This is not snark. I am not, ordinarily, very funny, and rarely on purpose. Nor, I hasten to add, am I some kind of troll; I haven't enough hair to pull that one off anymore.
This, at the expense of a would-be public figure, is a contemplation of the state of the American dream, and, along the way, yes, a bit of a defense of Joe the Plumber, who's had a hard time of it in these parts.
With me so far?
Let's see if I can pull it off, eh?
See, the thing is, we live in a lottery economy these days. What I grew up knowing as the American dream, it doesn't exist. Maybe it was always a chimera, but as far back as I can go in oral history through my family, every generation has done better than its predecessor. Except mine.
I am not a slacker. I went to college, to a pretty good public university. I have owned all or part of three very small businesses, one of which did tolerably well for a while. I have routinely worked 60-hour weeks, often for months without end. But the demographics -- and the ethics with which I was raised, perhaps -- have worked against me. First the Baby Boomers ahead of me (born in 1959, I come at the tail end of that bubble) had all the good jobs. Then the economy tanked, and nobody of my generation has or can count on keeping the kind of jobs which sustained our parents. Well, some can. I'm just not one of them.
Not sour grapes, just a preamble.
The American dream, it's no longer about creating a business you can hand down to your child, nor, even, about creating wealth you can hand down to your child (and that's a dangerous business, based on the great unhappiness I've witnessed among the handful of trust-funders I've known).
The American dream is the great lottery shot. It's public self-abasement on reality television.
And Joe the Plumber? He took it.
Let us skip, for the moment, his politics. Let's forget which side of the divide he's on, because that's not my point. Not tonight, anyhow. And let's stop quibbling over his back taxes, though it's always been my belief you pay Guido the Lump first. The plumber's license? Whatever. I'm sure that deeply offends union folk, and I understand why. But my best guess based on the available evidence is that he works for a guy who has a license, the fellow whose business he proposed to buy, and I suspect that's a pretty normal relationship. We had a crew work on our last house, the owner had a license, the two guys who did most of the basic work did not. They knew their jobs and their limitations, and they worked hard.
Now, Joe...he's a man with a dream. And he probably surrounds himself with people who aren't quite as smart as he is, with the result that he probably thinks himself smarter than he is. He served in the military, so he's traveled some. He probably listens to Rush, and has a bookshelf with Anne Coulter on it. He's raising a son, and I don't want to guess why his ex-wife isn't in that picture because that's an invasion of privacy we should not countenance.
But Joe has a dream. The American dream. He wants to make it. Now, a dream is different from a plan, but the man has instincts. He didn't cause Barack Obama to walk down his street, but he probably knew he was coming. He watches enough TV to know what good TV is made of, and so he seizes the day. He asks the question. He gets on TV.
Now, for a lot of people today, sadly enough, that is the sum total of the new American dream, the quintessential validation of existence. I do exist, you've seen me on TV. (I am reminded, briefly, of the old man witness on 12 Angry Men, the shabby man too vain to wear his glasses into the courtroom.)
Let's give him credit, though. That's a ballsy move, to get up in the face of somebody who could well be our next president, and ask him a tough question. Yes, it's a conservative talking point, and, yes, the premise he offers is, ultimately, not true. But he mans up, and he asks the question, and he gets on TV.
And there McCain's people find him. What happens next is probably a good story we won't learn until he writes his book, but somehow they get his cell phone number and call him during that third and final debate, the one in which he gets mentioned more times than McCain's running mate does.
He seizes the day. He's now a commodity, name of Joe the Plumber. Now, we evil netroots folks, we dig around with the googles and we find out all kinds of unflattering things about him, but that's not the point. Not his point. Who was it -- David Gergen? -- who said Joe the Plumber should go buy a truck and paint "JOE THE PLUMBER" on the side and get with it? Good advice, but our Joe, he thinks bigger than that. He's not average, and he's got dreams.
A lot of us -- a lot of us here (mirror, hello!), we think we could be pundits given the chance. Well, Joe has the chance. He does the rounds. Gets a new suit.
It's intoxicating, those lights and those famous people talking to and about you. Once upon a time I had a little taste of it, and fortunately I'm grounded enough to have recognized it for what it was, to have known instinctively that the same failures which ruled out a career in politics for me also rule out a career on television.
As my father-in-law says, he gets drunk on his own spit, sure he was. But he's also in the stream now, and he's got plays to make that he could only have dreamt of before.
So he makes them. Maybe he will run for Congress. If nothing else, it's a good marketing move, because suddenly he's a known man, an almost famous guy, and there's more money in that than there is in receding to the sidelines. And he probably knows the moment fades quickly, so he's grabbing at everything he can because that's the new American dream: get it while you can. You've won the lottery, can you figure out how to keep what you've lucked into?
This brings us, sort of, to this silliness of Joe the Plumber trying to get a country music contract. He's been beaten silly for this, and it IS silly.
Because I am still a semi-working entertainment journalist, let me retype here the press release I received via e-mail at 10:29 EST Tuesday morning. I will leave out the PR firm's name because I don't see any point in mentioning it. It says, simply, this:
"We are excited to announce the addition of Joe 'The Plumber' Wurzelbacher to [our] roster for exclusive public relations representation."
It goes on to mention the firm's roster of clients, which includes: John Anderson, Aaron Tippin, Pam Tillis, Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers, Leon Redbone, Chase Mattioli (a NASCAR driver), Karissa (no idea), Thompson Ward, and John Sebastian.
Nowhere in that press release does it say he seeks a country music singing (or songwriting) deal. Maybe it says that somewhere else, but the fact that he's represented by a Nashville PR firm which specializes in country music really means that the music business is kinda rocky and they're looking to diversify.
It also means this: Somebody is now backing Joe The Plumber's play (and I'll capitalize the definite article now, just to play along), because that kind of PR firm probably charges, oh, let's say $3,000 a month and works for three months, minimum. And Joe, based on what we know, doesn't have that kind of money.
Finally, then, Joe has a shot at the big time, whatever that means. And somebody with some money and maybe some power and influence, they're backing him. Maybe he ends up on local talk radio, because I'd certainly hire him if I had a station in that market right now. Maybe he moves up from there. All sorts of doors are potentially open to him.
NONE OF WHICH mitigates the fact that he's on the other side politically from virtually everybody who reads this. And, again, his politics are not the issue.
The issue is this: this game he's playing, and playing pretty well so far? It's the only American dream left to the vast majority of the American population.
THAT is what we are here to change.
So go vote. And wish Joe well. Because if this fails, nothing will ever again be good enough for him, and that son of his will have to live with all of it, either way.