More Money Than Brains (19 page)

Here is a fun fact: American politicians are actually better educated than their Canadian counterparts. Only 66 per cent of members of Parliament have an undergraduate degree, versus 93 per cent of the representatives in Congress.
²⁵
The myths about socialist Soviet Canuckistan aren’t accurate either, as the majority of Canadian
MPS
come from the private sector. Conversely, most U.S. representatives come from other state and local governments; they are part of a political class. U.S. politicos stay in public service far longer than their Canadian counterparts. Parliament has a much higher turnover rate than American political institutions do. This creates an amateurish, short-sighted political outlook, one that rarely sets its sights higher than the next election.

For all their differences, the U.S. and Canada share a democratic egalitarianism that is admirable in principle. Unfortunately, it blows in practice. We condone all kinds of inequities, economic and social, but enforce absolute equality when it comes to public displays of intelligence. No polity, or politician, has the latitude to be much smarter than the most ignorant citizens. The wording and inflections differ on the two sides of the border, but North Americans share similar idiocies and anti-intellectualisms, the same more-money-than-brains mindset.

The Canadian way of phrasing this attitude is “Who do you think you are?”(to borrow a title from the amazing Alice Munro). Canadians love to remind the presumptuous that
they are no better than the rest of us. Robertson Davies used to tell a story about being at a party where someone announced that Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had won the Nobel Peace Prize. An annoyed fellow reveller declared, “Who does he think he is?”
²⁶
This most Canadian of questions is simultaneously reproachful and passive-aggressive, accusing its objects of thinking they are so frigging great.

The American version is more aggressive, defensive, and individualistic; it sounds like Travis Bickle’s “Are you talking to
me?
“ Where the Canadian version focuses on the offending snob and chides him for transgressing community standards such as mediocrity, the American one emphasizes the speaker’s independence, his God-given right to his own opinion.
That snob has some nerve, thinking he is the boss of me!
The old “Don’t tread on me” flag goes double for experts, and triple for government experts, who have no right to occupy your interior or exterior space or clutter it with their phony facts.

On both sides of the border, pseudo-populists convince the electorate that someone can be too smart for high office. In Canada, all one need do is invoke the spectre of Pierre Trudeau, the last unabashed intellectual to serve as prime minister. What did all his fancy book learnin’ get us? Buncha debt and some stupid social programs! In the U.S., a panoply of lobbies, think tanks, and jesters like Limbaugh and Beck keep pouring the old anti-nerd wine into new bottles, getting their audiences ugly drunk on outrage, hopped up on their own anger and fear, thirsty for pitchfork vengeance and simple solutions.

The crazy thing about our idiocratic politics is how much expertise and intelligence go into keeping the bar low and
the sound bites small. A staggering amount of research and polling, vast wonk machines of experts in sciences pseudo and actual, have devoted their copious smarts to the electioneering process, to crafting the perfect piece of terrifying bullshit sure to drive soccer moms in preferred zip codes to the polls to defend their darling sprogs.

All that expertise and intelligence is devoted to making politics more idiotic, more anti-intellectual. These experts assume that people cannot, will not understand the issues, so they must tell stories and stoke fears. Long-time political journalist Joe Klein writes:

The scores of consultants who try to focus-group every candidate to maximal inoffensiveness – or strategic nastiness against the right wrong people – make the process less informative and more emotive. And the American campaigns that Klein covers are clown-car-packed carnivals compared to the stultifying small-mindedness, petty dramas, and hoary rhetoric of Canadian politics.

Knowing how to campaign, how to leverage the party platform as the national brand, matters a lot more than knowing how to govern. Canadians may think that our shorter, quieter elections are a sign that we are more sensible and marvel at the expensive spectacles down south, but most Canadian parties just keep on running for office once they get in. The grind of pandering and pitting factions against one another never really ends. The mighty beaver bites its own tail, producing fractious minority governments and shifting regional resentments, the simmering sense that somewhere, somehow, another province is getting more goodies from whoever’s running Ottawa.

“Big government” is a bogeyman, one deployed by the same people who brought you Homeland Security, among other expansions of intrusive federal power and burdensome public debt. “Big government” is a buzzword, half of a false choice, a hyperbolic contest between totalitarianism and lawlessness, tyranny and liberty. But government isn’t Cineplex popcorn: we don’t have to choose between way too much and none at all.

Freedom requires some basic infrastructure, some effective governance, to be more than an applause line in a speech. If you’re sick, you are living under the tyranny of the body like some lowly forest creature, and there should be health care to free you. If you’re dirt poor, you’re subject to the tyrannies of market caprice, and there should be welfare and employment insurance to help you get back on your feet and free to shop again. If you’re illiterate or ignorant, you are subject to the
tyrannies of demagoguery, pseudo-science, and marketing, and there should be daycares, schools, and universities to liberate you, to help you free yourself from the neck up, which is the most important freedom of all.

Rather than insisting that we have intellectual rights and responsibilities, as Enlightenment types like the Founding Fathers did, freedumb – the ideology of idiocracy – consists of two fundamentally contradictory propositions. First, we should do whatever Big Dad says, whether he comes in the form of God or Dick Cheney or Wall Street. But freedumb also tells us that we can do whatever we like, because we’re free to ignore those who think they know better. We’re free to tell them that they don’t know what they’re talking about, regardless of what we know. We are all the leading experts on ourselves and our wants, and that is what idiot politics speaks to, addressing millions of private yous instead of a public we.

