The Politician Full Of "Hot Air"
by Willy Staley
This cartoon caption, submitted by Lynn Tudor, of New York, N.Y. and then selected from a pile of hundreds and voted to the top by New Yorker readers, is deft political satire masquerading as daft political satire. The most dangerous sort of critique is that which the Powers That Be do not recognize as subversive, for it appears so facile. And Tudor, with this caption, makes herself nothing less than a modern-day Švejk, as she fights to expose the absurdities of a broken political system by pretending to believe firmly in its toxic conceits.
Tudor’s caption is, prima facie, incredibly (almost painfully) dumb. The expression “full of hot air,” has been around since the mid-19th century or thereabout. It is a cleaned-up version of the accusation that one is “full of shit” — perhaps a more compelling reason to see the doctor — indicating that what comes out of one’s mouth is useless: as spacious as it is hard to pin down. Hot air, as any middle schooler can tell you, expands and rises. It’s this principle that makes hot air balloons fly, and because the airship has existed since long before the expression, we can safely assume that this understanding is “built in” to the metaphor. Tudor’s caption seems to assume the opposite: that it might be clever to suggest a floating person is full of hot air. It reverse-engineers the very obvious critique at the center of a somewhat antiquated expression. (We just say “full of shit” now.)
On the surface, if Tudor has done anything to add value to this cartoon, it was making the Patient into a politician — but even this is hardly insightful upon further examination. Hot air, idiomatically, is most closely associated with politicians, people who make empty promises every four years, between bloviating on Sunday talk shows and grandstanding in front of the C-SPAN cameras. It takes a lot of hot air to fill up the vacant legislative chambers where Senators make their speeches. Modern politics is pure theater, and no one knows that better than politicians. It’s why they constantly inveigh against the scourge of the professional political class when they run for office, or do other things only a member of the professional political class does, like speaking to an empty legislative chamber.
In one of the many presumably incorrect origin stories for Chicago’s moniker, The Windy City, it is said that the name was coined because the city’s notorious pols were constantly spouting hot air all about. Do you get it? Chicago is no more windy than Cleveland, Detroit, or any other lakefront metropolis — its politics are just worse. This stereotype about Chicago’s politics is so ingrained in our discourse that Republicans still use it to score points against our president, despite the obvious fact that he was born and raised in Kenya.
The public’s hatred of politicians has been turned on its head because politicians now wield this hatred against one another to distract people, momentarily, from the fact that they are also politicians (the politicians, not the people). There is likely no higher insult in Washington than “Beltway Insider,” itself a bit of an insidery term that assumes one knows about Washington’s ring of freeways and where certain government agencies and associated institutions exist in relation to it. So, Tudor’s joke reeks of that knowing, almost folksy resignation at the inherent dishonesty of our elected officials that doesn’t, for a second, suspect that the system itself is broken.
But Tudors’ joke is so low-hanging that it obviously asks for a closer reading. Sophisticated New Yorker readers couldn’t possibly think this Palin-on-a-Popsicle-stick brand of humor is funny, and so we must dig a bit deeper to understand what, exactly, they saw in this caption.
Intriguingly, Tudor has identified the Patient as not just a politician, but a Senator. So many other classes of individual could be accused of being full of hot air — CEOs, “entrepreneurs,” rappers, you name it — that this specificity becomes interesting, and, I believe, leads us down a path where we might better understand the story that Tudor attempts to tell with this seemingly simplistic caption.
Of the many things that sets a Senator apart from other politicians, allow me to select the two salient ones: 1.) he is more likely to be a millionaire than not, and 2) his health insurance premiums might go up thanks to the very symptoms on display in the cartoon.
Politico recently reported, in the credulous way only Politico can, that Congress could face a “brain drain” thanks to the Grassley Amendment to the Affordable Care Act, which forces members of Congress and their staff to give up their cushy Federal Employee Health Benefits and instead get onto one of the exchanges set up by the bill. The amendment was added by Chuck Grassley, the Republican from Iowa whose Twitter account was long ago hijacked by a schizophrenic person, and it was an effort to make Congressional Democrats appear to dislike the very policies they were endorsing. It backfired — Democrats embraced the amendment — but created a snafu because of a lot of boring stuff better explained by Wonkblog. Needless to say, Congress won’t soon be facing a brain drain it hadn’t already began facing a long time ago.
And so, given this knowledge, the Patient’s look of discomfort as he floats above the Doctor’s scale can be reinterpreted as one of distrust. In the eyes of someone on the right of our political spectrum, the Senator’s level of care is guaranteed to be diminished. He’ll be forced to visit a young doctor, dressed in shabby, baggy clothing, who offers laughably flip diagnoses to rather grave health problems. (Thanks Obama!) This is certainly not befitting of someone who has made himself a millionaire by exploiting the workings of a nearly broken democracy, so much so that, who knows, maybe he’ll give up this whole lawmakin’ business. Or at least he knows a Politico reporter or two who will publish him saying just that.
Of course this is pure fantasy, the product of a recursive spiral of bullshit created by the intersection of two different broken systems — politics and political reporting — each equally guilty of producing the sort of hot air that Tudor is referring to in the caption. Tudor has tapped into and depicted the darkest recesses of the right-wing lawmaker’s mind, where his alarmist rhetoric plays out in his head. This is where he tests the limits of plausibility before going up there, in front of those C-SPAN cameras, in that empty room he once stood in on an 8th grade field trip, so awestruck he was nearly left behind by the rest of the group, and tells outright lies to the public. No amount of hot air could make a man float unless he were totally empty, no heart, no guts, no balls, no soul. He is as empty as the chamber where he foolishly believed laws were debated and made as a boy.
On the one hand, the cartoon depicts what the Senator wants his constituents to believe will happen to him — a diminished level of care — but it also shows us what the goal of all this political theater is: a public so totally inured to bullshit and hot air, and cowed by their constant exposure to it that it can only mutter platitudes about the dishonesty of politicians, without wondering for a second if the entire system is broken. The Doctor, despite his high level of educational achievement, stands in for this woefully misinformed public. With just 11 words, Tudor has constructed a manifold parable that exposes the calculus our millionaire lawmakers must do to maintain their status as millionaires, and lawmakers, rather than being exposed for the scoundrels that they are.
Tudor’s caption calls into question the very validity of our democracy. As such, it must masquerade as something tremendously dunderheaded to keep its author safe from retribution. That, or someone made a joke so obvious a high schooler might roll her eyes at it, and New Yorker readers awarded it the only prize they’re capable of giving out as a group, one which the New Yorker itself estimates to be worth $250.
Previously: The Alien Mysteries of Easter Island
Willy Staley contributes to Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions.