Andrew the Plumber – or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Meme

posted at 2:28 pm on May 5, 2009 by CK MacLeod

When, in the culturally revolutionary poem “A Woman Waits for Me” from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote that “sex contains all” he was celebrating procreation, but the statement explains… well everything.

It’s clearly a psychosexual thing when a mere headline thread on Joe the Plumber’s homophobic utterance to Christianity Today tops 600 posts (at last count).  And let’s not pussyfoot around in some effeminate manner that a man’s man like JtP himself would almost certainly reject:  JtP’s statement to the effect that he’d keep his “actually homosexual” friends “away from his children” was clearly homophobic, if the word “homophobic” means anything.

In its way, JtP’s comment is as revelatory as the bull in a politically correct china shop statements regarding Barack Obama’s “socialist” tendencies that made Joe famous, though I doubt that they will receive more than a tiny fraction of the same attention.  This lack of interest will no doubt disappoint one commenter in the HotAir discussion who flatly asserted:

Well, Palin is finished. She brought him up enough times during the campaign to make DOZENS of commercials in a future campaign. Cue Palin calling Joe the plumber a great man, then cue Joe the plumber telling “queers” to stay away from his kids.

I don’t personally recall Sarah Palin as VP candidate ever referring to Joe as a “great man,” but that’s beside the point:  What matters to people fond of such summary judgments is the stickily fructive association, the “meme,” whose birth he or she is hoping to midwife.  For the space of one meme-moment in the schizophrenic meme-universe, any assertion is self-evidently true (or virtually, memetically true) simply for and in having been asserted.

Which brings us to Andrew Sullivan.

Those of us who think of ourselves as residing in the so-called RW (real world), as opposed to the MW (meme world), might wonder why, exactly, Sarah Palin’s having touted Joe the Plumber during the presidential campaign would be more scandalous than Barack Obama’s confirmed association with Andrew Sullivan, that other memiparous plumber without a license.  Of course, Obama didn’t refer to Sullivan as a “great man.”  Instead, in last week’s 100th-Day “Enchanted Evening” Press Conference, the President merely lifted a typically thoughtless thought, a lucky wanna-be meme, from one of Sullivan’s recent tortured discussions of torture – invoking an apparently false claim regarding Winston Churchill’s supposed rejection of torturous interrogation as wartime exigency, making it the centerpiece of some typically hollow Obamaist posturing.

It somehow completes the circle that Obama would reach, bumblingly, for Churchill’s blessing, when one of Obama’s first acts as president was to return without request a bust of Churchill to Great Britain.  Clearly, Obama doesn’t give a brass farthing for Churchill.  Whether or not Mr. Obama harbors some congenital anti-colonialist hostility toward the great British Prime Minister, he campaigned on and appears intent on implementing the least Churchillian version of American foreign policy since Churchill was a back-bencher.  What’s at least as interesting for our purposes, however, is that the President, with his usual naivete regarding unseemly associations, apparently just assumed that Sullivan would get another Brit right, leading to the presidential utterance that shook the blogosphere, especially after its origins were sleuthed down and verified by Sullivan’s proud Atlantic colleague Marc Ambinder. “Bammy reads Sully!” went the over-meme.  Yet the underlying truth, the real Minervan meme-owl flying at this particular meme-dawn, is that Bammy has probably learned this week what so many of Sully’s former friends, colleagues, and fans learned over the course of the last decade: Sullivan is not to be trusted.

Like many other bloodthirsty warmongering neo-con enemies of all that’s good and special in the universe, I used to read the Daily Dish, and considered Sullivan an ally.  As the war he cheer-led turned difficult, we all watched him go wobbly on the way to turning as full-throatedly anti-war as previously he had been all in on it, dropping the Andrew the Conqueror persona in exchange for the hair shirt of Saint Andrew – the guy who once upon a time could justify the dismemberment via collateral bomb damage of little Ali, for the sake of defeating the barbarian Saddam, just a few meme-moments later translated into the guy half-drowning the world with tear-soaked blog-posts on waterboarding.

Yet, as with so many other cranks of the left and pseudo-right, it’s the loss of even minimal self-control and good taste around Sarah Palin that exposes how far round the bend Sullivan has traveled, and further underlines why our President needs to put better virtual food-tasters at the top of his staffing priority list.  In the same week that the Free World learned where its Leader goes for a juicy meme-morsel, the master meme-chef returned to one of his favorite confections:

[G]iven this blog’s coverage of governor Palin’s various strange stories about Trig, and her continued refusal to provide any medical records to confirm her account, her speech to the Kansas Right To Life organization – her first public explanation for her unusual behavior, since the MSM decided it was a question that could not be asked – is worth entering into the public record.

(Bold-face via Ace of Spades – link below.)  Frankly, my imagination fails as I contemplate how the Surfer-in-Chief might respond to this item and to the “Trig Trutherist” precis that follows, or to our valiant correspondent’s closing promise regarding the Governor’s (and the mass media’s) continued inexplicable reluctance to treat his sadomasochistic narcissistic obsession as worthy of validation:

But, hey, maybe at some point, she will. When she does, I will do my best to bring it to you. Maybe one day – who knows? – a journalist might even ask.

“And Bammy reads his blog,” says Ace.  My guess is that Bammy used to, and that, furthermore, just in case a journalist might someday even ask about the subject, there’s a comfy spot under the big Obamabus for Sully, near the compartment set aside for Iraq withdrawal, gay marriage, torture, and whatever other Sullivanesque luggage, should events prove the carrying politically inconvenient.

This will not and cannot be the last time that Andrew-world and Joe-world come into conflict, with or without Andrew’s or Joe’s direct participation, so, instead of trying to count the ways in which each appears destined to disgust the other, just as the MW is destined to fight the RW, and internet lunatics are destined to detest Sarah Palin, I’ll urge via re-linking a re-reading of “A Woman Waits for Me.”  My self-evidently and irrefutably true-for-its-moment meme today is that this poem explains why, like an infinitely, fatally frustrated Byzantine court eunuch denied direct participation in the rites of succession he jealously guards, Sullivan feels compelled to go against, to undermine, to assault, to supplant, to doubt, and to hate the terrifyingly fecund Empress-in-waiting, to deny, even at the cost of his sanity and his reputation, everything she stands for to all the average Joes.

As His Memefulness himself might say, here’s the “money quote”:

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,

I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death,
immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

Next time you think about writing on Sarah and Trig, Mr. Sullivan, just ask yourself, please, for your own sake, for the sake of your #1 reader, “Who’s meme-ing who?”

Blowback