Ted Kennedy was on Jon Stewart tonight, and he needs to fire every member of his idiot staff.
Republicans had a field day with John Kerry’s relationship to privilege in the last presidential election, and yet Kennedy showed up with a fussy three-point folded pocket square and did everything he could to wipe his cufflinks across viewers’ faces. And the worst part was the heavy gold linked bracelet that Kennedy seemed to want to jiggle in front of the cameras at every opportunity.
Yeah, Ted, you’re a fat cat. Your family is extraordinarily wealthy, and you benefit more than anyone else from those tax cuts for the rich. And tonight, you displayed your privilege–in those cufflinks, in that fussy pocket square, in that heavy and ostentatious gold link bracelet–in a way that reveals the genuinely plutocratic nature of the United States Senate.
I’m a Massachusetts liberal, and I have to say to Senator Kennedy: thank you for losing my Democratic vote. Partly because of what you’re saying, yes, but more because of how you’re saying it: you’re one of the most important Democrats in the Senate, and yet you and your staff are sufficiently stupid to think it’s a good idea to prominently display all the emblems of economic privilege that you possess.
I’m Ted Kennedy. Vote for me because I’m rich.
One of the great, awful triumphs of the Bush regime has been the virtual invisibility of its members’ prestige. I remember in their first issue of 9/11, Adbusters ran a photo of the cabinet with a caption explaining that 18 out of 19 members are millionaires.
(Bush Sr. did such a shitty job at that brand of obfuscation–eg, not really caring that he couldn’t tell the press how much a gallon of milk costs.)
The left seems to produce an endless stream of signifiers of so-called elitism. Or, signifiers that can be SPUN as elitism. Kerry windsurfing and snowboarding and duck hunting and playing in garage rock bands as a teenager. Dennis Kucinich, with roots in the working class and working poor, known for his committment to veganism.
The power structure of the GOP right now, materially, drips with prestige. And yet many of its *cultural* markers (or projected cultural markers anyway) project ‘everyday folk’: religious practice, heteronormative “nucular” family structure, etc, etc.
Urgh
I mean: “in their fist issue AFTER 9/11”
Well, not just the GOP. The intersection of money and politics in the U.S. effectively insures that just about everyone in the Senate has at least a seven-figure net worth, and the House isn’t far behind. But yes, it’s an interesting (and, for them, necessary) disconnect between material and cultural measures of class, and it also helps explain why American tax policy contributes to a ridiculously high rate of poverty in what is allegedly the most prosperous economy in the world. All hail hypocrisy.
No, I’M Ted Kennedy. Jealous? Just kidding. I was rather unimpressed as well.