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Ugly America In the Year of Joe the Plumber — and the Bridge to Nowhere and a “No Thanks” that was never uttered and the emergence of a ex-’60s-era-radical-turned-university-professor as the biggest bogeyman (or hobgoblin, if you prefer your goblins hobbing around) facing America — the ludicrous becomes the normal. It’s as if Eugène Ionesco’s world had become reality. (Although you might not be far off the track if you believed Ionesco’s world had become reality some decades ago, and we are just now catching on. Catching on so very often takes a while to catch on.) I don’t pretend to be an expert on Ionesco, but I have acted in several of his plays. And one of the wonderful things about acting in his plays is that if you drop a line or forget a blocking assignment, you can do any damn ridiculous thing onstage that pops into mind, and it seems to the audience that Ionesco wrote it that way. Thus, the Rays (the Tampa Bay Rays???) are in the World Series (the Rays and the Phillies — yeah, 27 or 29 people will be glued to their screens for that one) and Joe the Plumber enters the popular imagination. Yeah, good ol’ Joe of Toledo (well, OK, the way things work these days, it’s actually good ol’ Joe of Holland, Ohio, which is right outside Toledo). It’s a sign of how desperate John McCain has become that he has made Joe the Plumber a mainstay of his campaign, a symbol of the small-business person who would be hurt by Barack Obama’s tax plan. No, really. It’s as though McCain is acting in an Ionesco play (“The Leader,” perhaps?) and he forgot a line or blew a blocking assignment and now is doing the first ridiculous thing that pops to mind. Enter Joe. Except that Joe the Plumber (real name: Samuel J. Wurzelbacher) isn’t a small-business person at all; he works for a small, two-man business that maybe one day he’s thinking of buying. And the plumbing? Well, according to “Thomas Joseph, the business manager of Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Service Mechanics, based in Toledo, said … Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber’s license, which is required in Toledo and several surrounding municipalities” (New York Times). Hmm. And Joe the Plumber owes back taxes to the state of Ohio (around $1,100: NY Times, citing public records). And Joe the Plumber would undoubtedly be better off under Obama’s tax plan because he, by his own admission, makes nowhere near $250,000 a year, and people making less than that figure would get a tax cut under Obama’s proposal. Some campaign symbol, Johnny Mav. Of course, the saga of Joe the Plumber is not the only sign that McCain’s campaign is flailing around for the slightest wisp of a straw in the face of plummeting poll numbers and the analysis by some that Obama could pick up well more than 300 electoral votes. There’s Bill Ayers. The onetime Weather Underground radical is (and now professor), of course, the “terrorist” that Sarah Palin continually insists Obama palls around with, although she usually puts it in the plural (who the other “terrorists” are she doesn’t bother to say). It’s absurd, it should go without saying. For one thing, if Obama is palling around with a “terrorist,” then all the other prominent Chicagoans — Democrats, Republicans, independents — who also served on the same boards that Obama and Ayers served on are also palling around with a “terrorist.” And if so, if we have all these Chicagoans palling around with the next stop to Osama bin Laden, maybe we should just wipe Chicago off the map. Sarah Palin hasn’t suggested that. Yet. But a sign of how the McCain campaign has traveled from pure absurdity to pure ugliness is the reaction of Republican crowds to the palling-around line. “Hussein, Hussein, Hussein,” they shout (Obama’s middle name, and a sure sign to Republicans that Obama is not one of us, whoever we are). More chilling is the reaction of one white man at a Palin rally in Clearwater, Fla. Palin hit her “terrorist” line, and the man yelled, “Kill him.” Kill him? What sort of ugly America are Palin and McCain unearthing? |