More Money than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, & Idiots Think They’re Right

by Penny, Laura

  In his August 2009 town hall, John McCain was asked the following by a member of Arizona’s considerable old-bag constituency: “I would like to know how the President’s getting by … with all this money … it’s against the Constitution. Doesn’t he know it’s against the Constitution?” This indignant mess was greeted with many cheers. When McCain replied, “I’m sure that he does … I’m serious. I’m sure that he respects the Constitution of the United States,” he was rewarded with yowls and jeers.4

  As many of you are doubtless already aware, before he started his career in politics, Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade. Dude has forgotten more about the Constitution than these anti-government grumpuses will ever know. I’m no constitutional scholar, but I do know that the preamble says the government has a duty to “promote the general Welfare.” The very first power of Congress is to collect taxes to ensure a common defence and, again, the “general Welfare.” Moreover, wing-nut favourites like the army and the navy appear near the bottom of Congress’s list of powers, below nerdy priorities such as promoting the “progress of Science and useful Arts” through copyright law.

  Here’s another significant passage of the Constitution, one that the right has flouted shamelessly for as long as I can remember: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Of course, given that these chuckleheads can’t tell the difference between Nazism, communism, and liberal democracy, things that the Constitution actually says are beside the point. None of the protestors, to my knowledge, ever specified which parts of the Constitution Obama was traducing. The rhetoric of the right-wing protests bore little resemblance to the legal, procedural language of the Constitution, sounding a lot more like the fiery fuck-the-King polemics of the Declaration of Independence. The pseudo-populist right are sore losers and drama queens who think the other side’s winning a majority and trying to fulfil a central campaign promise is exactly like the “long train of abuses and usurpations” meted out by a distant foreign tyrant.

  The right-wingers who once equated anti-Bush sentiment with treason did a volte-face on respecting the office of the POTUS once that smart black guy took office. When Obama addressed America’s schoolchildren in September 2009, angry parents cried indoctrination and some school boards refused to air the speech. Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer declared, “As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.”5

  Obama’s speech was more little red schoolhouse than little red book, an endorsement of conservative values such as hard work, personal responsibility, and trying your best. Laura Bush supported him, and even Greer conceded that the speech was not as Trotskyist as he had feared. Of course, some right-wing pundits spun this as a victory for their side. If they hadn’t intervened and pitched a hissy, they said, the socialist prez woulda been quoting Castro. Never mind that Obama has given many a work-hard-and-stay-in-school speech, voicing values that are much more conservative than the reactionary vitriol and apocalyptic doomsaying of his opponents.

  The right tried to spin the school speech as an unprecedented exercise of executive power, but the first Bush and Reagan did the exact same thing. When Reagan delivered his address to students in 1988, it was unabashedly partisan, enthusing about the joys of tax cuts and less government, arguing that the Republican way was the American way, which was swiftly becoming the way of the world.

  Many of his tropes – his fulsome praise of free enterprise and the Founding Fathers, for example – still inform right-wing rhetoric. The anti-government mantras of the tea-party and town hall types are stale, dumbed-down Reaganspeak, right down to the red scares that played so well at the ass end of the Cold War. And those red scares were repeats anyway, cover versions of McCarthyism. These folks have not changed their minds in more than twenty years, but their ideas have changed America, for the worse, causing many of the problems they now complain about.

  Dubya’s experiments with untrammelled Reaganomics were an abject failure. His administration racked up the debt and trashed the economy. Some conservatives, to be fair, have distanced themselves from the former regime for that reason. But the hard right, the reactionary lumpenyanks, continue to worship the holy trinity of tax cuts, defence spending, and deregulation, in spite of all the wreckage they have wrought. Dubya’s disasters were insufficient to disprove their beliefs. They blame not the ideas but the man, claiming that Bush wasn’t really a true believer. Once he got to Washington, he sold out, succumbing to the siren song of big government. It wasn’t that Bush was too Reagany. He was not Reagany enough. There can be no such thing as too Reagany for the reactionary lumpenyanks who “want their country back.” If they could vote for his mouldering corpse, they would.

  Obama is not their president. And though there were plenty of vile racist signs at tea-party rallies, I do not think that race is the only thing that makes him appear foreign and threatening to the teabaggers and town hallers. They believe Obama is illegitimate because he represents the unreal America – brainy America – and there hasn’t really been a leader from around them parts since JFK. Obama can burnish his Midwestern niceness all he likes, but his suspiciously mellifluous speech and cerebral demeanour make him a usurper. He is a Manchurian candidate from the fifth column of educated city folk who gleefully grind virtuous small-towners under the heels of their modish, overpriced jackboots.

  The anti-tyrant yawping was proudly and vociferously anti-intellectual. Obama, the nerd-in-chief, and learned health-care wonks such as Harvard’s Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel were cast as sinister experts who want to control everything, heartless technocrats who long to dispatch Grandma to a death panel. Reason once again appeared as cold calculation rather than ethical deliberation, as a purely technical antagonist to basic human decency, which dwells in the heart, not the head.

