A Day in the Life of Joe Conservative: One Striking Way of Making that Point that Government’s Role is Necessary
As I prepare for that radio show on Tuesday morning, concerning the Tea Party movement, I recollect this essay which has reached me a few times in the past decade, just via someone emailing me. I never saved it, but did just now go looking for it and found this version of it –two versions, actually, as you’ll see– at http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Essay:A_Day_In_The_Life_of_Joe_Conservative
It is an eloquent –and, if polemical, also for the most part just– way of addressing that question of whether the government playing a role in our economic and social life is a terrible thing for that entity the Tea Partiers seek to represent, “We, the People.”
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Essay:A Day In The Life of Joe Conservative
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This essay is an original work by some guy. Please comment only on the talk page.
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance — now Joe gets it, too.
He prepares his morning breakfast: bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.
Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.
If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment checks because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university.
Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the taxpayer funded roads.
He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans.
The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.
He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.
Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved conservatives have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”
Note: This was originally published (anonymously) under the title A Day in the Life of Joe Republican. But this is a misnomer. In the last 140 years, the Republican and Democratic parties have switched sides several times, with one being conservative and the other being liberal. But labels and party affiliations change. What doesn’t change are the underlying political philosophies of liberalism and conservatism, and the fact that the liberals usually turned out to be right and the conservatives turned out to be wrong. And so it goes.
[edit] A Day in the Life of a True Conservative
Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.
Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.
On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.
He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.
Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.
Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.
His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.
His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.
They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.
Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.
Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”
January 31st, 2010 at 11:46 pm
That is really good except most of the benefits were not gained by wine drinking cheese eating liberals who wanted to call their gestating infants just biological embryos; or who wanted their sons to marry guys of their daughters to marry girls, or who wanted the government to regulate their right of free association, or put male homosexuals in the baracks with real men.
Much of today’s America was gained by the Democrat Party supported by Southern Whites and largely by Unions representing hard working productive American men whose rights were gained initially by strikes and violence along with political support.
It is interesting that since the Democrat Party lost the Southern Whites
and embraced the very fringes of society and has been tryng to mainstream and ‘normalize’ almost all the ‘un-values’ conceivable
the nation has sold out its economy to ‘foreign’ control, has diminished the force of the Labor Unions, and many of the benefits are under attack or threatened
Let’s be grateful for the benefits and privileges and give the credit where it belongs . . certainly not to today’s liberal-progressives !
.
February 1st, 2010 at 8:37 am
SHould be “Democratic Party.” Republicans began using the other as a kind of bad-sounding slur. I noticed it back in the 90s, as the darkness was taking over that Party, but if there was a history before then, I don’t know it.
February 1st, 2010 at 9:33 am
It’s like the 40-something year old woman who, at a town hall with Bush, publicly announced she was working two part-time jobs in addition to her normal full-time hours. Bush directly replied: “Well that’s just uniquely Amarican, idn’t it.” Joe Conservative has to be such a massively repressed person to regularly accept this pile of bullshit. Stockholm’s Syndrome comes to mind.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Thanks for this piece, Andrew Bard Schmookler. I am sharing the link to it on my private list of family, friends, and others around the country who seem willing to listen to me by email.
Larry
February 1st, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Well, the last administration declared that they would define “reality” as they went along. It seems we may now be witnessing a softer, gentler version of the same program. From the Health Care to the GDP to the Nobel Prize, nothing is as it seems. The premonitions of Orwell and Huxley have apparently had a successful mating. And so it goes, all facts aside.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Joe turns on his television prepared to enjoy one of the 100 channels he receives. He almost makes it through all 92 infomercial channels to one of the seven talk show channels he frequents but is enticed to order a grocery bag holder for $9.99. He pulls out his credit card with a $25,000 limit only to learn that he can’t use it to order the bag holder because his utility payment arrived two days late last month. He is sure that the delivery service is at fault, but when he calls the customer help line he is connected to a facility in India and is put on indefinite hold. “If this keeps up,” he muses, “I might just go postal. Wait a minute, postal . . . post office! Oh yes, I remember the post office, just another liberal conspiracy we are better off without.”
February 1st, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Hey, David R,
You said,
I was almost tempted to say, “So what’s your point? lol.” But the truth is simply that the movement of sex-positive values into the mainstream of this country turned off many good people that the Democratic Party needs to help support other common values in addition to sex-positive values.
This is an absolutely true story: I recently had occasion, for the first time in 44 years now, to visit one of my main almae matres, Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. I have mentioned Swarthmore before. For what it’s worth to this story, Swarthmore College has been consistently rated among the top educational institutions in the county by U.S. News & World Report right up to 2010. Anyway, my wife and I went by the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit for Swarthmore on the way back from an engagement party for a favorite niece of mine. We decided to get off the highway and take a look.
To focus on just one little part of what was a very nice experience, especially for me, on one of the student bulletin boards in the main building was a notice for a seminar on sex toys! Wow! My how times have changed! The notice didn’t even say anything about being for one gender or the other! I was pleased as well as being quite surprised, but I think my appearance at 65 years of age might risk cramping the style of the seminar leader(s) and younger attenders. :-7
Larry
February 1st, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Aarpn K,
Hate to be nit-picking but maybe you might check out the beginings of the U S Postal service. If you think old Ben was a liberal I’d think that very interesting.
