Question for McCain and His Running Mate

"Government is not the solution to your problem, government is the problem." This is the slogan Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin have been repeating ad nauseam on the campaign trail. If that is so, one may legitimately ask, “Why do you want to be part of it?” In fact, they are campaigning tirelessly not just to be part of it. They want to be its leaders. And the way they have been campaigning shows that they are prepared to stoop to any low to achieve that goal.

This pretense of contempt for government is in striking contrast to the attitude of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party nominee for President. “Government cannot solve all our problems,” he said in August, while accepting his party’s nomination, at its national convention, in Denver, Colorado, “but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

It is obvious that McCain and Palin are mouthing the slogan that belittles government with a view to appeasing the far right in their party. Those on the far right call themselves Reagan Republicans. John McCain never misses an opportunity to proclaim to be one of them. The slogan was first coined and popularized by Ronald Reagan himself. During the late President's term in office (1980-88), the conservative movement in the country gained in strength and popularity and the word liberal began to be treated with derision. Anything the government was supposed to be doing for the benefit of the disadvantaged in society was considered part of a liberal agenda and received scant attention. Many in the conservative wing started using the word liberalism interchangeably with socialism. Some even went to the extent of using it interchangeably with communism, thus making it sound un-American and anti-democratic. That is, liberal became a dirty word in America, much to the amusement of the rest of the world.

The nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill, who propounded the theory of liberalism, with the humane purpose of extending the benefits of democracy to disadvantaged minorities in society, may be turning in his grave when conservative Republicans equate liberalism with socialism and communism. The theory was born out of Mill’s concern that democracy being the rule of the majority, there was a danger of its degenerating into a “tyranny of the majority.” The theory makes it obligatory on the part of a democratically elected government to provide for the protection of minorities. Conservative politicians who condemn liberals as “socialists” and “communists” are either ignorant of this fact or doing it deliberately. Deliberately, because they know that in America, sticking a “commie” label to a person is the surest way of destroying his career. Remember McCarthyism?

It is sickening to see McCain and Palin resort to such dirty tactics. Having failed to make an impact on the electorate on issues that are important to them, the two have now sunk to the level of portraying their Democratic opponent as a socialist. “No, I wouldn’t call him a socialist,” Sarah Palin made a small concession, while responding to a reporter’s question. But, she hastened to add, the tax plan he proposed was socialistic.

Obama’s tax plan calls for a modest tax cut for the middle class and a slight tax increase for those who make over $250,000 a year. The plan would also permanently stop the tax cut the Bush administration has been giving to the richest 1 percent in the country. The administration did it in the hope that the benefits accrued to the richest would trickle down to the middle class and the poor. It has proved to be a pious hope. More than anything else, it was that provision in the Obama plan – the provision to stop the tax cut the richest in the country have been enjoying – that annoyed conservative Republicans.

In spreading the Obama-is-a-socialist canard, Palin has been more vociferous than McCain. The person who started the canard has become the poster boy of the McCain-Palin campaign. He is a plumber’s assistant, by the name of Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, who lives in Ohio. On October 12, 2008, Obama was campaigning in Holland, Ohio, when this “big, bald man with a goatee,” as Athena Jones of NBC puts it, approached him and said that he was ready to buy the plumbing company he had been working for. Once he bought it, he said, he could be making $250,000 a year. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” he asked Obama.

It might, Obama said. The two argued for sometime and at one point, Obama told the prospective entrepreneur, “And I do believe for folks like me who have worked hard, but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress that I just met over there who … can barely make the rent. Because my attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off … if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now, everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody … and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody [my emphasis].… But listen, I respect what you do and I respect your question, and even if I don’t get your vote, I’m still gonna be working hard on your behalf because small businesses are what creates jobs in this country and I want to encourage it.”

It’s the words that I highlighted that gave the Republican camp the ammunition to attack Obama. During the third and last presidential debate, on October 15, 2008, McCain invoked the plumber’s name – he called him “Joe the Plumber” – over two dozen times to accuse Obama of waging “class warfare.” Thanks to McCain and Palin, and right-wing journalists like the ones who work on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and for the Fox News Channel, a plumber’s assistant, who turned out to be a tax-evader and who doesn’t even have a license to plumb, let alone acquire a plumbing business, became an overnight celebrity. Reporters and talk-show hosts sought him out for interviews.

What had Obama done to deserve the waging-class-war accusation? Do McCain and his amen crowd think that spreading the wealth to benefit all sections of society occurs only under socialism? Doesn’t Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down economics,” which McCain and his ilk applauded, mean the same thing? That the trickling down of wealth never took place is a different matter. And that Reagan saddled the country with the largest debt known until then is something conservatives seldom talk about.