  Pundits and PR hucksters used hot-button phrases such as “government takeover of health care” to exploit elitophobia, anti-intellectualism, and the anti-government streak that has always been part of American politics. Anti-health-care types also invoked other anti-nerd myths, alleging that any public health-care plan was sky pie, wildly unrealistic, and way too expensive, something that might work in Europe, but never in the real world. At the same time, the payload of stats and research from every other industrialized country, which shows that their public health-care systems are more efficient and effective than America’s private system, was dismissed as socialist propaganda, more phony liberal expertise. It is ideologically impossible for certain Americans to admit that any government can do anything right, a belief that inspires unintentionally hilarious outbursts such as “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare – any one help me out? No!”6 and “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”7

  The fact that the President had to stoop to conquer the persistent rumour that the gub’mint was going to kill Grandma is a testament to two things. First, there really is no bar and no bottom to political discourse. Powerful lobbies and private interests have the wherewithal and the willingness to muddy the waters. They distribute whatever low-down, illogical, and just plain unhelpful slogans and distortions their buzzword technicians recommend to maintain their profit margins. Second, there are many less fortunate foot soldiers, grunts who are happy to repeat these free-market mantras to sow panic about shadowy gub’mint bureaucrats and their nefarious schemes, for pleasure and for profit. Sure, some of the town hall protestors and teabaggers were just independent dittoheads and freelance racists, but others were Astroturf organized by corporate-whore lobby groups such as Freedom Works, former Republican Congressman Dick Armey’s dick army.

  The panic over public health care is funny and sad, since America has had death panels and sinister bureaucrats for years. They’re called Aetna, Humana, and WellPoint, and they make a killing, figuratively and literally. Protesting on their behalf is like maki
ng a charitable donation to Wal-Mart or sending a fruit basket to the CEO of the bureaucracy that fired you or foreclosed on your house. Nevertheless, “severely normal” Americans turned out to defend the status quo, to uphold the constitutional right to gouge sick people, ration care, and generate massive profits. If Aetna is no longer free to make a pile of dough denying Grandma’s suffering, then no American is truly free, and the Marxist Nazi Muslims win.

  I can understand why Republican pols repeat this codswallop. They do it for the same reason high-class escorts praise aging executive schlongs – that’s what the people renting them have paid for. The same is true of the Blue Dog Democrats. What is more disheartening is that the Democrats who do support a health-care plan are also constrained by the power of big donors and by public hysteria about big gub’mint.

  Even Obama had to use the free-marketeering lingua franca of competition and choice to pitch his plans, which shows us that Americans still trust the market and money more than they trust the government or brains. The health-care “debate” is yet another example of the economic elite using the intellectual elite as a distraction, a cartoon villain, to conceal their own perfidy and retain their power. Universal health care would be a victory for brains, so the money-minded are duty bound to defeat it by any means necessary.

  The health-care debate is just one example of broader trends in North American politics. You have to love the entertainment value, if not the probity or efficacy, of a political system that requires its candidates to sell out to moneyed interests and invest the proceeds in waterfront property on the moral high ground. This is not a contradiction so much as it is a commitment to two different kinds of private value, one moral and one fiscal. North American politics has become resolutely anti-public, driven as it is by two private engines: personal values and private wealth.

  This has rendered North American political life idiotic, in a very old and specific sense. For the ancient Greeks, the idiot was the totally private person, the person who did not participate in the public life of the polis. The term wasn’t necessarily derogatory; idiot meant something more like “common man” or “worker,” and was closer to particular than selfish, as we see in other idio- words like idiosyncratic and idiomatic. It picks up pejorative heft throughout the history of the West, as when Marx praises the unprecedented productivity of the bourgeoisie for rescuing so many people from “the idiocy of rural life.”8 The word was enlisted by the medical profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a descriptor for retardation, lingering in idiot-savant, a term that has lately been decommissioned and replaced by autistic savant.

  In the twentieth century, idiot stumbled out of the clinic and into its current gig as an all-purpose smear, one that gets a lot more work than cretin or mongoloid but is less offensive than retard. Right-wingers are fond of employing “useful idiot” – their phrase for communist Russia’s Western appeasers and apologists – to suggest that anyone liberal or lefty is an ally of totalitarian forces. Lefties tend to use it in the more generic, whatta-maroon sense while mocking chicken hawks who can’t find the places they wanna bomb on a map.

  It doesn’t matter what your party affiliation is. We all live under idiocracy, insofar as we have become a people with little sense of the public good, people whose politics are largely devoted to personal or private issues. A candidate’s faith or fidelity to his family or ability to seem like an all right dude is a crucial qualification for office. And once the winner takes office, his highest task will be a largely private one as well: responsible stewardship of the economy and the prompt return of tax dollars to their rightful owners.

  Tax cuts are a good example of a very popular policy that is idiotic in the sense that I intend. Despite all the tea-party tantrums, Obama has actually cut taxes, like many other leaders who are trying to stimulate the moribund economy. And tax cuts were equally popular when we were in merry mid-bubble. Bush and Cheney bet that people like tax cuts better than balanced budgets, and they won a second term. Tax cuts are now a permanent plank in every party platform, in good times and bad.

