The pathetic populism of Jim Hightower.
What is it with these people and Woody Guthrie? I've never met anyone in real life who gives a damn about Guthrie, but there's a certain kind of fake-folksy essayist who pretends that ol' Woody's a major figure in American culture. And when Hightower praises Guthrie, he does so in language so false, saccharine and outdated that it's beyond parody:
"Woody G. [sic] was a fellow who spent a lot of time in his day going down the road as what he called a 'ramblin' man' and 'a little one-cylinder guitar picker.' As he rambled, he met hardworking folks who, like him, were feeling 'stranded and disbanded, busted, disgusted,' and he wrote their stories into songs that tell of the beautiful strength and tenacious spirit of the American people."
Ugh. I'll say it plainly: To hell with Woody Guthrie. And Tom Joad. If that cornpone is the entrance requirement for participation in the American polity, then we've got the perfect government already. It's no wonder that a polity addicted to such debased language attracts only the most insensitive, dishonest, tin-eared politicians. No one with an ear for American English or a sense of shame could take part in discourse like this.
It's painfully clear that "populists" like Hightower don't know a thing about contemporary American culture. Hightower chatters about "us regular Janes and Joes," unaware that nobody talks like that anymore (if they ever did). He uses Disney words like "rambunctious" as terms of praise. He bonds with the reader by reminding us that "most of us have experienced some so-and-so of a boss lording it over us as if he's King Tut and we're some mutt." If anyone ever talked like this in any social group I know, he would meet (depending on the group) laughter, dead silence or months of mimicry.
That's the pitiful thing about these "populists": Their America doesn't exist any more, if it ever did, and by chatting endlessly about it, Hightower ends up excluding nine out of 10 actual Americans from his phony "populist" country. If you come from a nameless suburb, do you still count? If you don't have an Aunt Eula? If you hate sports? If you think Woody Guthrie was in Natural Born Killers?
One would think that a real populist, if such a thing existed, might want to bond with the people by quoting texts they actually care about. Drop Woody Guthrie and quote The Big Lebowski, which has magnificent lines for every situation and is a pretty good allegory of the American polity as well. (Do people like Hightower even see movies like that? Could someone so out of touch with contemporary culture even get it?)
The traps involved in attempting to bond with the reader by shared cultural allusions are innumerable. For example, Hightower includes a list of fine bands that have played in Austin?and fails to mention the Butthole Surfers. I never trusted the man again after that revelation of heresy.
There is, of course, the alternative of writing with gravitas, skipping all these demeaning attempts to chat up the reader and instead stating the grim case against the Bush presidency in standard American English, with a little dignity. When Hightower drops his hokey twang to list the crimes of the Republicans, he's very good. The most heartbreaking and powerful passage in the book is a six-page list of all the anti-environmental crimes these swine have committed in three short years: "Rejected Kyoto global warming treaty?withdrew arsenic-in-drinking-water-standard; sought to roll back 'Roadless National Forests' plan?tried to shrink boundaries of nineteen national monuments and to allow oil and gas drilling on all public lands?cut 270 positions from the EPA's enforcement division?" After reading six pages of horrors like these, I wanted to march down to the nearest Green Party office and enlist.
But within a few pages of delivering this straightforward and powerful indictment, Hightower was a-bondin' and a-folksin' as per usual?and I was gagging.
The facts about the Bush "kleptocracy," as presented by Hightower, are outrageous enough. The troubling question is why Hightower and other leftists must resort to this degrading hokum to present the case. Perhaps anyone not on the far right in America these days is presumed to be un- or anti-American, so leftists (and "populist" is simply a euphemism for leftist) have to make their case in the language of Captain Kangaroo?or rather his "populist" sidekick, Mister Greenjeans. Thus, after a good, clear account of some particularly nasty stock-market con games, Hightower puts on his fake C&W voice to explain that "the problem with putting the?perps in the pokey is?the Congress critters?."
I haven't heard words like "the pokey" and "critters" since I gave up watching Deputy Dawg. This silly joshing undermines the righteous wrath that Hightower actually does a good job of arousing. His long chapter on the crimes of Wal-Mart is the best part of the book. The most shocking of his revelations about Wal-Mart is the fact that it has actually turned the central plot device of Gogol's Dead Souls into profitable corporate practice. Wal-Mart took out life-insurance policies on its employees with the company as beneficiary and collected after their deaths?in some circumstances, it can amass up to $750,000 without ever informing the employee or their next-of-kin that the policies even existed. What makes this practice particularly vile is that for all other purposes, Wal-Mart refuses to acknowledge any interdependence between itself and its employees, calling them independent "associates" and denying them benefits whenever possible?while claiming massive losses when they die.
Wal-Mart's appalling story ought to stand as decisive evidence of the poverty of "populism." As Hightower says, one of the reasons Wal-Mart has been able to roll over so much local opposition is that the corporation presents itself to the public as a poor little Arkansas general store made good, with Sam Walton's grinning, baseball-hatted head fronting for one of the nastiest sweatshop-spawning, union-busting, small-business-destroying multinationals in history.
By mimicking the contemptible populism of Perot, Bush and Walton, Hightower reveals perhaps the deepest fear of what remains of the left in America: that perhaps, after all, the American people really are as gullible and dimwitted as the right likes to believe. The corny anecdotes and Disney diction of Hightower's prose aren't just annoying and ineffective. They seem to suggest that, despite his frequent pep talks about our chances of "taking our country back," Hightower doubts we can grasp even the simplest argument unless he gets our attention with corny jokes and anti-intellectual posturing.
Maybe we're not actually that stupid. And if it turns out we are?if we really are the sort of morons who are only persuaded by this Will Rogers cornpone?welp, folks, then the whole durn sitchoo-ayshun kinda reminds me of Daryl Hannah's line from Blade Runner: "Then we're stupid and we'll die!"