Mickey Mouse, Karl Marx, Joe the Plumber

Orlando, Florida: October 27: Witness the Bidean dressing down of the Republican news anchor here in Florida, not far from the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney. (That American dream-park created by Walt Disney who before the House Committee on Un-American Activities named the Screen Actors Guild as a Communist front). Said Floridian news anchor quoted to Biden Marx's dictum about communal necessity and cooperative potential as representative of Obama's platform.'Karl Marx' creeps into American discourse. My American hosts here in Orlando assure me Karl Marx himself was never invoked during the four decades of Cold War. Instead pundits and politicians evoked "Communism" as a looming military bogeyman, a danger bereft of any ideology other than as a military Other bent on destroying Freedom. Why then is Marx's name, now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, getting an airing this week in the county of Mickey Mouse? Perhaps, one speculates, because the frightful ideological beards of Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden have been shaved by time, receded beyond threat, leaving the wholesome, clean-faced "natural" American ideology without its bearded opposition. Unable to locate itself in relation to anymore evil antitheses, the psyche of America breaks with McCain's raging dialectic of 'fight for America' and finds fertile calm in the Obamian O. McPalin, having failed to truly stir an antithesis through the specters of Obamian black nationalism (Reverend Wright), Obamian Muslim 'foreignness' (Barack Hussein), Obamian terrorism (Bill Ayers) now float the specter of Karl Marx, who is interpreted largely by way of Joe the Plumber (ne Samuel Wurzelbacher), that Ohioan skinhead proletarian teetering on bankruptcy, who dutifully does McCapitalist's bidding, trumpeting himself as a wizened scholar of global economic and foreign policy, an entrepreneur of all entrepreneurs (viz, only in America is he-who-is-not-a-business man-nor-never-will be so easily fictionalized into a false consciousness by GOP capitalists seeking corporate tax breaks, a tax policy which ensures that disgruntled and possibly threatening Joe the Plumber remains safely removed from any real power, laboring on his working-class basement renovations, narcotized by the flag, FOX, football and fear). Hence we hear again this Samuel Wurzelbacherian doctrine that an Obamaian presidency would be the death of Israel and his ongoing assault on Comrade Obama's communist plans to re-distribute the wealth. Who's wealth? one asks, Joe's wealth? Oui. The specter of Karl Marx truly shadows these tense final days before le jour d’élection

"I know just enough probably to be dangerous,” Joe the Plumber, October 27, 2008.