Joe the Maoist

I picked up the clip below at A Silent Cacophony, one of my regular reads. Looking for Joe the Plumber in the crowd, John the Candidate tells the audience to stand up because they're all Joe the Plumber. I'm sure the man with umpteen houses and cars and a private jet wishes it were so. I'm sure the Man who has never had a private sector job, much less a blue collar trade, would like us to think of him as a man of the people, a Maoist hero.

The idea of the wise peasant, the log cabin born leader is nothing new and it's typically American, but it's also a central mythology of Marxism. We remember Mao Zedong's cultural revolution during which the professional, academic and educated classes were all but exterminated in favor of leadership by peasant farmers, coal miners and yes, plumbers. That one learns to swim by swimming was a Maoist cliche that implied that education was not only not necessary, but not desired. It took China a generation to begin to recover from the destruction.


The idea still lives here in America, despite our continuing obsession with Communism and Socialism. We still believe in the wise fool; in the wisdom of those untainted by information and intelligence and culture and we still believe in superstitious suspicion of all others. We still believe that Joe, whose name is Charles, and isn't a plumber and can't do basic arithmetic much less understand the tax codes, has the answers we need because he's one of us and not one of them. We're still yearning for the Worker's Paradise promised by Communism. We still admire Forrest Gump and marvel at his wisdom, but we still can't seem to differentiate between the people who exploit us by invoking our class identifications and snobberies and class prejudices, and people who actually serve our best interests. All we seem to see is the working class uniform and not the wolf wearing it.

Only in America would the accusation of Marxism arise from a plan to add 4% to the burden of the top 2% elite in the interest of recovering some of the debt we have incurred in making them rich. Only in America would the accusation of Socialism arise from restoring the top tax bracket we had under Reagan; the progressive structure advocated by Adam Smith and Teddy Roosevelt and that we have had during the most prosperous years of our history.

I could go on endlessly about the irony of invoking a worker's paradise and the bogeyman of Communism to sell economic feudalism, but odds are, if you've read this far, you don't need me to do that. It's the dumb people that can be fooled all of the time. It's Joe the Plumber and everyone who stood up when John the Rich Man asked them to who enjoy the flattery and the snobbery and the smug, stupid certainties sold to them by Sarah and the old man.

Happy Deepavali!

by expatbrian (cross posted from World Gone Mad)

I've never been so remiss before about posting to this blog. But alas, my excuse is a good one as I have been blogging elsewhere. That link will take you to the blog I set up at the school for foreign students where I teach.

Anyway, since I already heard the fat lady singing, there hasn't been that much to talk about. Sure, the campaigns have continued. McBush is down double digits and like the ignoramous he is, he says he's happy with that. Palin has "gone rogue" in the words of some inside staffers. In other words, as could have been easily predicted, the dingbat is out of control, gone completely batshit with the media frenzy that surrounds her, and will certainly do something so incredibly stupid that her political career will implode if it hasn't already.

I've been especially amused by the various opinions expoused lately on what a "real American" is. It seems to be anyone who falls between Walter Brennen's "Old Rivers" and Andy of Maybury. Somehow, those of us who are educated, professional, thinking adults have been excluded from the definition. I mean, is anyone else as utterly offended as I am at the idea that, in order to be viewed as a "real American" we have to be the sort that drinks a six-pack at night after showing our butt crack all day?

Bloggingdino was right in his (her?) critique of one of my earlier comments over at The Swash Zone. The American voter is not mind numbingly stupid as I overgeneralized. It is only approximately half of them that are. Well, in the case of this election, less than half and that number is deteriorating rapidly. In any case, the moronic ones are quite simply the Republicans, who, with all of their failures so blatantly exposed, continue to support not only their ridiculous "team" of McCain/Palin, but continue to preach - to an emptying room - that their way works the best! They are apparently absolutely blind to their own recent history!

Like so many others, I feel like I have been politically brutalized by the Republicans for so long that I find it nearly, if not completely impossible to be in any way optomistic of the future. Yet, with Obama in charge and a 60+% in congress, who knows. Maybe, like Michelle, I'll get a renewed sense of pride and hope.

