More Money Than Brains (25 page)

“Speak English!” is definitely one of the planks in the Fox News/teabagger platform. Here’s an example from one of the town hall meetings of 2009. On September 2, Representative Jim Hines was taking questions from his constituents in Norwalk, Connecticut. A bishop named Emilio Alvarez wondered if it would be okay if he asked his question in Spanish. Hines is fluent in Spanish, so he agreed, but his response was drowned out by the crowd. The auditorium erupted in loud, sustained boos and cries of “You’re in the United States of America!” and “English!
English!
“

When Hines tried to translate the question for the yelping yahoos, he made a point of underlining that the bishop was a clergyman as he tried to placate, or maybe reproach, the crowd. A woman in the crowd responded, “He oughta speak English.” The bishop might be doing the Lord’s work, but that did not give him the right to sully her ears with that taco talk.
⁵

In this instance,
English
is a polite way of saying
white
and
American
. “Speak English!” is rude, but it’s still more acceptable than “Don’t be so brown!” or “Go home!” This equation of
English
and
American
means that the people who love Sarah Palin for her sassy straight talk also cast themselves as English’s true defenders. They are not racists or xenophobes but knights, crusaders protecting their virtuous mother tongue against scurrilous incursions by foreign invaders. Government forms
en español
are only the beginning. What other horrors does the shadow tyranny of King Juan Carlos portend?

This wing-nut allegiance to English clashes with the belief that words are not important – with comic results. Many English Only types are not very good at English. For example, there’s a great photograph of an incensed middle-aged woman at a protest in Texas, her shirt festooned with flags, brandishing a sign that reads “Make English America’s Offical Language.” Many of the tea-party signs also boasted misspellings, whimsical use of quotation marks, and a festival of factual errors. My favourite was the one that read “Obama: More Czars than the
USSR
“ – an awesome example of something that is so wrong it is right.

There are certainly Canadians who are anti-immigrant, and those who worry that immigrants are not assimilating, but there isn’t the same hue and cry about English here. When Canadians bitch about official bilingualism, it does not really carry the same cultural and political charge as the complaints of the English Only movement. The majority of Canadians who object to official bilingualism hate it because it wastes money. It offends their parsimony, not their patriotism. People grumble about the Bloc Québécois squandering the rest of the country’s time and money by thwarting the possibility of a majority Liberal or Conservative government.

Such complaints have little to do with language. English was certainly a political issue for Quebeckers circa Bill 101, but French is not really a political flashpoint in the rest of Canada the way Spanish is in the United States. The rhetoric does not come to the same rolling boil. When someone asks a question in French at a Canadian meeting, people wait for someone to repeat it in English, summon up their scraps of high-school
French, or zone out. Speaking another language is not a boo-worthy offence.

Hostility towards words, imported and domestic, is not confined to politics. It is also evident in consumer culture. Coffee ads are a good example. Since lattes have become shorthand for the nerd elite, advertisers must convince potential customers that they can enjoy delectable caffeinated beverages without all that obnoxious, snobby culture. The campaign for McDonald’s line of McCafé drinks featured two similar ads, one with two girls and one with two boys. When the pairs discover that McDonald’s finally has lattes, they are jubilant. The boys are thrilled that they can shave their goatees, take off their fake glasses, and watch football. The girls are delighted that they can stop listening to all that wretched jazz and pretending they know French; they can toss their books and read gossip mags again. No longer need these young people live a pretentious lie to avail themselves of premium coffee.

A similar, and similarly annoying, Dunkin’ Donuts commercial begins with a chant of foreign coffee terms, a dirge of
mokkachokkolatte
. Then the people standing in line for coffee sing, “My mouth can’t form these words … Is it French? Is it Italian? Perhaps Fritalian?” This is a shot at Starbucks’ pseudo-Euroisms such as
venti
, which is about as foreign as
Häagen-Dazs
. But it is also saying “English only” in its own corporate way. Foreign words are onerous or pretentious, even though English itself is a hodgepodge of them.

