Although the rain had thoughtfully let up, midday remained overcast and chilly on Wednesday 1 May, so it wasn’t the weather that brought me, one of my Boys, and a couple hundred other people to an Iowa City brew-pub located in a non-site, amidst building construction and a city-park-in-progress. And it wasn’t to celebrate International Workers’ Day, either. No, we were gathering to hear “Middle Class Joe” Biden.
The event was indoor-outdoor, the building L-shaped, with the podium and lectern along the short leg and on each leg large garage-style doors that opened onto a “beer garden” with room to stand and places to sit and be served drinks and food. MC-Joe was over an hour late, and while maybe that’s still fashionable, it may have skewed the demographics toward those with world enough and time (plausibly representative of Iowa City anyway) as it’s less than thoughtful to those whose jobs don’t permit extended lunch breaks (oh, yes, let’s do celebrate Worker’s Day with a long lunch at this brew-pub I know. . . ).
M C-Joe’s current fashionables aren’t styling bespoke: just a blue-and-white striped, open-collared shirt under a generic two-piece blue suit. And therefore also not bespeaking quite the same message as Senator/VP Biden’s notorious dress-like-a-swell (in)vestments—the pocket squares and French cuffs apparently have (been) retired (with government guaranteed defined-benefit pensions?). It’s rumored that MC-Joe does represent “work”—on his hair, face, and teeth. If true, those “workers” earned their pay: MC-Joe’s current head does look pretty good.
MC-Joe begins his rap by pulling the microphone out of its holder before going into the litany-of-locals that a candidate always opens with. For the first twenty minutes he scarcely moves out from behind the lectern, though he’s not stationary or stolid—he waves and points, turns side-to-side to address different parts of the crowd, modulates his voice depending on whether he wants to rile or cajole. He’s clearly at home on the road.
MC-Joe has his favorite samples: “the fact of the matter is”—my Boy caught this, and, once alerted, you heard MC-Joe spin it nearly as much as “folks”, his #1. He’d even pile them together in a disconcerting ‘when-I-go-high, I-go-low’ register mash-up, a mix that could feel like a dizzyingly out-of-control auditory Necker Cube. And then there was “dignity” (echoing Don Lockwood’s “dignity, always dignity” in Singin’ in the rain), which came up in extended riffs, most notably one starting with his father telling him “A job’s about more than a paycheck—it’s about dignity”. While MC-Joe tugs some strings with stories of his family and invocations of “working folks”, this one—unfairly—brought to my mind a John Berger line I read recently. Berger was explaining the importance of work in combatting pessimism: “This has nothing to do with the dignity of labour or any other such crap; it has to do with the nature of physical and psychic human energy . . . . Work, because it is productive, produces in man a productive hope.” Can’t touch that (oh, and his use of “man” here . . . let it go—this is John Berger).
MC-Joe occasionally comes out half-stepping, but more often he just puts his left foot in then takes his left foot out. “We need to reward work, not wealth . . . or at least reward work as much as we do wealth.” “We have to make sure health care is a right and not a privilege . . . it’s a right every American should have . . . . You should have a choice to buy into the option of a health care program like Medicare . . . . You should be able to make that choice yourself.” “There’s been a war on labor’s house for a while . . . . Folks, it’s not only labor’s house that is being crushed, but it’s your ability to negotiate for your own individual worth.” “Trump’s tax cuts increased loopholes for the superwealthy—and they’re not bad folks, folks”. “[To fix the tax cuts] we don’t have to punish anybody. There’s nobody you have to punish. It won’t change anybody’s standard of living at the top end of the scale.” “We can do all we need to do without punishing anyone.” “You really felt the stimulus in that tax cut, haven’t you? It really has helped you a great deal, man. I’ll tell you what it did do: it increased the deficit by almost 2 trillion dollars.” “Every life-altering change has come out of the research universities—it’s been monetized by corporations and companies, and that’s good . . . .”
Does MC-Joe’s speech sometimes falter or wander a bit? Sure—but perhaps having a POTUS who should stop and think before speaking or, dare one hope, acting, would not be such a terrible turn-of-events. It’s not clear that quickness is precisely the most needed or desirable of traits in a POTUS. A part of Obama’s appeal was surely his measuredness, the way he would often enact, show, a person-in-thought before he responded. Another, less obvious, model of this for MC-Joe are the portrayals in the Godfather, by both Brando and DeNiro, of Don Corleone.
And speaking of crime families (segue!), there’s real passion when MC-Joe raps Don Trump. This Don breaks (and dances on) DC norms, and more than anything else MC-Joe is DC-Joe: the upholder, the embodiment, and the carrier (think Typhoid Mary) of DC norms. He was 29 when he won his first election to the Senate—too young even to take office—so basically his entire adult life has been DC norm-alized. DC-Joe seems to feel deeply the need to return to norm-ality, the nirvana of bipartis(in)anity. “Even after Trump won, the Republicans joined me post-election day to go ahead and increase by almost 8 billion dollars NIH research. . . . Folks, the first thing this president did when he came along was call for cuts to NIH by almost 10 billion dollars.” You’re left wondering how much the actual existing enormities of, say, a Lindsey Graham (a DC-Joe colleague from the Senate, and doubtless also “not bad folks”) ever get real to DC-Joe.
This summoned up something I heard Robert Caro say about what he’s learned from writing about Robert Moses (NYC, not SNCC) and Lyndon Johnson. “. . . [P]ower does not always corrupt. Sometimes power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal. When you get enough power so you can do what you want, then people see what you wanted to do all along.” MC-Joe/DC-Joe . . . MC/DC . . . where’s the walk—what’s the walk—in all the talk?
In the outside area there were four “fire pits” around which people gathered as they watched and heard MC-Joe. The pits were large and round, piled with coal, burning good flames. People were sitting and standing near them, enjoying them; and yet, the scene wasn’t quite what it seemed to be. Through the mounds of coal, the flames danced up high, but that was just for show. People were getting warmed, but what you couldn’t see was what really fueled the fire. It was pure gas.