Being There

I have been amazed and amused by the rapid ascent of Joe the
Plumber from anonymity to prominence and prosperity as the
poster boy for the Republican Party. The story is so improbable
it had to be a work of fiction.

Then, I realized it was and I had read it before - back when Joe
the Plumber was named Chance the Gardener in a book called
Being There, written by Jerzy Kosinski and published in 1971.

Chance, a simple-minded man "with rice pudding between his
ears," is catapulted from his simple life as an estate gardener
to national prominence through a chance meeting with Ben Rand,
a dying business leader and political king-maker. Rand sees
Chance as a failed though totally decent businessman down on
his luck. He also sees Chance's reference to seasons
in gardening as an insightful comment about the national
economy. Chance's personal style and seemingly conservative
and insightful ways embody many qualities which Ben admires.
His simplistic, very serious and indeliberate utterances, which
mostly concern the garden of which he stewarded, are
interpreted as allegorical statements of deep wisdom and
knowledge regarding business matters and the current state
of politics in America.

Rand introduces Chance to the President who finds the gardener's
advice so inspiring he quotes and names him on national TV. The
General Public, as evidenced by opinion polls, thinks that Chance
is simply "brilliant." The financial and political elite believe Chance
the Gardener may be their man for the next presidential election
instead of a second term for the current President.

It is Louise the maid, who has known Chance since he was a boy,
who announces that he only has "rice pudding between the ears."
She declares, "It's for sure a white man's world in America. I raised
that boy since he was the size of a 'pissant' and I'll tell you he never
learned to read nor write. No sir. Has no brains at all. Stuffed with
rice pudding between the ears. Short-changed by the Lord and
dumb as a jackass. Yes sir, all you got to be is white in America to
get whatever you want."

Fortunately some historical fiction is not prologue and some simple
verities can change.

Pander Like It's 1984

My sixteen year-old daughter is reading 1984 in her AP Reading class. When I read 1984 in high school the premise and promise of George Orwell’s novel was still out there, somewhere, near but still unseen. Now the year 1984 has come and gone and is quickly receding in the rear view mirror. Yet, even as the title of the novel becomes more and more passé, a relic of the last millennium, the literary warning Orwell sounded is resounding loud and clear.

NEWSPEAK new•speak ('nü-"spEk, 'nyü-), noun, Usage: often capitalized. : propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. Etymology: Newspeak, a language "designed to diminish the range of thought," in the novel 1984 (1949) by George Orwell.

Newspeak is the language of the McCain campaign. When Obama uses the metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” to describe McCain’s justification of failed Republican policies, McCain calls Obama “sexist” because he has insulted McCain’s running mate, a self-proclaimed lipstick wearing pit bull.

Ergo, Barack Obama, the son of a single mother, raised on food stamps, is the “elitist” while John McCain, the ultimate legacy kid who got into Annapolis not on his merits but because his father and his grandfather went there and who owes his current career to the political clout of his rich father-in-law, is the “populist.”

DOUBLESPEAK double•speak language constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning, often resulting in a communication bypass. Doublespeak may take the form of bald euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs) or deliberate ambiguity. Doublespeak is a disparaging label for any euphemistic term perceived to be uttered in bad faith.

McCain employs doublespeak at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin where he gives his cheering supporters a simple choice: AMERICA FIRST or OBAMA FIRST. Hmmm. Either you are for America and against Obama (the black guy for those of you scoring at home) or if you are for Obama (the black guy) you are against America.

Yet, this very morning, in response to Obama questioning his economic IQ, the McCain campaign charges the Obama campaign is “trying to scare voters into voting for him (Obama).” Really? The Obama campaign is trying to scare voters. Right.

Winston Smith, the nominal hero of 1984, is a bureaucrat in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, revising historical records to match The Party's contemporaneous, official version of the past. The revisionism is required so that the past reflect the shifts of the day in the Party's orthodoxy.

So, caught in the headlights of Hurricane Gustav, the Republican convention reinvents George W. Bush as the Hero of Katrina.

Smith's job is perpetual; he re-writes the official record, re-touches official photographs, deleting people officially rendered as unpersons.

So McCain is running as if the last eight years of Republican administration did not happen. George Bush and Dick Cheney were officially deleted unpersons at the Republican Convention.

At the Ministry of Truth, the original or older document is dropped into a "memory hole" chute leading to an incinerator.

So McCain’s past as a carouser and womanizer has been removed from his biography, conveniently dropped down a memory hole with the ex-wife he dumped and the number of houses he owns.

Orwell’s Smith eventually learns that the motivation of the ruling Inner Party is not to achieve some future paradise but to retain power, which has become an end in itself. For those of you grazing at home, “the inner party” is the top 2% of the population – “my base” as current unperson George the Second once gloated at a Republican fundraiser.

From the low, dank trenches of his own “Ministry of Truth,” John McCain, the current standard bearer of the Inner Party, has proven willing and able to use all the Orwellian tools at his disposal to retain power.