That executive hair.
That fixed, oddly unnatural smile.
The obvious discomfort with which he wears his oddly muffin-topped jeans.
Watching Mitt Romney on the campaign trail can get to be downright eerie. I actually cringe a little when he smugly, pedantically tries to explain why he sticks to his claim that corporations are people.
That condescending tone; that golly-you’re-precious-but-let-me-explain-to-you-why-you’re-an-idiot way of asking people leading, dumbed-down questions and trying to get them to say something that suggests that they agree with him without them realizing they’re doing it. (It doesn’t work. That hasn’t stopped him.)
That fixed, weird smile he has on his face every time he does this.
It’s almost like he’s human. Or rather, it’s like he’s almost human.
The term Uncanny Valley (http://www.wired.com/... ) refers to a feeling of revulsion that people experience when exposed to simulations that approach, but do not quite achieve, a human likeness. On a graph of positivity in response to robots and simulated creatures, people’s reactions begin low when responding to, say, an assembly-line robot, but respond more positively to other simulated beings, such as stuffed-animal toys, or cute, cuddly, cooing, and artificial Paro (http://www.parorobots.com/), and so on, even up to a degree of resemblance to a human being. But at a certain degree of not-quite-rightness, the anthropomorphism of the likeness stops being cute, and people start to recoil. That dip in the graph is called the Uncanny Valley.
Mitt Romney lives in the Uncanny Valley.
And, as he keeps demonstrating, he can’t help it. He lives a life that has little interaction with the lives of everyday Americans. And it shows.
That offer to bet Rick Perry $10,000?
Romney made the challenge over Perry's claim that Romney had edited later versions of his book to remove talk of endorsing the Massachusetts healthcare plan that he, Romney, had championed as a model for America. Do you know many people who'd toss $10 grand at a bet, as though they were tossing bus fare, or spare change?
Mitt Romney is a simulated regular American. And the simulation isn't all that convincing. Romney exuded 1-percent-ness even before the viral spread of the notorious Bain Capital photo that’s now all over the Intertubes. The 1984 shot features Romney and six other Bain executives standing, dollars stuffed into their expensive suits in unusual places, at unusual angles, grins of cash-lechery on their dollar-chomping mouths. His simulation of casual banter with average Americans is also imperfect; in his Uncanny Valley kind of way, he does a terrible job of unscripted speaking with the masses at campaign stops.
Ad-libbing, apparently, does not compute.
I’ve been watching Romney supporters rationalize their support for this 1-percenters' poster boy, marveled as they somehow string together a sort of fantasy world in which this man, who tore down his meager 3,000-square-foot shack to replace it with an 11,000-square-foot castle, is a man who could somehow represent them. And by them, I mean people who are clearly, like the vast majority of us, simply not among the wealthiest few in the world.
As a Bain exec, Romney was part of vulture capitalism, to use the current argot; he had a direct hand in the smashing of companies and the destroying of jobs and, as a direct result, in ruining people’s ability to earn their own, modest way through. He is responsible for attacking the financial foundations of working-class people who simply expected to be able to do their jobs, put in their time on the clock, and in return, to be able to expect to get by.
"Eat the rich"? Romney’s life is one of the rich eating the rest of us. It is Robin Hood in reverse, with the wealthiest few preying upon working, everyday folks, and robbing them of their occupations and their paychecks and their dignity. And it is not a hidden history. You really don’t have to look very hard to find it.
So how could anyone who’s not a member of the one percent actually support a candidate who favors policies that grant economic boons to the already-wealthy while ignoring middle- and working-class people?
Why would any non-1-percenters delude themselves into thinking that this man — with his Uncanny Valley home address and his track record of making the lives of working people miserable — this man, somehow, inexplicably, represents their interests?
Romney may have it right when he claims that those who have a problem with his career of economic smash-and-grab — some of them, anyway — are practicing the "politics of envy." People do tend to want to gain more, accumulate more wealth and, accompanying that, more financial security. But he also plays a game of dumbing down and propagandizing when he claims that anyone who has an issue with his Bain Capital Scorched-Earth economic ways is against all of capitalism. It is a galling affront to the average American’s intelligence, a ballsy leap into the abyss of bullshit, to say, with a straight face: "An attack on me is an attack on the entire system of capitalism."
I must admit my limitations here and confess that I simply do not understand. A couple of days after Mr. Uncanny Valley started with the whole to attack me is to attack the whole of capitalism shtick, a supporter of RMoney appeared on the news, repeating Romney's talking point. She accepted and repeated the programming, never mind how brokenly and imperfectly she did it, insisting that capitalism is "our system," and some people get hurt, and nobody likes it, but that's the way it is; she made it sound as though Romney could not possibly have made a big-ass Bain-billions omelet without screwing over thousands of workers by needlessly devastating the companies that employed them.
Nope. I don't get it. Romney takes me into the Valley.