Far’n-bashing is part and parcel of anti-intellectualism. Far’n-bashing usually involves Yerp, which usually means France. I won’t revisit the bad old days of wine-dumping and freedom fries. But Mitt Romney is still in the running for the 2012 Republican slot, and he rocks the Francophobia like it’s 2003. To be fair, Romney was anti-France before hating France was cool. When he was in college, he dodged the Vietnam draft by waging spiritual war in France, where he did his required Mormon prototyping.

For Romney, France is like a bizarro America – her godless, socialist, pathetic double. The
Boston Globe
managed to get its paws on a campaign document, a seventy-seven-page PowerPoint presentation, that outlined Romney’s strategy. One page bore an equation: “Hillary = France,” and another was emblazoned with a tricolour clip-art version of
le mauvais pays
and instructions to hit France hard. When Romney announced he was quitting the race in February 2008, he said, “I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century – still a great nation, but no longer the leader of the world, no longer the superpower. And to me, that is unthinkable.”
⁶
The Romney camp also had plans for a bumper sticker with the same theme: “First, Not France.” Which is another way of saying money, not brains.

In an August 2007 speech, Romney maintained that he loves France, even speaks French himself. Heck, his kids were on vacation in France right then! France was just one of a list of bogeymen that Romney was planning to deploy in the campaign. He was also girding his loins for battle against
Hollywood, Hillary, and Massachusetts, the depraved socialist hellhole he governed from 2003 to 2007.

The Romney documents show that his team was concerned that the public thought he was a flip-flopper. Flip-flopping is a grievous charge. The valorization of certitude, the idea that staunch belief is a political virtue, means that anyone who changes his mind appears weak or vacillating.

It’s absurd to call a politician a flip-flopper when he changes his mind because the situation changes or because he learns something new. That’s not flip-flopping; it’s sentience. But Romney is flip-flopping like a fish on a floor, trying to pick the most politically expedient positions, conjuring convenient devils to raise hackles and funds. What can anyone reasonably expect politicians to do about Hollywood? Is bringing back the Hays Production Code an urgent action item? Of course not. Romney’s words are only means to ends, ways to win.

The creepy spectre of Euro-socialism has so inflamed the right that they now require classic Continental baddies such as Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia to represent the bleak American future. But right-wingers continue to make disparaging remarks about the French. The health-care debate provided irresistible opportunities to dispute the claim that the French health-care system is the best in the world. How could it be? It’s a government-run program, and they always fail.

Anti-French invective is another form of nerd-bashing, but it sure is funny hearing it from someone who is wearing a Ben Franklin costume. The right’s heroes, the guys they
name-check in their books and speeches, the guys they dress up as at rallies, all admired the French. They
relied on
the French. French ideas inspired the men who wrote America’s founding documents, and French funds helped pay for their muskets and gunpowder. Without the help of the French, and the fancy French thought that real Americans sneer at, there wouldn’t be an America at all.
Sacre vache
, y’all would be speaking British!

This part of America’s history – the fact that the founders were nerds, not bullies – is conveniently omitted from the idiocratic version of the American Revolution, which is the story of a bunch of Joe Six-Packs getting mad as hell and deciding they weren’t gonna take it anymore. They stood up! They fought! You do not often hear the right enthuse about the long hours the Founding Fathers spent thinking, reading philosophical texts, and crafting the documents that teabaggers wave at protests and pretend to defend. I guess “They sat down! They wrote!” just doesn’t have the same zing.

The tea-partiers are a minority, and an extreme one at that, but their beliefs are paranoid, cartoon versions of opinions that the moderate majority hold too. You can’t trust the government or big business, in that order. The only thing you can trust is the people. Freedom is the highest value: it decrees that I get to do what I like, spend my money how I please, and rear my progeny however I see fit.

