of Rovian tactics he was advocating in the previous column.

Back during the Democratic Primaries, he characterized the unguarded moment when Hilary Clinton teared up as “manipulative,” and suggested it was the reason she won New Hampshire; speaking of the constituency of women voters, he said “White women are a problem, that's, you know—we all live with that.” After McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate—a choice he celebrated unequivocally—he then turned around and blasted criticism of her as “sexism.”

He has been one of the most indefatigable champions of the war in Iraq, of the Patriot Act, and of all of the mutable rationales offered for invading Iraq in the first place; he was among those predicting that it would be a cakewalk, that those calling for higher troop numbers were alarmists, that the American soldiers would be treated as liberators. His support of the Iraq war is perhaps unsurprising, considering that the Project for the New American Century (a collective including such signatories as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) was calling for the invasion of Iraq when it was first founded in 1998.

So it was with a feeling of dread that I read the first sentence of his column yesterday: “Barack Obama will probably win the 2008 presidential election.” Uh-oh. I suppose I can balance that dread with the memory of all his “advice” to McCain/Palin over the last few months, and how all that has panned out. Fortunately, in the sentences following this pronouncement, dear Bill provided me with his trademark comedy: “If he does, we conservatives will greet the news with our usual resolute stoicism or cheerful fatalism. Being conservative means never being too surprised by disappointment.”

Oh, where to even begin … “resolute stoicism”? “cheerful fatalism”? Methinks my friend Bill hasn’t been introduced to Sean Hannity and Anne Coulter—though as a regular contributor on Fox News, I don’t entirely know how he’s avoided this. He’s apparently (lucky for him) never heard Rush Limbaugh in full swing, and I guess he must have been backpacking in Nepal or something during Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, and thus missed conservatives’ progressively more vitriolic attacks in print and on air. And he evidently hasn’t been reading the back-and-forthing on political blogs over the last few months.

And besides the glaring fact of the historic awfulness of the Bush Administration, exactly what “disappointments” have Republicans had to deal with over the last eight years? I suppose the 2006 midterms count … but other than that, a lock on two branches of government and some serious inroads into the third doesn’t seem like something to make Republicans need to blink back tears. If Obama wins tonight, I look forward to seeing just how “stoic” and “cheerful” the American Right is over the next eight years.

With the increasingly partisan temperament of U.S. politics over the last ten-fifteen years, an increasingly toxic national discourse polarizing the ends of the political spectrum and the ascendancy of Rovian campaign tactics to the national norm, there’s only one person I can point to who possesses “resolute stoicism” in the midst of the maelstrom—and he’s the guy I hope and pray to see some time late tonight passing 270 electoral votes.

None dare call it socialism

There were a few Halloween-themed editorial cartoons this past Friday, depicting Barack Obama taking away candy from some children and giving it to those who haven’t worked as hard at their trick-or-treating. Cute. Sort of funny too, but typically wrong-headed. The McCain campaign and conservative punditocracy have been beating the drum labelled “Socialism!” pretty heavily since the whole Joe the Plumber silliness, and will undoubtedly continue on unabated until polls close on Tuesday night. This much is to be expected during campaign season I suppose, but the refrain of “redistribution of wealth” is so disingenuous as to border on being frankly dishonest.

Why? Mainly, because redistribution of wealth is government’s primary job, whether it be FDR-style New Deal big government or the small-enough-to-drown-in-a-bathtub fantasy of Grover Norquist. But there is something more insidious when “spreading the wealth” is framed in the derisive tones of a Sarah Palin or a Sean Hannity, for it is invariably citing welfare—the spectre of having your hard-earned money taken away and given to some stoned slacker eating nachos on the couch, or an unwed mother who has children solely for the extra money it adds to the welfare check. These stereotypes have been repeated so often in the past that they don’t even need to be explicitly drawn.

What baffles me is that this supposed entitlement of the poor is more certain to get people’s hackles up that the entitlement of the wealthy. Why is it preferable to certain sectors of the American Right that the $700B bailout not purchase American taxpayers a stake in the banks they’re saving? Why is it preferable that these banks have complete autonomy over the money they’re given (as was Henry Paulson’s original demand)? The answer of course is that the former constitutes “socializing” the banks; any government incursion in the private sector is an impingement on freedom, never mind that when FDR made a comparable move in the Great Depression, the American people saw a return on that money.

