joe the plumber: this year's "old shoe"
Music: Marconi Union: A Lost Connection (2008)
About a decade ago Barry Levinson introduced us to a very funny and very disturbing film, Wag the Dog. The basic plot is this: owing to his priapic weaknesses, a sitting president has no chance of reelection and turns to a Hollywood producer to help him win reelection. The solution they concoct is to create a fake media war in Albania, which the president will end, garner widespread affection, thus cinching the next election. Gradually, the media inventions take over political intentions. To combat a drop of public interest, in the following scene the producer and political advisors create a new public nationalism by celebrating a soldier named "Schumann," caught behind enemy lines:
When I first saw this film---at the time as a graduate student more interested in the arcane than the political---I was amused, but overlooked its relevance. After Nine-eleven, the film moved into my interior creep zone as postmodern prophecy. As Benjamin warned, the aestheticization of the political can lead to a dangerous autonomy, particularly when the sovereign is elevated beyond the rule of law. Wag the Dog suggests this autonomy is not of a people or a party, as Benjamin assumed, but of the reality industries---a sort of governmental apparatus that is biopolitical at base but hypperreal in character. I've been calling this the "political uncanny." The political uncanny refers to the fantasy of a governmental apparatus fueled by sheer political drive (ends) but operating relatively free of control and consumption (means). The political uncanny on a stick is Gilliam's Brazil; it is the idea of politicians as automatons and government as a machine. Wag the Dog is thus really a fantastic tragedy, the horror of instrumento-promotional reason independent of the human.
Watching the last of the presidential debates and reading about "Joe the Plumber" for the past week has me to the point of nausea. McCain's pained and jerky movements---not to mention is almost mechanical shift in political allegiances---do make him appear like a machine. His campaign's apparently deceitful "robo calls" to households across the country add to this machinic aesthetic. But nothing makes me shiver inside more than this attempt to send up Joe the Plumber as an American hero: how different is this than "Old Shoe?" Well, it's not. The horror of contemporary politics is not that the battle over the heart and mind of Joe the Plumber is completely contrived. We could go back in history hundreds of years and see this folksy fabrication logic as a common occurance. What's new is the immediacy of truth effects of the digital age, the speed with which Joe the Plumber has become an emblem of the American voter, and that everyone knows Joe the Plumber is a fabrication. In other words, it's cynical reason: everyone knows Joe the Plumber is complete bullshit, but we don’t care. The MSM continues to do stories on Joe, to hound him at home and at his work place, to play up Joe the Plumber as a body over which the election will be fought.
The real life Joe the Plumber is expendable in all of this. That's what is uncanny about this whole thing: Joe the Plumber are us.