Socialism: The Final Frontier of Smears

Smears.

Let's unpack that. What qualifies as a smear?

It's been oh about ten years since I've opened a written assignment with a dictionary definition (perhaps the ultimate five-paragraph-essay cliche), but over the course of this unbelievably gripping and tumultuous campaign, the use of semantics, language, and semiotics has glaringly underpinned the ideological landscape, exerting an unquantifiable influence on voter preferences and allegiance. Words, phrases, appellations--all have experienced a usurpation of their signified-s. This linguistic usurpation process is, of course, a tale as old as language itself, but all the more pressing considering the truly urgent nature of this election season. This way of looking at things is always relevant; everything begins and ends with language. So without lapsing into a game of Saussurian Mad-Libs, let me present the dictionary definition of smear:

3: a usually unsubstantiated charge or accusation against a person or organization —often used attributively (a smear campaign)(a smear job)

Being the armchair language cop that I strive to be, I was frustrated throughout the presidential campaign by the cavalier linguistic use of "negative campaigning" and "smears" and the resulting conflation of the two. T0 be fair--and in spite of Obama's pledge to avoid "negative campaigning"--campaigning necessitates negativity. But at what point does the requisite "negativity" devolve into "smear tactics"--i.e., pure lies?

The operative word is unsubstantiated.
Calling John McCain old may have been negative, but it wasn't a smear. Noting Obama's solidly liberal voting record may have been negative in some circles, but it wasn't a smear. Both are true.

Obama was the first presidential candidate to establish an organized response effort to smears, enabled of course by the Web and Obama's aggressive presence here. Some of the smears are concrete--if inexplicable--and can be traced to concrete, identifiable sources: an email, a calculated "offhand" remark by a seemingly distant surrogate. Smears seek to tap into conscious and unconscious fears that voters harbor regarding the securities that our government pledges to sustain. One of the latest, and last, smears lodged against Obama is that he is...dun dun dun...a SOCIALIST:



Socialism and its even worse-reputed sibling, Communism, are two of the dirtiest "-ists" in the American political vocabulary, narrowly behind "terrorist" as the most hysteria-provoking threats, either existential or actual, to our freedoms (to borrow dear old Retarded Cowboy's parlance).

Obama was smeared as both during this campaign, but in the 11th hour (and relatively effectively, if the last-minute tightening of polls count for anything) he was accused in all seriousness of experimenting with "the s-word", first by Samuel Wertzbacher the Unlicensed Contractor and Comically Transparent Manufactured McCain Pawn a.k.a Joe the Plumber (FF to about :40 for the s-word):



and then in turn by John the Senator's running mate Sarah the Dim-Witted Fundamentalist Demagogue:



and finally by the Candidate himself (FF to about 0:35):



and in turn by a cacophony of McCain and/or Fox spokesbots who somehow managed to equate a progressive tax policy--a run-of-the-mill Democratic platform that McCain's hero Teddy Roosevelt also advocated--with socialism.

The irony, however unsurprising, is that few of the pundits and pawns have much concept of what socialism actually means. Rather, "socialism", according to their definition, is a broad-to-the-point-of-meaningless condition characterized by taxation, "big government" and therefore some vague imposition of uniformity on the masses and stripping of personal liberty, identity and self-expression. Socialism is the very antithesis of what we purport to value most in America--personal freedom. Still, over the past eight years we have allowed unprecedented, unchecked powers of domestic surveillance and hyper-exceptionalist military aggression as a response to the other Bogeyman: Islamic extremism.

We detest and fear the communist Cuban government such that it's actually illegal for U.S. citizens to travel there. (No other country shares this distinction.)

Clearly, America has an extremely complex and tormented relationship with the waves of Marxist influence that we've seen over the years--whether real or paranoid fantasy.

But that was after World War II. Consider this amazing 1932 Betty Boop cartoon. The notion of a classless utopia has surfaced in often odd and surprising ways (this is Assignment #3):



And here's my Assignment 4, A Slacker's Guide to Socialism in American Political Discourse, also embedded below.