The first version of the bailout failed in part because there remains a stolid core of free-market fundamentalists among U.S. legislators, who see any form of government assistance—much less assistance that would purchase a stake in private enterprise—as the leading edge of socialism. The $700B figure is serendipitous however, for the fact of the matter is that there is a massive sector of the U.S. economy already socialized to a tune just shy of $700B annually.

Defence spending in the United States accounts for, depending on how you read the numbers, 20-40% of the annual U.S. budget, and the total amount spent each year is equal to the defence budgets of the rest of the world combined. This however seems to have escaped notice in the current campaign silliness, that a whole host of research, development and production companies and corporations are largely or wholly subsidized by tax dollars. Vast numbers of people are reliant on government support: just see how quickly Congressman X loses his seat if he lets a military base in his district get closed down; see how secure Senator Y becomes when she lands a plum DOD contract for industry in her state. Three million people are employed by the Department of Defence; even more by corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, or Kellog, Brown & Root, all of whom receive billions in defence contracts every year. The economic presence of the military, as Eisenhower noted in his farewell address, “the total influence—economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Eisenhower then went on to make his famous warning against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Re-reading those words today sort of feels like closing the barn door, so to speak. As Chalmers Johnson, writing for Harper’s in autumn 2003, observes: “munitions making and war profiteering have supplanted the energy and telecommunications deals pioneered by Enron and WorldCom in the 1990s as the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough. To call these companies ‘private,’ though, is mere ideology. Munitions making in the United States today is not really private enterprise. It is state socialism.” The ongoing debacle in Iraq has only magnified this reality: a deadly quagmire for U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, but a no-holds-barred capitalist playground for companies and corporations in a position to receive government contracts, often without having the bid for them, and usually with little or no government oversight—the result being billions given to companies like the notorious Haliburton, with very little to show for it in the end aside from a very well-equipped Green Zone.

I don’t write this post as a polemic against US military spending, but to try and explode the egregiousness of the whole “socialism” accusation. A good hypothetical litmus test for free-market economy is to eliminate government spending and realistically speculate on what would happen. Would the economy chug cheerfully along? I’m not an economist, but it seems pretty clear that the recent Wall Street collapse would be a minor blip compared to what would happen if the military-industrial complex suddenly found itself without its $600B dollars in annual taxpayer money.

A possible counter-argument here is that I’m talking apples and oranges—that military spending (unlike, say, health care or social security) is an absolute necessity, and that we cannot talk of national security in terms comparable to banking, investment, or the auto industry. I do not agree with this assessment, however, for the simple reason that there is more to national security than being able to drop bombs or fire missiles (especially when the principal threat currently posed is not by conventional armies or nation-states). “Security” is itself a complex of factors, bound up in a nation’s level of education and literacy, its physical and economic health, and its confidence in itself as a nation. The already-cited fact that U.S. defence spending equals that of the rest of the world combined is something we often hear, but it never fails to shock and appal. Why that kind of government spending is utterly acceptable while universal health care is considered the vanguard of a communist revolution (as Ronald Reagan characterized Medicare) by a certain segment of the U.S. population frankly escapes me.

So let’s all take a deep-knee bend and ratchet down the whole “socialism” thing, OK? Or at the very least approach the term with a little more nuance. Which is all very much like crying out in the wilderness during campaign season, I realize, but a boy can dream.

Here at the end of all things, you can (apparently) blame me

This is too funny. I received an email from someone calling him/herself "Nudar (The Rular)" with a link to a video titled "Obama's Loss Traced to Chris Lockett." This is what I saw:



When you come to the end of the video, a screen appears encouraging you to customize the video for your friends and send it on.

I love this. It's like a virtual chain letter, but funny and entertaining. "I'm worried John McCain will bomb my goats. He is a crazy man!"

All that remains is to figure out who this Nudar fellow is. I have my suspicions.

Cautious (cautious!) optimism

OK, so it has become apparent from the various comments and emails from friends that I've kind of been obsessing a wee bit over the American election, and have expressed sentiments about Barack Obama that verge on the worshipful.

And what I have to say to that is ... well, ya got me. True enough.

I will however stop quite short of getting myself the Obama Cabbage Patch doll, an image of which my friend Arlene kindly sent me. And I hereby forbid anyone to get one of these for me for Christmas! My admiration for the Senator does have limits ... and besides, as you can see, the doll really bears almost no resemblance to him. In fact, if it looks like anyone at all, it's Gary Coleman. (Anyone making a Whad'you talking bout? joke in the comments will be banned from this blog.)