The underlying principle of what Obama said can be traced to Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, says Steve Coll, in his “The Talk of the Town” column, in the October 27, 2008, issue of The New Yorker. He quotes the following passage from Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) to substantiate his point:

“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor…. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess…. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

Every time McCain and his running mate call Obama a socialist for his suggestion that the rich in society help out the poor, they are insulting the memory of the man to whom modern capitalism owes its theoretical foundation. Or they are betraying their ignorance of the basic principles of capitalism.

Spreading wealth doesn’t incite class war, Mr. McCain may please note. The undue concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, to the detriment of the rest, does. The pertinent question is: How can you create wealth to run the government and pay for at least the most essential services it is supposed to provide, if you give tax cut to the rich and refuse to raise the tax on any? Gone are days when stronger countries generated wealth by looting weaker ones. For modern nation-states, the main source of wealth is tax.

Obama has spelled out how he intends to create it: by taxing the rich, avoiding waste, eliminating departments that don’t work, abolishing the tax cut Bush gave the richest in society, and so on. McCain, it seems, knows only one way of creating it: by eliminating pork-barrel spending. He keeps harping on it even after he was told that the entire pork-barrel spending accounts only for $18 billion. What is $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget? On his own admission, economics is not his cup of tea. But what we are talking about here is simple arithmetic. By saving $18 billion, McCain won’t be able to pay even for the Bush tax cut which he has vowed to make permanent, if elected.

Another fact relevant to the running of a state is worth examining here. When the tax collected by the state is insufficient to pay for unavoidable services, borrows money from other states and from private sources. Though borrowing, over a period of time, erodes the state's strength and prestige, there is no other way it can meet its obligations. The unsavory condition the U.S. is in right now is partly the result of reckless borrowing and profligate spending. Right now, its overall debt is over $10 trillion, and it is ballooning at a rate of $3.88 billion a day. Half of the debt is owed to foreign countries. China is the second-largest creditor of the U.S., the largest being Japan. The leader of the capitalist world borrowing from a Communist country? There is something wrong with the way the leader is conducting its business. The steepest rise in debt in the post-World War II period occurred in the past eight years. The tax policy of the Bush administration and its misadventures abroad, both of which McCain supported, has something to do with it.

Lately, some conservative Republicans have even started ridiculing those who suggest that making sacrifices through paying higher taxes to help the country out of a crisis is the patriotic duty of a citizen. Prominent among them is the star of the republican ticker, Sarah Palin. She has been making fun of her Democratic counterpart Joe Biden for having made such a suggestion. She first did it during her debate with Biden, on October 2, 2008, and has since been repeating it at every other campaign rally. During the debate, she turned to Biden and said:

“Now you said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America which is where Todd [her husband] and I have been all of our lives, that's not patriotic. Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper. An increased tax formula that Barack Obama is proposing in addition to nearly a trillion dollars in new spending that he's proposing is the backwards way of trying to grow our economy.”

Though she outsmarts President Bush in affronting English grammar, one can gauge the essential point of what she said: paying tax is not patriotic. Does she think evading tax is? “What an awful statement,” says Thomas L. Friedman, in his October 8 column in The New York Times. “Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan [which the Bush administration pushed through Congress to bring the biggest financial institutions in the country from the brink of bankruptcy]. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.” Mr. Friedman's sentiment is shared by millions of Americans.

He goes on to list a few questions he wishes the moderator of the debate or Biden himself had asked Palin. Questions like: “Do you think borrowing money from China [to pay for those endeavors] is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?”

There is one more campaign slogan which McCain and Palin have been repeating to please their ultra-conservative base in the party: that they are going to Washington to “get the government off people’s back.” (This one also was borrowed from Reagan). The point they are trying to make is that the government has no business to get involved in people’s activities, especially economic activities. It brings us back to the question with which we started this discussion: If that is so, why do they want to be part of the government and add to the burden on people’s back?

Reagan translated the slogan into action by removing governmental regulations in the economic arena. The process begun by him was quickened by the present administration. The outcome is here for all to see: a financial meltdown, the disastrous consequences of which the U.S. and the rest of the world are going to suffer from for years to come. And to prevent a complete collapse of the economy, those who detested governmental intervention all these years have now come out with the biggest form of it. The Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout plan is precisely that – the biggest form of governmental intervention in the private sector, in the history of the U.S. This could have been avoided if the administration had not dismantled the regulatory mechanism built into the system over years.

Yes, free-market competition is the lifeblood of capitalism. That doesn’t mean the government has no role to play in it. For any competition to be fair, certain rules and regulations have to be followed. The role of the government is first to formulate those rules and regulations and then to enforce them as an impartial umpire. Free-market competition, in the absence of governmental regulations, can lead to a free-for-all. Some economists call it "predatory capitalism" and others “social Darwinism.” What we have witnessed in the past few years – instances of giant corporations swallowing up small ones – is precisely that. It’s the removal of governmental regulations that facilitated the swallowing. Not surprisingly, McCain was at the forefront of Senators who argued for the removal. Deregulation has been their way of getting the government of people’s back.

It is not enough that McCain, Palin and their supporters proclaim their patriotism by shouting "Country First" at the drop of a hat and by festooning their campaign rallies with posters and banners carrying "Country First" slogan. Patriotism also means respecting the government the country lawfully establishes. It also means respecting the machinery the government lawfully sets up to bring some order in the country. The alternative to order is anarchy. Are John McCain and Sarah Palin going to Washington to usher in an era of anarchy?

Manneken Pis, the famous statue in the Belgian capital of Brussels, had stirred a mini-controversy in Bombay in the late 1960s. The reason? Air India had featured it in one of its advertisements. The advertisements were part of a campaign the airlines launched to promote its recently introduced flights to various European cities, including Brussels.

Some prudes in Bombay did not like the idea of their national airlines’ using in its advertisement the picture of a child holding his penis and urinating. The airlines’ explanation that the picture of Manneken Pis (meaning little man piss in Dutch), a great tourist draw in Brussels, blended well with the theme of the advertisement did not pacify the prudes. Nor did the humor the airlines added to it, by showing a passerby warding off the ‘urine’ with an umbrella.

I remember getting into heated arguments with some of those prudes. “What about the pictures that are hung on the walls of your homes and sculptures that exist in temples around the country, showing gods and goddesses engaging in all kinds of natural acts, including sexual intercourse? And what about that adorable picture of Lord Krishna as a child, eating stolen butter with one hand and fondling his penis with the other?” I remember asking them. I even told them that if I had money I would drag them all to Brussels and force them to stand underneath the Manneken Pis statue and “take a picture of the piss falling on your heads.” I knew even then that what came out of the statue was not urine, but drinkable water.

Air India’s advertisement and the arguments I had with prudes came back to mind during my visit to Brussels two months ago, when I requested a young lady from an Australian tour group to take a picture of mine posing in front of Manneken Pis (see to the left). “Make it look as though the piss is falling on my head,” I told her. I knew there was no danger of its happening, because the place where the statue stood and the ‘urine’ fell was fenced off. When some people in the crowd burst out laughing at my remark, I told them the story behind it. “There are such characters in every country,” one of them said.

Legends behind Manneken Pis are many. One of them is linked to Duke Godfrey III of Leuven. He was only two years old when he assumed dukedom, in 1142. The same year, a battle erupted between his troops and the troops of the Berthouts, the lords of Grimbergen. The battle took place in Ransbeke, the present-day Neder-over-Heembeek. Hoping to get inspiration from the infant ruler, the troops of Leuven (or Lower Larraine) put him in a basket and hung from a tree, at the scene of the battle. Legend has it that the infant urinated on enemy troops and the latter lost the battle.

Another legend goes thus: In the 14^th century, Brussels was besieged by French troops. They were about to destroy the city with explosives, which they had already placed at the walls of the city. When a little boy by the name of Juliaanske who had been spying on the enemy saw the fuse of the explosives burning, he urinated on it. It is said that the statue of Manneken Pis was built in honor of the little boy’s urination that extinguished the enemy’s burning fuse and saved the city from destruction.

A third legend has it that the statue was built by a wealthy merchant as a token of gratitude to the people of Brussels. He was on a visit to the city with his family. He had been wandering around, oblivious to the surroundings, when he suddenly found that his little son was missing. The panic-stricken family searched for the boy all over the city. Many from the public joined in the search. The search ended, to the great relief of the family and amusement of others in the search party, when one of them spotted the little boy “happily urinating in a small garden.” The Manneken Pis, according to this story, is a monument built by the merchant as a gift of gratitude to Belgians who helped him find his darling son.

The original stone statue, erected as early as 1388, was stolen and replaced several times. The two-foot-tall bronze statue, which we see today at the corner of rue de l'Etuve and rue Chênet, was created in 1619 by sculptor Jerome Duquesnoy.

Every time I passed by the statue – I did it three times – during my four-day stay in Brussels, there was a crowd of tourists jostling with one another to take a good look at it. “If only those prudes in Bombay who argued with me years ago had witnessed this scene,” I said to myself looking at the crowd, admiringly and amusedly watching the manneken pissing, with the penis held between his fingers.

I was not lucky enough to see the ‘little boy’ in one of his 600 costumes. The costumes, “most of which are freaking hilarious,” according to Willy Volk, are on display at the Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles.

No matter what the prudes and puritans say, Manneken Pis will survive and continue to attract crowds from around the world. There is no doubt about it. I wish I could say the same about the country in which the statue stands. The intense hostility that has been going on for a long time now between Flanders to the north and Wallonia to the south, of the country, has raised real concerns about the survival of Belgium as one nation. It is my hope and prayer that Belgians find a way of ending the hostility and keeping their beautiful country intact.