by Penny, Laura
State-subsidized crackers love, love, love to lecture everyone else about self-reliance, small government, and being a decent, hardworking citizen. There’s no snobbery like reverse snobbery. Palin’s debut speech at the Republican National Convention was part sap, part vitriol, and all cornpone oversimplification and disdain for complexity. At her rallies, besotted hordes chanted “U! S! A!” as if she were wrestler Hacksaw Jim Duggan. The right-wing press anointed her the second coming of conservatism, the shapely love child of Reagan and Thatcher. Rush Limbaugh summed up Palin’s appeal succinctly: “Babies, guns, and Jesus! Hot damn!”21
Moreover, as the right pointed out ever repeatingly, Palin, unlike Obama, had been the boss of something. Those somethings might have been a tiny town and a sparsely populated state, but she ran those suckers, goddammit. Being a boss – especially an autocratic, my-way-or-the-highway one – and leading a people are the same thing, or so says idiocratic politics.
Here’s a blast from Palin’s past, from an analysis of her mayoral term that appeared during her gubernatorial run:
Palin has cited her mayoral work as a central part of her qualification to serve as governor. But at the beginning of her term, asked by the local newspaper how she would run the city without experienced department heads, she made the job sound like no big deal: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.”22
As Porky Pig said, “Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!” The government is a business, a budget, and some bossable staff, nothing more. Throw in McCain’s talking points and you get the full picture. Government is a business and a war machine. (Hey, kids, guess which is which! Sorry, trick question.)
The Palin pick was a ploy that failed. She is not as popular as she was before she kept on talking. But the fact that a very ardent minority still believe she is their dream candidate demonstrates how persistent anti-intellectualism is. Palin is a perfect and pure idiocrat, opposed to any government she does not run, and her enduring popularity is an affirmation of idiocracy.
In an interview with the Washington Post in September 2008, McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, conceded that Palin was a deliberate curveball, a swerve away from the issues. “This election is not about issues,” Davis said. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”23 Palinmania was a way to circumvent any serious public debate about the economy or the war or the environment. The Republicans tried to turn an election that was already chockablock with private minutiae into a character campaign, a clash of personalities, a celebrity horse race between Palin and Obama: feisty MILF vs. uppity negro, bully vs. nerd.
Barack Obama may say encouraging things when he speaks of public trusts like health care and education, but he still had to promise middle-class tax cuts galore and play a cool dude on TV to win the election. Personal stories, the “narrative” pundits kept gabbing about, mattered more than policy positions. Here’s an example of this kind of storytelling, an exemplary piece of anti-nerd invective.
In an August 2008 article in the righty publication the American Spectator, a commentator argued that the box-office success of Batman: The Dark Knight and Rush Limbaugh’s new multi-million-dollar contract were indisputable proof that John McCain would win a landslide victory, for Batman, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and John McCain all play similar roles. They are heroic warriors on brave crusades who cannot be swayed by others’ opinions. McCain, like Batman, is
a rebel against the Establishment. He is unafraid to act. He is willing to take risks. He could not possibly care less about what “feels good” or whether anything he says or does “makes sense” to a single other person. He runs on instinct. He is here to do the right thing. Nothing more, nothing less.24
In the bizarro world of right-wing pseudo-populism, a millionaire superhero, a millionaire ex-prez, a millionaire professional gobshite, and a millionaire senator are not members of the Establishment. No, they are a ragtag band of righteous rebels sticking it to the Man.
Here we see once again that action and thought are mutually exclusive and thinking is for pussies. Unlike Obama with his foppish “sense-making,” manly menfolk like Limbaugh and McCain “act on instinct.” You know who else acts on instinct? My cats. And though I laugh whenever my feline cohabitants bash their heads against closed windows in pursuit of errant birds, I expect better from people – and much, much better from presidents and prime ministers.
The political promotion of thought and action as opposites, the valorization of guts and heart at the expense of the brain, has had dire consequences domestically and internationally, economically and politically. And it is not an exclusively American phenomenon either. The Great White North also suffers from idiocratic politicking.
The Harper Cons have repeatedly nerd-bashed Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and his successor, Michael Ignatieff, mocking their academic bona fides as if Harper were some hewer of wood and drawer of water, a hardy pioneer portaging his way through the economics department of the University of Calgary. Harper’s master’s degree is not as perilously professorial as the Liberal leaders’ Ph.D.’s, but it is wonkier than Bush’s M.B.A. or the customary law degree.
Harper is a nerd who aspires to bullydom. He keeps his caucus on a short leash. He speaks to the public via ads. The press and the people – the ingrates! – cannot be trusted to stay on message. Like the American right, which Harper has long admired, he sees other parties as enemies. Such partisanship is unhelpful in a parliamentary system where the current Conservative minority government must negotiate and compromise with several parties to get anything done. Harper’s preferred themes are tax cuts and law and order, and his public statements are rife with bullyspeak such as “strong,” “tough,” and “proud.” Wrapping him in a fuzzy blue sweater vest and having him wax avuncular before a fireplace or tickle the ivories at the National Arts Centre only adds another layer of fake. He’s a nerd wrapped in a bully trapped inside a sensitive Beatlemaniacal dweeb.