Incidentally, there are also Cabbage Patch dolls for Sarah Palin and John McCain:

I think the McCain doll is the most lifelike, don't you?

In other news, I'm starting to nurse some cautious optimism. (Cautious optimism! Did you hear that, Fates? CAUTIOUS! Really, hardly optimism at all! Far be it for me to tempt the wrath of the guy from high atop the thing ...). There's a lot of back-and-forthing among the various pundits of late, pointing to Obama's static numbers, and a narrowing of his lead in some polls. However, things do look much better when you look at the electoral map. While I generally tend to find the whole electoral college system kind of fukakta, I'm taking some comfort in it now. Obama needs 270 electoral votes to take the election. At the time of this posting, a tally of the states in which he has a double-digit lead in the polls gives him 254; a tally including states with a single-digit lead gives him 375. Conversely, McCain's two-digit lead states give him 118, and with the rest he has 157. Which means that, to win on Tuesday, he has to take 113 electoral votes away from states in which Obama leads. Obama on the other hand has to cinch 16 votes, which he can do if he takes Ohio, where he's currently leading by six points.

I just want to conclude by assuring the Guy High Atop The Thing that I offer these numbers as an entirely neutral curiosity and am not making predictions or suggestion that anything here means anything at all.

I dunno ... I just don't think I want to triple my salary if I have to pay that extra $121 to the tax man ...

Joe the Plumber just won't go away. I wonder how long it will be before he gets his own action figure.

David Frum guest-hosted The Current on CBC Radio this morning from Washington D.C. He was speaking to a conservative economist whose name I missed just as I pulled into work today, who professed himself "terrified" at the prospect of a Democratic White House and Congress. While this is unsurprising (perhaps I should direct him to my recent blog post about conservatives endorsing Obama, in case he missed the bandwagon), he also trotted out one of those arguments about Obama's tax plan that contains a certain kind of logic I've never understood.

The argument, paraphrased, goes something like this: "You've got the Joe the Plumber type of guy, who works hard, putting in his twelve-hour days so he can buy his own company ... but if he realizes that, once he does that, he'll get hit with higher taxes, is he going to bother?"

I always hear this sort of argument and think to myself "Um ... yes?" Keeping in mind of course that at this point Joe the Plumber is an entirely fictional and hypothetical figure, let's work from the numbers: the average plumber in the U.S., it was reported, earns somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40K-$60K. Under the Obama plan, he would save $1118 in taxes, and $325 under McCain's plan. His projected income, were he to purchase his company, would be around $250K -- a healthy jump, I think we'll all admit. Now, whether that is what his company would earn or what he would himself be making was never made entirely clear; but it still constitutes a fourfold increase in earnings. With McCain's planned tax cuts, he would get back an extra $8,159 -- not chump change. So what is the exhorbitantly high amount of extra taxes he would pay under Obama's plan? $121. Seriously.

Still -- let's say for the sake of argument that he would pay under Obama what he would save under McCain. Is this a serious detriment to making the transition from a $60K job to a $250K job?

All of these numbers, by the bye, come from Parade.com.


In other news, I'm starting to think that Joe Six-Pack and Joe the Plumber are starting to feel lonely, and need an expanded family of working-class cliches. How about Waitress Jane and Joe the Short-Order Cook? Or Joe Trailer Park? I welcome suggestions ...

I want to take my next vacation in Fake America

My favourite moments on The Daily Show are when you can see the absurdity or stupidity of the day's politics get to Jon Stewart, and the facade cracks a little. Sometimes, like on his brilliant appearance on Crossfire, he drops the comedian's mask deliberately; sometimes, like on election night 2004, a certain despair shows through. And then there are those times when you can tell he has been genuinely pissed off, and it adds an extra edge to his satire. Such was the occasion of this past Monday's show, where he reacts to the words of Sarah Palin and some McCain aides when they characterized some parts of America -- especially small towns -- as the "real" America. These they counterpoised to those parts of the country that are "anti" America, or, in Sarah Palin's words: "We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call 'real' America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

Now, even in a campaign that has been marked by mendacity and polarizing language, these sort of characterizations reach a new low, and you sort of saw that on Monday night on Jon's face. As he clarifies Palin's comments: "So, if small towns are 'real' America, that would make big cities like Washington D.C. and New York City the capitals of 'fake' America -- like the epicenter of fake America, the -- oh, what's the word I'm looking for? -- the 'Ground Zero' if you will of fake America. I'll bet bin Laden feels like a real asshole now! 'What?! I bombed the wrong America?!"