These beliefs are totally mainstream. We see them in
TV
shows and movies. We hear them in pop music; rappers and redneck country singers agree that every North American is free to get rich. We see these beliefs in ads all the time.
Corporations play on public distrust, selling themselves as the only company that really cares about you, the lone honest broker or quality product in a world of lies and junk. Advertisers also love freedom-speak. Each innovation, no matter how minor, represents a liberation. McCafé ends the elitist stranglehold on espresso. Lysol leaves us germ-free. Vanilla toothpaste delivers us from the tyranny of mint.

As I argued in
Chapter Five
, freedom’s most vocal defenders often end up trivializing it, defining it in merely selfish ways, such as the right to pick your favourite flavour or to teach your kid that global warming is a hoax. The right to be cheap, to hang on to one’s hard-earned dough, is paramount. “Why should
I
have to pay for that?” is the standard idiocratic objection to public spending on the arts and social services.

I’m perfectly happy to pay taxes so kids and poets can eat, and I have no interest whatsoever in purchasing bombs or building hockey arenas. But Canada includes people who love hockey and people who love poetry and people who love both, people who want a bigger military and people who want to cut defence spending. So I am not always going to get what I want, and that’s the price of being part of a
we
. That’s a price that people seem increasingly unwilling to pay.

The idiocratic version of freedom undermines the public infrastructure that sustains freedom. The idiocratic bias against government is not a healthy skepticism; rather, it is destructive and nihilistic. Teabaggers and radical libertarians who dream of a world without taxes, without government, without public schools or hospitals are the logical conclusion of idiocracy’s attempt to privatize all things public.

The desire to privatize is based on the myth of “the people.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle are forever saying that “the people” are good; it is Ottawa and Washington that are bad. But the people choose their representative blackguards and dispatch them to their respective capital hells. The people vote for bad governments and patronize corrupt corporations. Separating the people and their institutions is a lot like trying to pry apart content and form, what we say and how we say it. This is what pseudo-populism tries to do when it insists that the people are always trustworthy but the governments they elect are not.

Such assertions, like Palin’s passive verbs, dissolve responsibility. Saying that the people are better than their government encourages the people to ignore or disdain the government. This gives politicians permission to suck at their jobs and then blame the profession – politics in general – for their failures.

Pseudo-populist politicians tell voters that they are smart, but they treat them like they are stupid.
Hard-working people know best! Here’s a tax credit. Go get yourself something nice and don’t worry your pretty little head about the deficit
. They use all kinds of emotive buzzwords, ploys, and props such as France and Hollywood, green forests and blue sweaters, to play the public. They hire consultants to study the public, focus-grouping and testing every message, so they can tell the people precisely what they want to hear. In short words. Over and over again. The subjects of these studies must really crank the dials on their approval meters whenever politicians praise the superior intelligence of “the people.”

Telling people what they want to hear is much easier than telling them what they need to know or what the government plans to do. And listening to happy bullshit is easier than following the news and puzzling through the issues. The leaders don’t have to go through the fuss and bother of explaining their complicated plans, and we don’t have to feign interest in the tedious details. It’s efficient and convenient. It cuts down on the “verbage.” Everybody wins!

But lately lots of people seem to be losing. They’re losing their jobs, losing their houses, losing their health insurance coverage, losing their pensions, losing their investments. They feel they are losing interest in the machinations of their minority government or losing their post-electoral hope. Some believe they are losing their country, and some of those people seem to be losing their minds. So who is really winning? The answer is glaringly obvious: the people with the highest scores.

Pseudo-populism creates what it claims to despise. Politicians cede control to financial markets, which are elitist, and proudly so. They are complicated intellectual constructs that average, non-fiscal folks have a very hard time deciphering, that use math and language beyond our ken. Advice and counsel about the market is a huge market. Countless websites, books, seminars, and advisors offer explanations of how the market really works and how you can make it work for you.