If you replace the
freedom
s in political speeches with other words such as
safety
or
money
, they acquire a refreshing candour and coherence. Freedom has been trivialized by some of its most vocal enthusiasts, who have successfully rebranded it as freedumb: the right not to give a shit or know jack about what happens, the right to make and support decisions on the grounds of guts and grudges and greed. And with these rights come responsibilities:
Stop whining and get back to work
.

Armies, cops, and fire departments are the only public services that most freedumb fighters support, the only fruits of governance that justify themselves with real benefits. The thin green, blue, and red lines between Homeowner McAverage
and suicide bombers, rapists, and crackheads are the only sacrosanct public trust. Right-wingers like Cheney and Harper talk tough and play bully to remind all of us that we should be scared shitless and grateful for the protection of our hired brawn. To ask anything more of the government, to charge it with tasks other than laissez-faire economic management and the deployment of force, is churlish, childish, naive at best, and communist at worst.

In his inaugural address, Obama said:

His initial attempts to make government work have been greeted with howls of protest about the gub’mint takeover of put-near everything. A Rasmussen poll conducted in February 2009 found that 59 per cent of respondents still agreed with Reagan: government was the problem, not the solution. A Gallup poll released in September of that year found that 57 per cent of respondents believed that the government was doing too much, and 45 per cent said there was too much government regulation.
²⁸
These numbers are pretty astonishing and depressing, especially when you consider that the government was doing “too much” because it had to. Private interests had left it little choice when they screwed the global
economy six ways to Sunday and then importuned government for handouts and help.

Bankers grovelled before the governments they usually revile, like wispy poets whining for grant money. They got billions in bailouts, yet somehow the financial sector still inspires more trust and respect than the government that saved it from itself.

This shows us that the North American public’s Stockholm syndrome towards the real elites remains powerful. Freedumb will not, cannot die. The breakdowns and bailouts did not educate or convert the idiocrats. Instead they have become more adamant and entrenched and the war against gub’mint is growing more intemperate and illogical. For a few brief weeks after the financial meltdown started, I thought that maybe this economic crash would mark the end of the idiocracy and show the world how counterproductive anti-government governance is. I must have caught some of that contagious hope that was in the air. Suffice it to say that the weird warm feeling has passed.

T
he media, like Alice in Wonderland, have gotten huge and shrunk, grown bigger and smaller. But the world of media is weirder than Wonderland, since it is growing and shrinking
at the same time
. Old journalism has suffered mass layoffs and speaks to an aging and dwindling audience. But the media in the broad sense – the infoswamp of celebrity gossip, political scandals, fragments of economic data, heinous crimes, lifestyle advice, personal narratives, and just plain weird events – has grown much larger, enveloping North America entire in its miasma, its fog and flickering lights.

There are fewer journalists now than there were before the recession. Tens of thousands of staffers in print,
TV
, publishing, and radio have been laid off since 2008. At the same
time, everyone and her dog can now be a microparticle of the media and say her piece about the issue or scandal
du jour
. Of course, papers have published letters to the editor and radio stations have done call-in shows for ages. But now the audience is moving from commenting to providing content, becoming more integrated into programming, like product placement instead of commercials.

Getting your readers or viewers to write copy or fill airtime is an irresistible combo of populism and cheapness (see also reality
TV
). You can make the audience do some of the content provision or revision for free rather than overpaying some buncha hacks. Many comment boards on news sites, for example, are full of free copyedits of hastily posted stories. Producers and editors can occupy the idle hours and empty pages of a slow news day by getting the audience to tell them what they think about the latest info crumbs and incitements. This flatters the audience too. It tells them that the average person’s opinion is just as good and germane as some journalist’s version of the events or some expert’s interpretation of a situation. It’s similar to the rhetoric of tax cuts:
you know better than we do, so please tell us what to tell you
.

This is also part of a broader social trend. Things that used to be considered jobs or skills have become choices we can make, evidence of market freedom on the march. We are free to scan our own groceries at the self-service checkout, free to be our own bank tellers, free to pump our own gas. We are free to assemble our own furniture and execute our own stock trades. So too are we free to make our own wee bit of the news, be that in the form of a text or message-board post, a
cellphone pic of a disaster, a hit YouTube video, or a particularly piquant blog, tweet, or status update.

Even though virtually everyone with access to a computer has unprecedented access to the media and opportunities to opine, the press is still considered part of the hated nerd elite. The media get lumped in with the brains who control everything, slotted somewhere between the diabolical professoriate (smarter and uglier than the media) and well-heeled Hollywood degenerates (stupider and prettier than the media).

At the same time, many nerds think the media are part of the problem. Cultural critics are often quick to blame the media for the decline of this or that venerable noun, to argue that what passes for news dumbs us all down. The right has produced a barge-load of books about liberal media bias, the left has long held that the media are corporate shills, and many retired journalists have written tomes a lot like those university-decline books I mentioned in
Chapter Four
. Apparently everything was better and truer when reporters typed their own copy piss-drunk while sporting a snazzy hat.