See the full clip here.

As a rather amusing footnote to Palin's comments, I read in the paper this morning that the Republican National Committee has spent some $150,000 on clothing for her -- now that's a small town wardrobe! Even more amusing than this stratospheric spending is where, apparently, most of these clothes were purchased: at, according to the NY Times, "Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Barneys New York and Atelier New York."

Fake America: where your discerning small-town Real American shops for clothes while scanning for terrorists.

Corrections and outrages

Ok, so remember that time I mentioned that Barack Obama had been endorsed by former secretaries of state Kissinger, Eagleburger, Haig and Baker? Turns out I got that one exactly wrong. Oops. I still love the name Eagleburger, though.

Distressingly but utterly unsurprisingly, the endorsement I did get right -- Powell's -- has excited a response from the wingnut right dubbing him "Benedict Powell," and accusing him of endorsing Obama based solely on the consideration of race. A cartoon by Gordon Campbell (not the premier of BC, another one) recreates the famous image of Benedict Arnold, except in blackface and with the caption "Benedict Powell: Race Patriot."



Rush Limbaugh said, "Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race. OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed." (As George Zornick retorts to that, "Powell usually only endorses inexperienced, very conservative, white candidates. He even works for them!") And a pair of particularly idiotic talk-radio wingnuts maintain that Powell is endorsing Obama because "he's tired of being called an 'oreo' ... he wants to be black again ..."

Again, this is hardly surprising, but it is still infuriating. I have little doubt that Colin Powell, like most African-Americans, is heartened by the prospect of a black president. The very fact of Obama's nomination is a seismic event in the history of race in America -- and for what it's worth, there are vast numbers of white people, yours truly included, who feel the same way.

But to suggest that someone like Powell, whose entire career has been marked by thoughtful and cautious deliberation, was moved to this endorsement solely on the basis of skin colour is simply ludicrous.

On the other hand, one of the more entertaining aspects of this campaign, especially since the economic crisis has made people more inclined to look for leadership and substance rather than ad hominem attacks and trivia, has been watching the Rush Limbaughs of the world flail with increasing impotence. Four years ago, watching with increasingy disbelief as Bush's victory mounted, I wondered just what it would take for the U.S. elctorate to come to its senses. I guess we're seeing the answer to that question now.

Obama's new constituency

It is really rather painful to watch the ongoing American election knowing I cannot vote in it. Every time I see an encouraging news report that gives Obama a comfortable lead, or read a column like this one by Charles M. Blow in which he announces that it’s all over but the shouting and the Obamas can start measuring drapes in the Oval, I recall the last two U.S. elections. The margins by which Obama leads (on average) are comparable to those held by Al Gore in 2000, and let’s not forget that the exit polls in 2004 were trending toward John Kerry. Every time someone predicts a blowout for Obama I cringe, infected as I am by the congenital liberal certainty of doom.

On the brighter side of things however, an ongoing source of both hope and amusement has been in seeing conservatives south of the border attacking the McCain campaign or, in some cases, going so far as to endorse Obama.

What conservatives, you ask, are endorsing Obama? Well, none other that the inveterate pro-Iraq War hawk Christopher Hitchens, who writes in Slate that the debates “showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical.” Further, “the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.” Say what you will about Christopher Hitchens (and I could say a lot), but he does have a way with words.

But it doesn’t end there … Christopher Buckley, scion of William F. Buckley, has also endorsed Obama in a column titled “Sorry Dad, I’m voting Obama.” In it, he says of McCain that his “once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises.” For his pains, Christopher (gotta say, I like the way the Christopher bloc is shaping up here) was turfed from The National Review, a periodical founded by Buckley Sr.

And most recently? Our old friend Colin Powell, formerly Bush’s secretary of state, and the most vocal moderate in Bush’s cabinet—which, to quote John Stewart, also made him “the blackest moderate, the whitest moderate, the tallest moderate, the shortest moderate …” You get the idea. Yes, just yesterday Powell went on Meet the Press and stated that the recent negative campaigning by McCain tipped the balance for him, as he “thought that was over the top,” and “was beyond just good political fighting back and forth.” He further called Obama a "transformational" figure, and that while Powell has a great amount of respect for McCain, it is time for a generational change.

