The Weekly Screed (#588)

“You could be walkin’ around
lucky, and not even know it”
by David Benjamin

PARIS — The 2012 campaign drumbeat from Republican spokesmen is that America’s business leaders are reluctant to invest and hire because the president’s tax policies have infected the economy with a paralysis of “uncertainty.”

Of course, there’s tons of research that proves, empirically, that tax policy plays very little role in investment decisions by U.S. companies. But that’s beside the point.

The point here is GOP revulsion against — what? Uncertainty? These are Republicans saying this? This is the Grand Old Party of Rich White Businessmen and Kick-Ass Entrepreneurs? What’s happened to these guys? Have they gone chicken?

I mean, really! We’re talking GOP here, the stewards and evangelists of capitalism, free enterprise, the Almighty Market. This is the party who proclaims, at every opportunity that American exceptionalism sprung from the minds of enterprising wildcats with brilliant goofball ideas who leapt off the cliffs of uncertainty toward either fortune or fiasco. The GOP is the Party of Risk! It seeks out and celebrates American entrepreneurs who emptied their savings, cashed in their bonds, decimated the kids’ college fund, hit up every uncle on the family tree, begged from the banks, borrowed from their friends and dumped out the cookie jar to underwrite their capitalist dreams.

According to a political mythology largely fostered by the Republican Party, we are a race of rugged individualists who — in order to prosper like no other nation in history — are always ready to roll the dice on an iffy proposition and then work like coolies from Day One, cutting corners and pulling out every stop, enduring any sacrifice for the sake of the million-dollar idea, but sweating bullets all the time and never taking a break because the very nature of free enterprise, the very reason you can’t slack off for a second or take anything for granted or buy the wife that hat she saw at Penney’s is that what you’re doing is gloriously, thrillingly, chillingly, absolutely UNCERTAIN.

It’s uncertainty, and the conquest of uncertainty by determined, fearless, mostly Republican businessmen that has made America mighty. Our refusal to succumb to uncertainty is the fundamental, formative, character-defining essence of the American dream. Or so the Republicans have been telling us for a century or so.

After all, was the American Revolution a cinch? Hardly. The only certainty in U.S. business is a monopoly — like, say, Standard Oil or the Bell System. But look what happened even there. The government, insisting that certainty is unhealthy and uncompetitive, broke up the monopolies and loosed them into the free market. And pretty soon, the oil tycoons and the phone-company hucksters were richer than God.

Uncertainty does it again.

Among my favorite movies is a horse-race comedy, “Let It Ride,” with Richard Dreyfuss and a superb cast of character actors. The premise of the film is a “sure thing,” a fixed race at Hialeah. “The only way Charity can lose on Saturday,” says a shady character in the back of a taxi, “is if she’s struck by lightning at the starting gate.”

Well, Richard Dreyfuss’ character finds out about Charity. He bets his last $50. And, yes, he wins — but barely, in a photo finish. When Dreyfuss meets later with the shady characters, they all agree that even a sure thing is never a sure thing: “You never know,” they say, breathing a sigh of relief, “You never know.”

Maybe so. But “You never know” is not the philosophy that guides the horseplayers in “Let It Ride,” nor is it a philosophy that has spawned lotteries in almost every state in America, launched a string of slot-machine riverboats up and down the Mississippi, sustained the boom-and-bust wealth machines of Las Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City — not to mention Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bain Capital, the Mellons, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, Gates and Zuckerberg, Soros and Buffett and even Mitt Romney (the Republican candidate for president) — for lo, this past century and more. The motto that guided all these big winners in the Great American Crapshoot is the mantra of all the lovable characters in “Let It Ride,” and of every true-blue American: “You can be walkin’ around lucky and not even know it.”

The only way to find out is to take a chance! You gotta love uncertainty!

Which is why it’s so weird that, whenever I see him on TV, John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House is saying how the mere presence of “uncertainty” has turned U.S. businessmen into creepy little Scrooges afraid of their shadow, hoarding away their cash in mattresses and coffee cans buried in the backyard. Boehner can’t really mean this. If Boehner is serious, then never — in my estimation (and I remember Richard Nixon) — has an American politician been more full of crap.

Boehner knows — my God! Everyone knows — that life is a gamble, a roll of the dice, a spin of the wheel bouncing that capricious little white ball nobody-knows-where. Real life is putting your last fifty bucks on Charity’s nose. To win.

If the challenge of the uncertain were not the true reality — and guiding spirit — of America, why else does every sports page in the country publish the point spreads for every football game every weekend from August ‘til February?

When John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, or that glassy-eyed charlatan Paul Ryan stand before us promising that they’ve found the secret formula for ending economic “uncertainty,” they’re not just being silly, deluded, or even nakedly partisan. They’re not merely a trio of phony opportunists peddling a barefaced lie soaked in snake oil.

No, it’s worse. They have betrayed the very first principle of their right-wing brotherhood. They’ve renounced the one true faith and gone over to the Dark Side. They have become what they’ve been calling the rest of us since the days of HUAC, Herbert Philbrick and the Hollywood Ten. They are, if not “un-American,” then — even worse — they’re un-Republican.

They seem to be favoring, after all, the sort of economic “certainty” only a Welfare State can provide. And if they’re honest-to-God sincere about this spectacular change of heart (which I doubt), you know what that means?

Yeah! The Democrats are walkin’ around lucky and don’t even know it.