Harper, Dion, and Ignatieff are all too void of charisma, too visibly and audibly nerdy to run for American political office, let alone win party leadership. One might surmise that Canadians, like Europeans, are more tolerant of politicians with academic backgrounds than Americans are. But nearly all of our prime ministers have been lawyers, a category that encompasses both flamboyant, brainy sorts like Pierre Trudeau and money-minded corporate collaborators like Brian Mulroney.
Here is a fun fact: American politicians are actually better educated than their Canadian counterparts. Only 66 per cent of members of Parliament have an undergraduate degree, versus 93 per cent of the representatives in Congress.25 The myths about socialist Soviet Canuckistan aren’t accurate either, as the majority of Canadian MPS come from the private sector. Conversely, most U.S. representatives come from other state and local governments; they are part of a political class. U.S. politicos stay in public service far longer than their Canadian counterparts. Parliament has a much higher turnover rate than American political institutions do. This creates an amateurish, short-sighted political outlook, one that rarely sets its sights higher than the next election.
For all their differences, the U.S. and Canada share a democratic egalitarianism that is admirable in principle. Unfortunately, it blows in practice. We condone all kinds of inequities, economic and social, but enforce absolute equality when it comes to public displays of intelligence. No polity, or politician, has the latitude to be much smarter than the most ignorant citizens. The wording and inflections differ on the two sides of the border, but North Americans share similar idiocies and anti-intellectualisms, the same more-money-than-brains mindset.
The Canadian way of phrasing this attitude is “Who do you think you are?”(to borrow a title from the amazing Alice Munro). Canadians love to remind the presumptuous that they are no better than the rest of us. Robertson Davies used to tell a story about being at a party where someone announced that Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had won the Nobel Peace P
rize. An annoyed fellow reveller declared, “Who does he think he is?”26 This most Canadian of questions is simultaneously reproachful and passive-aggressive, accusing its objects of thinking they are so frigging great.
The American version is more aggressive, defensive, and individualistic; it sounds like Travis Bickle’s “Are you talking to me?“ Where the Canadian version focuses on the offending snob and chides him for transgressing community standards such as mediocrity, the American one emphasizes the speaker’s independence, his God-given right to his own opinion. That snob has some nerve, thinking he is the boss of me! The old “Don’t tread on me” flag goes double for experts, and triple for government experts, who have no right to occupy your interior or exterior space or clutter it with their phony facts.
On both sides of the border, pseudo-populists convince the electorate that someone can be too smart for high office. In Canada, all one need do is invoke the spectre of Pierre Trudeau, the last unabashed intellectual to serve as prime minister. What did all his fancy book learnin’ get us? Buncha debt and some stupid social programs! In the U.S., a panoply of lobbies, think tanks, and jesters like Limbaugh and Beck keep pouring the old anti-nerd wine into new bottles, getting their audiences ugly drunk on outrage, hopped up on their own anger and fear, thirsty for pitchfork vengeance and simple solutions.
The crazy thing about our idiocratic politics is how much expertise and intelligence go into keeping the bar low and the sound bites small. A staggering amount of research and polling, vast wonk machines of experts in sciences pseudo and actual, have devoted their copious smarts to the electioneering process, to crafting the perfect piece of terrifying bullshit sure to drive soccer moms in preferred zip codes to the polls to defend their darling sprogs.
All that expertise and intelligence is devoted to making politics more idiotic, more anti-intellectual. These experts assume that people cannot, will not understand the issues, so they must tell stories and stoke fears. Long-time political journalist Joe Klein writes:
I am fed up with the insulting welter of sterilized speechifying, insipid photo ops, and idiotic advertising that passes for public discourse these days. I believe that American politics has become overly cautious, cynical, mechanistic, and bland; and I fear that the inanity and ugliness of post-modern public life has caused many Americans to lose the habits of citizenship.27
The scores of consultants who try to focus-group every candidate to maximal inoffensiveness – or strategic nastiness against the right wrong people – make the process less informative and more emotive. And the American campaigns that Klein covers are clown-car-packed carnivals compared to the stultifying small-mindedness, petty dramas, and hoary rhetoric of Canadian politics.
Knowing how to campaign, how to leverage the party platform as the national brand, matters a lot more than knowing how to govern. Canadians may think that our shorter, quieter elections are a sign that we are more sensible and marvel at the expensive spectacles down south, but most Canadian parties just keep on running for office once they get in. The grind of pandering and pitting factions against one another never really ends. The mighty beaver bites its own tail, producing fractious minority governments and shifting regional resentments, the simmering sense that somewhere, somehow, another province is getting more goodies from whoever’s running Ottawa.
“Big government” is a bogeyman, one deployed by the same people who brought you Homeland Security, among other expansions of intrusive federal power and burdensome public debt. “Big government” is a buzzword, half of a false choice, a hyperbolic contest between totalitarianism and lawlessness, tyranny and liberty. But government isn’t Cineplex popcorn: we don’t have to choose between way too much and none at all.