Powell, incidentally, joins other former republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (seriously), Alexander Haig (who served under Reagan), James Baker (Bush Sr.’s administration) and Lawrence Eagleburger (who also served briefly under Bush Sr.) in endorsing Obama.

(Can I just say that I love the name Eagleburger? It sounds like a lunch special in the Capitol Building cafeteria, something you would order with a side of freedom fries).

Looking back over this list—to say nothing of the condemnations of McCain’s campaign by such staunch conservatives as Kathleen Parker and David Frum—I've got to say, if you’re John McCain you really have to be wondering “just how far from the pack have I strayed?”

Some thoughts on Joe the Plumber and Horatio Alger

I switched on the presidential debate about five minutes in last night, and was almost immediately bewildered by the repeated invocation of "Joe the Plumber" as the epitome, apparently, of working-class America. My three main thoughts, in the order that I had them, were "Who the fuck is Joe the Plumber?" "Is he Joe Six-Pack's brother-in-law, or something?" and, "Why is every working-class American cliche named 'Joe'?"

I have since learned that Joe the Plumber is a real person -- Joe Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio -- who asked a question of Obama about his tax plan. The nub of the matter, and what McCain tried to hammer Obama about, was that Joe wants to buy the business he works for, but that if he succeeds in doing so he will then likely be earning over $250,000 a year -- which is the point at which Obama's proposed tax hike kicks in. Joe is thus ambivalent , because while he is currently in the bracket that will see his taxes go down under Obama's plan, he has his eye on a future success that will see him (again, under Obama's plan) being taxed more.

Joe the Plumber, thanks to John McCain's adoption of his quandary in last night's debate, has suddenly become a national figure; even before last night, he was interviewed on Fox News, in which he said "[Obama] said he wants to distribute wealth. And I mean, I'm not trying to make statements here, but, I mean, that's kind of a socialist viewpoint. You know, I work for that. You know, it's my discretion who I want to give my money to, it's not the government decide that I make a little too much and so I need to share it with other people. I just -- that's not the American Dream."

Ah, the American Dream ... the reason I'm kind of fascinated with Joe the Plumber is that he's a living embodiment of the contradiction inherent in the American Dream. First of all, kudos to Joe for having worked so hard to be in a position to be one of the few who can genuinely claim to represent the substance of that dream, the rags-to-riches narrative that Horatio Alger used in his two hundred and seventy dime novels about penniless but spunky young men who rose to be captains of industry. The problem is, Joe the Plumber is the exception to the rule, and Obama phrased it rather well in last night's debate when he pointed out "five years ago, when you were in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then."

One of the great problems at the heart of the American Dream is that it makes lower-incomes reluctant to tax millionaires, because they cling to the hope that they might one day be millionaires. Joe the Plumber's dilemma exemplifies this equivocation: do you want to be more heavily taxed, proportionally, when you have less money or when you have more? I suppose the Republican (and Conservative) answer is "none of the above", but with two wars, crumbling infrastructure and a $700B bailout in the works, that seems less and less feasible. That raging socialist Oliver Wendell Holmes himself once said “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”*

Of course, Obama didn't do himself any favours when he said to Joe "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they've got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." Ouch -- and a bell went off at Fox News and McCain campaign headquarters (I know, tomato, toh-mah-toh), if the number of times McCain used the phrase "spread the wealth around" during the debate is any indication. I know that in a certain part of the conservative mind "spreading the wealth around" = "communism," but can we not perhaps agree that this equation is both simplistic and disingenuous? That government's principal function, be it big or small, is to redistribute wealth (i..e. taxes) for roads, bridges, running water, the civil service, and education? To say nothing of that little government agency called the Department of Defense?

I don't know anyone who likes paying taxes or who sends in their forms in April with a cheerful smile, and I certainly remember feeling blindsided when I looked at how much was taken off my first real paycheck. And this is all perhaps an academic argument for me, as I'm unlikely to ever be in the quarter-million dollar salary range (or to be taxed by the IRS rather than Revenue Canada, for that matter), but if I was looking to make that kind of money ten or twenty years down the road and I could choose whether to pay proportionally more tax now or then, that would be a no-brainer for me.

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*Thomas Friedman had an excellent column on taxes and patriotism recently. Read it here.