It's always tempting to pile onto a particular controversy, and I'm a little late to this party. Most everyone in America by now has heard the basic story of 'Joe the Plumber', and most everyone has their own opinion of his exchange with Senator Barack Obama. Good luck trying to change those opinions, too: either you believe that 'Joe' is a champion of the working class who correctly understands Senator Obama to be a socialist, or you believe that 'Joe' is a fraud, a phony and a tool of the rightists who continue to hold back progress in America. Thanks to the mainstream media we've learned a lot about Joe these last few days, from his unpaid tax lien to his lack of a plumber's license to his divorce to the big SUV he drives.So Joe is in part a mirror to our own political and cultural beliefs. What we believe determines how we see him.
I confess that I see Joe somewhat differently.
For me, Joe is a neighbor.
I work as an academic physician in Hyde Park, Illinois, home to Barack Obama and a lot of other very smart intellectuals. These folks are often referred to in the media and in political commentary as 'elites': you say that either with reverence or with a sneer depending on your political orientation. Hyde Park is a wonderfully quirky, yeasty community that has more bookstores than bars. It's a different place than much of the rest of America.
Joe wouldn't be comfortable living in Hyde Park. Neither was I, and I tried it.
I've lived in a number of working class neighborhoods, starting with the one I grew up in, a semi-rural tract in Ohio. My father was a technician, and we lived amongst people like Joe: carpenters, teachers, and factory workers. The house on the corner had a welder who spent his spare time refitting tow trucks in his driveway. The largest house on the block belonged to a contractor; he was the kind of man who'd wielded a hammer long enough to remember where he came from and so lived on a block with others like him. The men went to work every morning; so did some of the women, while the rest stayed home and raised the children. You learned a lot as a kid just by watching the adults: they worked, they tended to their homes and their yards, and they looked after their kids. Their pleasures were relatively simple, and a holiday trip for them was heading downstate to see the family or into the woods to hunt a deer.
Joe would have lived there. He would have lived in several more neighborhoods I've lived in as an adult, because they were filled with people like him, even the blue community in a blue state, where the electrician and the corporate vice president shared a driveway. Joe would have been comfortable playing football with his son in the front yard in any of these places, because we were all, despite our occupations and our different upbringings, pretty much the same people.
We remember from where we came. We remember who our neighbors were. Everyone was useful. Everyone had a job to do, and we learned that those jobs were important. Think you're smart because you're a doctor, a lawyer, or an author? Try repairing a broken sump pump. On a Saturday night. Standing in a foot of dirty water. One learned, growing up in a working class neighborhood, that everyone who could do something had a basic worth.
Some 'elite' people understand that as well, but some, perhaps because they've become embarrassed by their upbringing and have been cowed living amongst those who live on a higher intellectual plane, have run away from their former life. They now live in Manhattan but don't appreciate being reminded that they grew up in Manhattan, Kansas. Yes, yes, their political beliefs require them to acknowledge the 'working person', but they've overcome their humble beginnings and want, sometimes desperately, to be accepted by their new neighbors in Manhattan, or Hyde Park, or Berkeley, or Boulder. The working class is an item of study to them, something found in books and journals that describe the 'material dialectic' and the proletariat, something to be molded and 'educated' perhaps, particularly around election time, but nothing to be a part of anymore. They're beyond that.
It's an elitism that requires one to forsake the old ways in favor of the new life. It induces a particular psychology that in the end becomes disdainful of the plumber. Sure he has a life and dreams and plans, but after all, he's just a plumber. He's an object, much like a plunger, and while the elites superficially acknowledge his humanity, they also make plans for him without his consent. Those big plans mean that it's perfectly acceptable to spread his wealth around to other people in other classes: the 'poor', the 'elderly', the 'minorities', all also similarly deconstructed. You wouldn't understand, Joe. Shut up, plumb your pipes and give the man your money.
Joe the Plumber spoke back to the instrument of truth and power, and he has to be punished for that. It's a lesson to all of us. That's why the mainstream media tore into him, why the late-night comics ridicule him, and why Senators Obama and Biden openly mock him on the campaign trail. They understand the danger of allowing a challenge to pass without response.
It's the same message to all of us in fly-over country who work at a job, try to put a little away, and play football with our kids. We can be bitter and cling to our religion if we want (the guns they'll take away), but we'd better pipe down and not ask any embarrassing questions. Let the elites run America the same way they run Europe.
We are all Joe. Be quiet.