I used to run a TV news show, and I told my staff (literally) that using the term "Joe Six Pack" in a script or interview was a firing offense. I probably couldn’t have gotten away with firing them but it made the point. I grew up just outside a mill town along the Monongahela River — it was the same town so brilliantly portrayed in The Deer Hunter — and I went to school with kids whose parents worked in steel mills and coke plants and river locks. Some of them lived in trailers. I was the Jewish Girl – a bit of an outsider but usually part of the gang – parties, sleepovers, crazy afternoons sneaking cigarettes in pine-paneled basement "family rooms."
I guess lots of those parents were what Sarah Palin called Joe Six Pack. But that’s not who they were- who they are. America is full of hard working people who drink beer. Bruce Springsteen portrays them all the time – much better than I could. They are dads and husbands and brothers and sons and they love their kids and their wives and, where I lived, the Steelers. They often don’t ever move out of their "starter houses" because that’s what they can afford. The dads that I knew sent their kids to college though – or to "the service" which paid their tuition, and the next generation did better economically – the American dream at work.
I admired these people, and loved some of them. When you spend lots of Saturday night sleepovers at girlfriends’ houses you get to know their parents. And, remembering those dads, I do NOT understand how Sarah Palin can talk about "Joe Six Pack" and still say she’s one of "the people." It’s like talking about "Polacks" and then claiming you’re Polish. The term is a colossal insult, the speaker setting herself above the folks she’s describing. For some reason, it’s painful — almost heartbreaking, to hear. I know it’s partially my rage at her for claiming some special channel to working class Americans while, it appears, cynically performing like a parody of them – much like Frances McNormand did as Marge Gunderson in FARGO. Her "Joe Six Packs" deserve better.
I was going to write about all the Orwellian rhetoric too — McCain and Palin repeatedly claiming untruths and running against things McCain himself helped to put in place. Here’s what I mean: They talk about Wall Street malfeasance when they and their party repeatedly squashed efforts to bring it under control. They talk about change when they’re fighting it and economic insecurity when their policies helped to cause it. That’s not a working class agenda, it’s just cynical pandering. Mr. Orwell would be proud. "Joe Six Pack" — and the rest of us, deserve better than that, too.