February 1st, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Ho ! ho ! The ‘smarter’ they get the ‘behinder’ they go. (Oh !! oh !; careful ! do not misread that) Couold be a remark of unintended consequences)
Speaking of changes, at Vanderbilt some years back there was a conclave in the Theology department whose said purpose was changing the Bible.
A talk host was carrying on like it was big stuff so I called in. Say Buddy, do me a fovor; if you bring this up again, say They are Changing THEIR Bible.
And he did ! And then made a talk himself of the ‘timelessness’ in the substance and meaning of the Bible as we have it. Re Vanderbilt Divinity,
What do you think of an unbelieving Jewish lady as as New Testament lecturer ?
There is progress indeed. It’s been a couple of years when there was a public lecture of the female vagina (excuse me ladies) and it was not the Medical School.
And they knew not ”til the enemy came and took them (or their money) all away !
I visited the zoo in Memphis one time and the monkeys’ demonstrated interest in sex and their activities and antics somehow comes to mind during discussions such as this, Larry. If evolution is possibly true for some folks
and their grandparents really ascended, do you suppose this could be a reverse trend. Wow ! Science . . at the zoo . . .
February 1st, 2010 at 6:04 pm
“The faster I go, the behinder I get.” This is precisely how most American workers live. It’s no wonder the MSM controls the minds of such drones, who think their freedom is a personal thing divined by some power on high. T’ings be goin’ faster all de time, man.”
February 1st, 2010 at 6:14 pm
David R, I am sorry to say I don’t believe it is possible to have rational discussion between the sex-positive people and the sex-negative people, what with each group, really, believing that the existence of the other group is harmful to society, i.e. evil, to some significant degree regardless of whatever positive features the individual members of the other group have in them that might or might not outweigh this major bad feature. One might advocate for the two groups learning just to ignore each other, but that of course makes cooperation difficult in other areas. I have no good solution to offer other than to move to a part of the country where there are people of like mind. In fact I have the understanding from before the economic crash that many people actually were moving with the goal of living among people of like mind. NSB is a special community where some perhaps somewhat exceptional people care to try to communicate despite the divide. But we’re still probably going nowhere with sexual morality except of course as the discussion may cross over into other more general moral issues such as being honest and perhaps even refraining from stealing from other people.
Larry
February 1st, 2010 at 7:03 pm
So you see, Larry, partly why I say the new theme for unity (if there is to be a majority) will be economic.
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:49 am
For the sake of economic unity, you might want to consider holding back on badmouthing people of differing religious views from your own, David R. In furtherance of that, though I sure you will have see it by now anyway, I respectfully commend your attention to the very timely sermon “Right and Left Together
What Religious Liberals and Conservatives Have in Common” that Andy just posted at http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=5573&cpage=1#comment-386375 and also the previous article by the same author. I posted the title and link to that previous article in the other thread, but here is the link again for your convenience.
http://uuworld.org/ideas/articles/1716.shtml
Again, David R, this is in furtherance of our mutual hope for economic unity.
Larry
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:39 am
Re “changing the Bible” see: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/10/the_conservative_rewrite_of_th.php
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The core of the article there:
“A few examples, to get the unreality of this across:
One of their goals is “identify pro-liberal terms used in existing bible translations, such as “government”, and suggest more accurate substitutes”. So any verse in the bible that mentions “government” is, automatically, incorrect, because the word “government” is pro-liberal. There’s no discussion of whether “government” is an accurate translation of the original greek or hebrew; it must be wrong, because according to their supposedly “conservative” philosophy, government is always bad, and so any passage in the the text which says anything that might be remotely positive about government is, necessarily, wrong.
One example they give of a “liberal falsehood” is a verse from the new testament: “Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.””. That, they say, must be removed from the bible. Because, you see, that quote only appears in one book of the new testament, and it’s just obviously wrong. Why is it obviously wrong? If you want to contribute to the Conservative Bible Project, you’re not allowed to ask that question. It just is wrong, because they don’t like it.
In their early efforts at translation, they’re trying to get rid of the word “Pharisees”. “Pharisees” is a very specific term; it means a specific group of people. It’s not a generic term for “bad people”, or “liberal people”, or anything like that. They were a group that was distinguished by, among other things, believing in (gasp!) the literal interpretation of the book of Exodus. They were also the grouping that included most of the high priests of the second temple. The conservapedia folks have been suggesting replacing “Pharisee” with “self-selected elite”, “intellectual”, or (cutting to the chase) “liberals”. As a “translation”, that’s absolute garbage. It completely ignores the meaning of the original text, in order to create the appearance that their political beliefs have some sort of divine support, even though the original text can’t support that interpretation.”
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ToddR comment: I think that the Sadducees, not Pharisees, were the “Book of Exodus literalists” during the Second Temple period, so the writer had that wrong. But his point that “Pharisees” has a specific meaning not well-captured by modern terms such as “liberals” stands.
More ironic for the project, Pharisees were distinguished by their strict observance of religious ceremonies and practices, adherence to oral laws and traditions, and belief in an afterlife and the coming of a Messiah.
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:48 am
Oh, I forgot to mention that the blog I quoted was not criticizing the Vanderbilt Theology project, but the Conservapedia project mentioned at http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project