Insane McCain

If you've ever been to a turkey farm, you will have seen how one lone animal will begin gobbling and the rest will follow suit until the whole flock begins to sound like the American news media commenting on an election.

"Spread the wealth" seems to be the latest gobble ever since John Mc Cain, in his desperation, attempted to conflate the Obama tax policy, which hardly differs from what we've had since the beginning of income taxes in America, with socialism. It's not much more of an idiotic redefinition than is typical of the 2008 campaign rhetoric which has it that a hundred year occupation of a foreign country is a "victory" and accomplishing the goal of regime change and democracy is "surrender." Indeed the trickle down theory is little more than a scenario in which people the government helps to get rich then redistribute a small part of it by spending.

In St. Charles Missouri this weekend, John McCain attempted to show the show me state that lifting some of the burden from the struggling classes is Socialism. Senator Martinez from Florida compared Obama's tax plan to that of Fidel Castro and the chorus of boos from their gobbling audiences is not directed at the dishonest and sometimes demented charges or the turkeys who make them, but at anyone outside the circle of the tribe by virtue of sanity, education, honesty or intelligence: particularly intelligence. There is no idea too stupid, too false, to demented that the tribe will not dance around the fire and scream "kill him!"

It there any charge quite as incredible as insisting that presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan must have been socialists who wanted to redistribute the wealth by not giving the kind of tax breaks to the top 5% that George Bush did and that John McCain wants to continue and extend? We have never had a bigger and bigger spending government than we have now and McCain has no plan to change that that could pass a second grade arithmetic teacher's scrutiny. He has hot button topics like earmarks, and socialism and spreading the wealth, but the rest is only "trust me my friends."

"Our opponent's plan is just more big government, and John and I think that that is the problem, not the solution," said the gobbler in the glasses "Instead of taking your hard-earned money and spreading your wealth, we want to spread opportunity so people like you and Joe the plumber can create new wealth."

Of course it's not more big government by any measure. It's a return to the time before George Bush's borrow, bloat and spend policies.

What's the Palin plan? Give it to the rich and let it trickle down. Gobble, gobble, gobble. What's the plan? borrow and spend and put the burden of all that debt on people like you and me and Joe the plumber and our children and grandchildren, and how do we sell it? We lie about palling around with terrorists, we call Obama an elitist Arab Muslim Terrorist, who conspires with Vietnam War protesters, who is a Chicago Machine politician with no experience, whose house was paid for by gangsters, who reads books by terrorists and whose education was paid for by Pakistani Fundamentalists and who isn't even an American. Did I mention that he's black?

At this point and regardless of who wins, I'm ashamed to be part of this. If Obama wins, the country has been so damaged already and will be filled with a large minority who think he's the devil, the future is so dim my old eyes can't see anything but gloom.

Colin Powell's Endorsement of Barack Obama

Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama was about as thoroughgoing as this dinosaur could have hoped, the general’s polite qualifying phrases aside. He demolished Senator McCain’s potential closing arguments for the last few weeks of the campaign: the “experience and c-in-c prep argument,” the economics argument (though McCain had already ruined that one himself), the character attacks alleging radicalism, and the insinuation of an unacceptable degree of “otherness” in Obama’s person and background. McCain isn’t likely to change many minds from here on out, especially since his running mate and high-level supporters keep declaring whole swaths of the country “un-American,” claiming that our core values are hunting and fishing, insulting us by lying to our faces about things that have already been proven several times over against them, and so forth. They just can’t help saying transparently blockheaded, alienating things because if they didn’t say them, they would have nothing at all to say. For once, we seem to be showing some collective determination to invalidate the cynical judgment that “nobody ever lost a nickel underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” (Either P. T. Barnum or H. L. Mencken said that, I believe.) What I’m seeing – based in part on those huge St. Louis crowds Barack is drawing now, and the amount of money he raised in September ($150 million, mostly from small donors) -- looks like a genuine upwelling of healthy regard for participatory guv’ment. Still two weeks to go, but at present things are looking good. Maybe humans aren’t so bad after all, though I still think things were better and simpler in the Jurassic. We didn’t have politics at all because we had already achieved Aristotle’s dream of “the good life.” Bloody asteroids!