A Clap Item Veto

Last night, I got to hear the President's State of the Union address. Frankly, and perhaps this does confirm that I have ADD, I grew really bored of having to sit there and hear people, primarily Republicans, clap after every sentence. It takes so long! I wish they just held up a banner or something. Whatever one thinks about any particular sitting President, it is an offense to us, the American people with things to do, when you break out into thunderous applause just because the president opened his mouth, and you make us wait for you to tire yourselves out from all that vigorous thumping! There are better ways of showing you approve of the President, like in your voting record or issuing articulate public statements. Or, if you have to take up my time during the State of the Union address, spice it up with a little variety. Have some screaming Bush groupies rush the stage or something. I would enjoy seeing Republican congressmen mosh for each salient point.

Well, since I didn't have much to do during all the clapping bits, I started speculating on the practical difficulties involved for any congressman listening to a "State of the Union" address offered by an opposing party's president--Republican and Democrat alike. I mean, if you belong to the same party, you can get into a steady routine during the speech: the President says "blah blah blah freedom blah blah," you jump to your feet and start clapping wildly; you could conceivably not pay any attention to the content at all. But if you're of the opposing party, you have to listen closely. Suppose the "blah blah blah" is saying, "we want America to have freedom from the terrorists." It seems that's the sort of statement that if the other party is clapping, it would behoove you to clap, lest you risk a kick to the booty come election time. But suppose the "blah blah blah" is actually saying, "we need to protect the precious freedoms that we are in danger of losing if the other party has its way," then it seems an instance in which clapping would be counterproductive.

There can be a lot of moral quandaries concerning whether to clap or not. Suppose the President is saying something that prima facie is true and good, but in its context, it's actually dissing you: for instance, "hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy," does carry truth as an aphorism, but the subtext is, "Hey Democrats, you so stoopid!" Or suppose that the president throws a whole bunch of propositions together, only some of which seem clappable. For example, one of Bush's statements that earned claps from both Republicans and Democrats was the following: "One out of every five factory jobs in America is related to global trade, and we want people everywhere to buy American. With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker. " Now, I like America, and I would like people everywhere to buy American, so that's clappable material, even if the nationalism feels a little over the top. But it does seem to me naive to assert that with open markets and the removal of tariffs, no one could out-compete us. We have a higher standard of living than many countries. We have a higher cost of living than many countries. American workers are simply not as economically competitive as those in India and Mexico because Americans need to pay more for food so they do not starve. Even if other countries had the "level playing field" of a standard of living and a cost of living equal to our own (if that is what Bush is saying), how in the world could we ever affirm unequivocally that no one could out-compete us when such a scenario is beyond our frame of reference (what a logician would call "hypothesis contrary to fact")? It's startling to me that this was one of the few statements that could unite both Republicans and Democrats in clapfest 2006!

In his address, President Bush called for the passage of the "line-item veto," so that a president could veto the special interest pork while still passing important legislation. I do like the principle, although I can see potential abuses (e.g. if a piece of legislation offers both spending increases and spending cuts, and a president only approves of the former). But it seems to me it is even more important to have a system in place whereby, when the president lists a bunch of propositions together in a speech, you can have a "clap-item veto" whereby you can strike out the propositions you don't want to clap for, but still get to clap and feel like less of a grouch. I'm really not sure about the logistics of this idea; I do think that giving each congressman a buzzer might be distracting. Or we could try simply limiting the number of claps, and declare that any congressman who gave a standing ovation twice during any two minute portion of the speech would have one of his hands cut off, thereby preventing future infractions. Anyway, here's hoping that somewhere out there we can find a cure for when congressmen have a case of the claps.