Freedom requires some basic infrastructure, some effective governance, to be more than an applause line in a speech. If you’re sick, you are living under the tyranny of the body like some lowly forest creature, and there should be health care to free you. If you’re dirt poor, you’re subject to the tyrannies of market caprice, and there should be welfare and employment insurance to help you get back on your feet and free to shop again. If you’re illiterate or ignorant, you are subject to the tyrannies of demagoguery, pseudo-science, and marketing, and there should be daycares, schools, and universities to liberate you, to help you free yourself from the neck up, which is the most important freedom of all.
Rather than insisting that we have intellectual rights and responsibilities, as Enlightenment types like the Founding Fathers did, freedumb – the ideology of idiocracy – consists of two fundamentally contradictory propositions. First, we should do whatever Big Dad says, whether he comes in the form of God or Dick Cheney or Wall Street. But freedumb also tells us that we can do whatever we like, because we’re free to ignore those who think they know better. We’re free to tell them that they don’t know what they’re talking about, regardless of what we know. We are all the leading experts on ourselves and our wants, and that is what idiot politics speaks to, addressing millions of private yous instead of a public we.
If you replace the freedoms in political speeches with other words such as safety or money, they acquire a refreshing candour and coherence. Freedom has been trivialized by some of its most vocal enthusiasts, who have successfully rebranded it as freedumb: the right not to give a shit or know jack about what happens, the right to make and support decisions on the grounds of guts and grudges and greed. And with these rights come responsibilities: Stop whining and get back to work.
Armies, cops, and fire departments are the only public services that most freedumb fighters support, the only fruits of governance that justify themselves with real benefits. The thin green, blue, and red lines between Homeowner McAverage and suicide bombers, rapists, and crackheads are the only sacrosanct public trust. Right-wingers like Cheney and Harper talk tough and play bully to remind all of us that we should be scared shitless and grateful for the protection of our hired brawn. To ask anything more of the government, to charge it with tasks other than laissez-faire economic management and the deployment of force, is churlish, childish, naive at best, and communist at worst.
In his inaugural address, Obama said:
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works …
His initial attempts to make government work have been greeted with howls of protest about the gub’mint takeover of put-near everything. A Rasmussen poll conducted in February 2009 found that 59 per cent of respondents still agreed with Reagan: government was the problem, not the solution. A Gallup poll released in September of that year found that 57 per cent of respondents believed that the government was doing too much, and 45 per cent said there was too much government regulation.28 These numbers are pretty astonishing and depressing, especially when you consider that the government was doing “too much” because it had to. Private interests had left it little choice when they screwed the global economy six ways to Sunday and then importuned government for handouts and help.
Bankers grovelled before the governments they usually revile, like wispy poets whining for grant money. They got billions in bailouts, yet somehow the financial sector still inspires more trust and respect than the government that saved it from itself.
This shows us that the North American public’s Stockholm syndrome towards the real elites remains powerful. Freedumb will not, cannot die. The breakdowns and bailouts did not educate or convert the idiocrats. Instead they have become more adamant and entrenched and the war against gub’mint is growing more intemperate and illogical. For a few brief weeks after the financial meltdown started, I thought that maybe this economic crash would mark the end of the idiocracy and show the world how counterproductive anti-government governance is. I must have caught some of that contagious hope that was in the air. Suffice it to say that the we
ird warm feeling has passed.
Chapter Six
MORE IS LESS
The Media-Entertainment Perplex
Flat is the new up.
– RECESSION-BATTERED MEDIA-BIZ CATCHPHRASE
The media, like Alice in Wonderland, have gotten huge and shrunk, grown bigger and smaller. But the world of media is weirder than Wonderland, since it is growing and shrinking at the same time. Old journalism has suffered mass layoffs and speaks to an aging and dwindling audience. But the media in the broad sense – the infoswamp of celebrity gossip, political scandals, fragments of economic data, heinous crimes, lifestyle advice, personal narratives, and just plain weird events – has grown much larger, enveloping North America entire in its miasma, its fog and flickering lights.
There are fewer journalists now than there were before the recession. Tens of thousands of staffers in print, TV, publishing, and radio have been laid off since 2008. At the same time, everyone and her dog can now be a microparticle of the media and say her piece about the issue or scandal du jour. Of course, papers have published letters to the editor and radio stations have done call-in shows for ages. But now the audience is moving from commenting to providing content, becoming more integrated into programming, like product placement instead of commercials.
Getting your readers or viewers to write copy or fill airtime is an irresistible combo of populism and cheapness (see also reality TV). You can make the audience do some of the content provision or revision for free rather than overpaying some buncha hacks. Many comment boards on news sites, for example, are full of free copyedits of hastily posted stories. Producers and editors can occupy the idle hours and empty pages of a slow news day by getting the audience to tell them what they think about the latest info crumbs and incitements. This flatters the audience too. It tells them that the average person’s opinion is just as good and germane as some journalist’s version of the events or some expert’s interpretation of a situation. It’s similar to the rhetoric of tax cuts: you know better than we do, so please tell us what to tell you.