Bird in Space

Matt Yglesias does us all the favor of retyping a portion of the sample speech that Republicans are advised to give their older constituents in order to hornswoggle them into supporting the privatization of SSRI:

Let me leave you with a question: Why should young people who will retire around the year 2035 be forced to live with a system that was invented in 1935, especially when that system is in such deep trouble? So many things have since changed then. When Social Security was created the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t exist and neither did Mount Rushmore. You couldn’t see the Wizard of Oz because it hadn’t been filmed and Cheerios hadn’t been introduced as a breakfast cereal. Americans in 1935 couldn’t imagine our world of cell phones, computers, or landing a man on the moon—and that was more than 30 years ago! Times have changed, even if the values behind Social Security haven’t. Young people ought to have a chance to do it differently than their grandparents. So let’s press our leaders for this change now, and start putting money into personal accounts as soon as possible.

Mr. Yglesias then goes on to earn his "East Coast Liberal Elite Merit Badge for Missing The Point" by treating this language as an argument and ridiculing it.  Of course, if it were an argument, Mr. Yglesias's ridicule would be well founded, but that language is not in any way an argument from premises to conclusions.

That entire block of speechification there is phatic language, intended to convey something about the speaker and his relationship to the rest of the world.   What it's intended to convey is that the Republican speakers with their plans to privatize SSRI are shiny stainless-steel modern forward thinkers, allied with the inevitable, unstoppable TechCentralStation forces of technological progress and the limitless ClubForGrowth economic possibility that is America if only the noble business men were allowed to roam free.  Democrats, and their resistance to gutting a system that really works quite well, are old stodgy tweed-jacketed patchouli-smelling  fuddy-duddies who are probably faintly afraid of their rotary telephones and run screaming from digital watches. (N.B.  Yr. Humble Corresp. still thinks digital watches are a pretty neat idea.)

I think this language supports Mark Schmitt's opinion on how the Republican SSRI privatization ploy may play out if it's not handled well by the Democrats:

[P]art of the game with Social Security was to force a debate between Republicans holding out limitless visions of universal prosperity and opportunity, and Democrats blocking it in the defense of a stale old boring program. In my view there's plenty to be gained by losing, and I think that still applies if the audience is not just people who are getting checks, but those who aren't -- the younger voters to whom this is pitched.

The sample Republican privatization speech, together with many of the other words and deeds of the current Republican Party, reminds me of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto:

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.  We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.  A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle.  There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character.  Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!  What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible?  Time and Space died yesterday.  We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

I leave it to the reader to research the political affiliations and ultimate fate of the Futurists.

Comments

[Fontana Labs]

Nice bit about the futurists.

But surely it's a mark against that speech that you can't read it with a straight face? I mean, the Constitution is pretty big in Republican language, as are Timeles Values and Eternal Verities and all the other things that I secretly like but am accused of hating.

[paperwight]

Uh, FL, have you listened to many Republican speeches lately? Just because you can't read it with a straight face doesn't mean that a Republican politician can't.

[Avedon]

And, funnily enough, it does seem they want young people to do it just the way my grandparents did it. They worked through the depression and they were poor. Yet my own parents, who managed to work their way up from poverty, did it while paying into Social Security. They bought houses, and cars, and raised kids who went to good public schools where we learned grammar and everything.

But what they aren't admitting is that what they really want to do is give the baby-boom generation the worst of both worlds - no jobs, no money, no Social Security - but we still get them taking out payroll taxes from our checks every month. Now there's justice.

[Ben Jones]

Do you think that it would be worth pointing out to Mr Yglesias that Mt Rushmore has been standing there for millennia, just without the faces? At the very least, it might piss him off.

[Abby]

I am constitutionally incapale of being taken in by all this futurist type talk (though the parallels are eery). I suspect it's because I'm a lot more conservative than a lot of the current crop of Republicans.

I always did prefer the Virgin to the Dyanamo. I know that makes me UnAmerican--kind of ironic, this being a Christian country and all.

[paperwight]

Abby, I think you're right to not be taken in.

The Futurist Manifesto is a kind of mumbo-jumbo spell chanted in resonance with the repetitive machinery of the 20th century. One might argue to some degree that the Futurists were the Baroque Period of the Moderns, right before Modernism was made ashes in the crematoriums of Auschwitz and Dachau.

I find it ironic that the current American Republicans are so enamored of these modes of thought, while calling themselves "conservative". Near as I can tell at this point, the only way in which the Republican Party is conservative is in desiring to establish and enforce a rigid social hierarchy, sorted roughly by wealth, sex, and sex-preference.

In all other ways they seem to have adopted a pastiche of the worst possible elements of the Modernist and PostModernist approaches to understanding the world.

[Desert Donkey]

For 'real' language on the issue, Ezra Klein post Evan Bayh getting it right.

http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/good_show.html

[eRobin]

But If the GOP strategists are doing any of the stuff you are pointing out (and they are) they aren't doing it because they know about Modernism and Post-Modernism and Futurists. All they know about is the reptile brain theory of advertising. "Shiny things that belong to the future appeal to young people. " "God appeals to minorities who vote." "Nobody likes gays." Those are all reptile thoughts divined in focus groups during which the first full hour of discussion (out of three) is thrown out because the testers aren't interested in what the participants think - they want to know what they believe. I may have missed the point above - I just don't want them to get too much credit for having any integrity of thought when they're just finding the best ways to manipulate us so that their corpofascist agenda can be advanced.

[paperwight]

eRobin -

I should be more clear. I don't think the Republicans have any particular integrity of thought, at least not along these lines. I raise these examples as a quintessentially conservative point: "See, this has all been done before." Humans have a hard time breaking out of their cycles of behavior, both in the small, everyday sense, and in the larger historical sense, and it's worse when we're following our baser instincts.

The reptile brain is our basest instinct, and it should be no surprise that we follow it to the same ends every time, unless we're very careful. The Republicans are playing the reptile brain game, and whether they know it or not, they are dragging all of us into the same place it takes us every time.