REVISITING H.L. MENCKEN

Although he was a virulent anti-Semite, I have to forgive him because of one unforgettable phrase. The seer of Baltimore wrote that” “No one ever got poor underestimating the intelligence of the American People.” I always hated that quote because it demeaned the very people Mencken wrote for. It was, to me, always a kind of elitist snobbery characteristic of many journalists. Anyone who has ever spent time in a city room has heard remarks like: “Here we go. Another day with the great unwashed.” Contempt for the very people you wanted to reach was an insult, an insult to the journalist himself.

But I dither. Mencken came to mind as I watched a new non-political “public service” commercial. You may have seen it. It showed a man with a shovel starting to dig in the ground. He was soon standing in a deep hole. The admonition was: “There is an old saying – if you find yourself in a hole, don’t dig deeper.”

It is playing to the average citizen’s failure to properly understand fiscal policy. We are just as guilty as the Americans. The difference is that their present economic ignorance is leading them to embrace the very people who got them in the financial mess they’re in.

Don’t be so smug though. Didn’t Paul Martin, when he was Minister of Finance make a crusade over reducing the deficit? It made political sense because it painted him and the Chrétien Liberals, as people who wanted to save our country from itself?
The deficit came down but unemployment was high and as usual the pain was felt by the people least able to handle it. It was, and it still is, a very bad idea. In the U.S. especially, the priority is to bring back something closer to full employment; to restore public confidence; to make America great again – and all that stuff.

The other day, in his press conference, Obama did a tap dance around the word “stimulus.” It seems now that that word has become an anathema, a pejorative word, a political flash point. He was asked if his proposed new 50 billion dollar infusion into roads, railways and runways was a “stimulus.” He smiled. He knew that the reporter asking the question was mirroring the American disappointment in the stimulus program and has somehow been convinced that it will ruin the country. Obama said, sidestepping daintily, that his job was to “stimulate” the economy, somehow re-inventing the word stimulus. Give me a break!

He still professes to believe that the public sector is supposed to spring forward and start hiring people, knowing full well that they will be hiring people to make product that the suddenly cost-conscious consumer will not buy. So why produce? So why hire?

Yes, deficits do dig a hole. But unemployment digs a far deeper one. What bothers me most, and this harks back to the Mencken quote, is that Americans fail to see the irony of their distaste for deficits. The irony being that the greatest deficit responsibility lies, not with out of control public spending, but with out-of-control tax refunds, especially to the wealthiest 5%. George Bush’s policy of tax cuts made the biggest hole of all. The renewal of those tax cuts will dig that hole even deeper. I am not even mentioning the tens of billions into the “hole” of the Iraq war.

In the face of the anti-deficit lobbying from The Right and the timid Left, there is no hope. Americans will go to the polls on the first Tuesday in November, and just two years after utterly rejecting them for their stupidity with the economy, will reward the same guys with a return to power.

What Mencken failed to mention was that the ordinary person, in the U.S, or in Canada, simply can't stand up to the huge pressure of political campaigns and untruths from power-based lobbyists that have only one goal in mind: re-election. We are dupes because we seem to want to be.

It is also too easy to blame governments for pandering simply to get elected. You have to have the gullible suckers within range to succeed with pandering. Here in Toronto, we are about to elect (unless some sense arrives spontaneously in the voters’ minds) a man who has sloganeered his way into the hearts of people who seem to want to be duped. Just use language like “waste and corruption” and enough people believe. Sad. Sad. Sad.

Go dig a hole.