What I Meant Was...

Nothing warms the heart like a good gripe.  Let’s face it, we feel better about ourselves when we complain about others, or things for which we can’t be held to blame.  Isn’t it the great Canadian prerogative to complain about the weather?  About how the government is out of control, not looking out for the common folk, not doing enough and being paid too much?  About how hard we have to work to receive so little?

The best rants are of course political commentaries, from the likes of CBC’s ‘At Issue’ panel, Rex Murphy, Rick Mercer, and my personal mentor and role model, the late Andy Rooney.  These folks make (or made, as it were) a living opining about virtually everything, from quirky day-to-day peeves to hot-topic debates about international affairs.  Most of these commentators are humourous, while some are sharp like verbal daggers eager to be thrust without reservation.  The best employ both, inflicting the most damage while maintaining the comedic veil.  Even stand-up comedians make a living by fearlessly roasting their subjects under the long-arm protection of the notion of ‘parody’.  It is rare that a comedian steps over that line and gets reprimanded by the court of public opinion, but when it does, it can be harmful beyond repair to that person.  Michael Richards – aka Kramer from Seinfeld—learned that the hard way. 

We love it when people ‘tell it like it is’.  Most of us, most of the time, would love to tell our bosses exactly how we feel.  We would love to tell our neighbours to clean up their yard because it looks awful and might devalue our property.  We dream of telling that close friend that their breath smells bad, their jokes aren’t funny, that they talk too much, that they don’t speak up enough.  We would be thrilled beyond words to tell that cashier that her attitude stinks; that those bumper sticker logos and slogans are not funny at all; that the service at Service New Brunswick is anything but; that we’re livid that it costs that much for a Tim Hortons coffee but that we’re slaves to the caffeine and keep paying anyway.

There’s a little bit of chicken in all of us.  Even those who puff out their chests and blow off steam in an instant will only do so with the right audience present, and over the right issues.  We have been taught to reserve our thoughts.  We know we have something to say, but for fear of something impulsive spewing out rather than a constructive response, we delay our reactions because we know the damage we can cause by our words is significant.  There is a lot at stake.  Friendships, business relationships, and reputations can be made or broken with only a few choice words spoken at the right or wrong time.  It can work both ways.  Great speeches are great because they are equal parts eloquent and timely.  Dr. King’s speech delivered at any other time may or may not have had the same effect.  Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Party’s National Convention recently was a huge hit; had he delivered a speech such as that for John Kerry, I dare say it would not have had the same effect, and perhaps would have been detrimental, since his own administration was still fresh in the American consciousness.  Super Bubba now almost radiates a late-90’s nostalgia, and nostalgia is always cool.

Telling it like is can be a major blunder if the truth that is revealed is so reviled by a majority of people.  You need look no further than presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.  This past week, while addressing a small group in a non-public forum, he made reference to the so-called 47% of Americans who live off social programmes, and therefore are blindly supporting incumbent President Barack Obama  and are not worthy of Republican concern going into the November polls.  The root of Republicanism—the  way I understand it at any rate—is  that notion of people being responsible for themselves, and to find a way to make their own American Dreams come true.  Any idea of social programmes in place to help those who need the help, those down on their luck and looking for work, or any kind of safety net to keep people from living in sheer poverty seem to be anathema to Republican values.  They are consistently against welfare or any derivative of it, stimuli for economic growth, universal health care, and other policies which might be construed as ‘socialist’.  Personally, I never grew up on a self-sustained or -contained farm, and neither has anyone I’ve ever met, so I can only conclude that as human beings living in 2012 we are social creatures by necessity.  Since when has helping our fellow people become so wrong?

Romney’s comments have struck a potentially fatal blow to his campaign, and with about six weeks until polls open, it appears he’s dead in the water.  Republican heavy-weights are condemning his words, which should be common sense, since anyone with half a brain should know better than to insult half your potential electorate.  The Republicans themselves seem to be at a crossroads because they had an awful time electing a candidate in the first place, and the campaign to do so pitted future allies against each other in traditional mud-slinging rhetoric to the point that they can’t stand to even look at each other.  To pretend they are one big happy family is preposterous.  They wouldn’t allow some candidates and their delegates to even attend the Republican National Convention.  Somehow, someone thought it was a good idea to let Clint Eastwood speak to a phantom Obama in an empty chair though.  I read on Huffington Post (a questionable source, I know) that some guy in Texas actually ‘lynched’ an empty chair.  Throw in the Todd Akin comments last month about ‘legitimate rape’, and this party has seriously become a gong-show.

I am going to venture a possible theory into Romney’s thought process while saying what he did.  I think, and it’s just a theory with no real evidence to support it, he was saying to a close group of supporters in what he thought was a private forum, that the Republicans have little chance of breaking through to almost half of the electorate, and in that case, what he said wouldn’t have sounded so irrational.  Barack Obama has an overwhelmingly faithful fan-base, and for a number of reasons.  I’ m not throwing the race card out there, but I will point out that it has traditionally been hard for immigrants or African-Americans, non-Christians or LGBT folks to support a party that at times has been downright hostile toward them.  If you were to count all of these people, they must surely amount to over 40% of the US population, but again, I am just speculating.  Romney knows this, and while he personally may not feel any hostility against any of those people, he knows that the word ‘republican’ is slowly becoming an utterance signifying a mélange of certain ‘values’, and that he has little chance of reaching them.  And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that, and admit it he did.  But boy-howdy, did he ever do it the wrong way.

Maybe in a few weeks, Mitt Romney will be elected President.  It would surely be the most stunning upset in memory.  It would give us a new model to follow:  that half-truths are as good as truths or untruths, depending only on the circumstance in which they are claimed; that ‘telling it like it is’ really is the best way to go about things, since you can conceivably survive any repercussions thereafter; that if you proclaim your opinion loud enough and with enough force, you can repress that instinct in others around you, so they will blindly follow your lead for fear of reprisal.  We are seeing that last one with the Harper Government in Canada right now.  I fear for a Republican government in the US, because there is a vacuum in their party, and there is no telling what will come rushing in to fill it. 

What do we do in the meantime?  Well, we can keep being unsatisfied with Service NB.  We can just accept that Rogers and Aliant are fleecing us, that gas prices have absolutely no reason to be what they are, and that nobody seems to know how to park their car in two straight lines anymore.  Or, we could look to a third alternative.  Maybe we could politely say “Pardon me, but I have a concern about why I am being charged this much for my cable package.  Is there something you could do to help me, because if there isn’t, I will take my business elsewhere.”  Honesty doesn’t have to be served on the edge of a sword.