  Tax cuts are also declarations that the public sector has failed and owes the people a partial refund for services poorly rendered. It’s like a restaurant comping you a free dessert to make up for an overdone entree. Here, citizens, take this coupla hundred bucks back; you know far better than we do how best to spend your cash. We fucked up and we give up. Most tax cuts are just shrugs, politicians abdicating their civic responsibility as leaders and then wrapping their laziness in flattery and bribery.

  Alleging that someone is a “tax-and-spend liberal” sounds absurd to me, like saying that someone is a “teach-and-grade professor” or a “tackle-and-catch-the-ball football player.” Deciding who and what to tax and what programs to invest in represents a goodly chunk of the work of governance. Instead of making long-term investments in public infrastructure such as roads, schools, and hospitals – the kind of resources that allow all of us to exercise our freedom – tax-cutting governments give voters chump change and try to purchase our loyalty with relatively minor private perks, with idiocratic short-term rewards. Everyone can count the cash and enjoy it immediately; you can’t say the same for the kind of long-term benefits bestowed by good schools, bridges, or novels.

  Tax cuts have become a campaign staple, a constant promise, whether or not those cuts conflict with other assurances about balanced budgets or spending. It is impossible for politicians to promise anything but fiscal conservatism, and equally impossible for them to deliver anything that vaguely resembles it. And if we can’t make government work at this bean-counting level, the one our leaders keep emphasizing, it is hardly surprising that people can be quite cynical about the prospect of the government’s enacting measures that go beyond balancing the books and paying voters off with dribs and drabs of their own money.

  Canadians are slightly less anti-tax than their southern neighbours, largely because of health care. However lousy the current incarnation of the government may be, we can still go to the hospital for free, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. But anti-tax sentiment in Canada has grown more and more vocal as we have lurched to the right too.

  From 1998 to 2002, Prime Minister Harper was president of the anti-tax National Citizens Coalition, which militates in favour of “more freedom through less government.” The NCC, one of Canada’s oldest right-wing groups, was founded in 1967 by an angry insurance executive opposed to Trudeaupian notions such as universal health care and a guaranteed annual income program. The NCC happily disseminates the pro-rich opinions of its wealthy members, assuring the public that they would be better off trusting plutocrats than politicos. It opposes all the usual public targets, such as the CBC, unions, and taxation in its many pernicious forms.

  It’s not as though Harper merely had a youthful dalliance with the radical free-market right. He went from being president of the anti-government NCC to leader of the opposition to prime minister in the time it takes to get a worthless B.A. Harper is but one of North America’s cadre of idiocrats who preach anti-government governance until they form the government. They criticize executive power until they wield it, and they demand accountability and transparency until they are the ones who have to provide it. People who do not believe in public service, because they do not believe in the public sector, run for office in bad faith. They’re gonna take the system down from within, maaann. But these pols are ultimately more interested in destruction or obstruction than genuine reform. Who tries to fix something they don’t believe in? Can you imagine a computer company run by a guy who thinks we were better off with the abacus? A vegan steakhouse chef? Anti-government politicians are just as oxymoronic, and much more common, alas.

  Heal thyself, idiocratic politicos. If the private sector is so fantastic, so much better at everything than the government, then go join it. Leave the work of governing to people who actually believe that governments can work. Quit besmirching your precious free-market princip
les, feeding your own photo-op families filthy federal funding. If the milk of the state be poison, detach thine own gums from the chapped taxpayer teat.

  Nobody likes paying taxes. Nobody likes government waste. It’s dead easy to campaign against those things, to promise that you will keep providing the services people like, plus wars, minus anyone having to pay for anything. Here’s a telling moment from a 2008 campaign-trail stop in Aspen, Colorado: a Washington Post reporter noted that “McCain drew a smattering of laughter when he said ‘I have to be against tax increases, as you know.’ “9 It was funny because it was true, one of those moments of McCain candour. No Republican or Conservative can propose tax increases of any sort, since that would contradict their fundamental message: that government itself is a waste.

  If liberals float tax increases, they must couch them, as Obama and Bill Clinton did, as taxes on the very wealthiest, taxes that will not impose further burdens on the beleaguered middle class. But these promises are belied by the fact that Democrats – and Liberals – also need to endear themselves to wealthy campaign contributors and lobbies. And no matter how modest the proposed tax increase, right-wingers accuse them of communism, any tax being a precipitous slippery slope to Soviet Russia, to punishing success. How dare the libs imperil North America’s most precious national resources, our super-rich?

  The relentless focus on the economy and tax cuts, seeing the government as a private wealth manager rather than the public infrastructure that ensures people are free to create wealth, is the most obviously idiocratic strain in political life. Radical idiocrats go even further, arguing that the government is nothing but a parasite battening on the free market’s lifeblood. Such arguments ignore the contributions the public sector makes to private industry. I’m not even talking about the obvious corporate welfare or bailout packages. Good luck making or selling anything, or employing anyone, without roads and cops and a legal system, without the kind offices of schools and hospitals. There are more high-end spas and better snacks in socialist Sweden than in the libertarian paradise of Somalia.