 Thank you Jane and thanks to everybody who's made this the 10th year of an amazing event Increasingly more amazing event. I'm gonna read two brief things one of them the first of them is a piece I did on fresh air at the end of 2008 when people were looking for the word of the year and Some people like hypermiling some liked bailout Bill sapphire wanted to go with frugalista, but I suggested that if if it were up to me I'd fasten on the brief resurgence of Joe a name that encapsulates the whole history of 20th century populism In 1942 FDR's vice president Henry Wallace made a famous speech in which he declared that we were living in the century of the common man For most of that century the common man went by the name of Joe The generic Joe blogs first showed up in the 1920s along with his alias Alice's Joe zilch and Joe blow to be joined later by Joe Schmo from Kokomo and by the 1930s Joe had replaced John and Jack as the generic word for a chap or a fellow was in a good Joe or a regular Joe GI Joe made his first appearance in 1942 as a comic strip character in the army weekly yank He quickly took the place of Johnny Doughboy who was a holdover from World War one Since that period Joe has always been the name that people reached for when they wanted to suggest blue collar unpretentiousness You think of Joe Paluka the affable heavyweight champ from a popular comic strip that dated from the 1930s or Jackie Gleason's garrulous Joe the bartender or Josephine the pulp plumber who was featured in long-running ads for Comet cleanser in the 1960s Joe camel slouched on to the scene a couple of decades later shooting pool with his baseball cap on backwards We're sitting on his motorcycle in a black leather jacket always with a cigarette dangling from his split lip Man or drama dairy you couldn't imagine him as a Jeremy Joe's don't stand on ceremony, which is why the truncation is compulsion compulsory for any politician called Joseph Particularly if he can claim modest origins. Hey, can I call you Joe? Actually that's sort of the idea Joe lunch pail appeared in the 1960s and Bill Sapphire has traced Joe's six pack back to a 1970 Boston congressional race at the time some people heard the phrase is a slur on Irish voters But it caught on as a slightly jocular handle for ordinary working-class Americans Homer Simpson embraced the label and expanded on it calling himself Joe 12 pack Those are the voters both parties have been wooing since the late 1960s But usually under a bleak labels like the silent majority working Americans with a forgotten middle class The working class and lower middle class have no entries in the American political lexicon Pundits and politicos on both sides might chew endlessly chew over the question. What does Joe six pack want? But the gentleman was only referred to in the third person before Sarah Palin No national candidate had ever admired my address six Joe six plaque by name much left offered him or herself as a Representative of what Palin calls the normal Joe six pack American and Then in one of those you can't just can't make this stuff up moments the NGSA national Joe six pack Normal Joe six pack American constituency acquired a fresh flesh and blood embodiment in the format of an Ohio man Who happened to go by the middle name of Joe and who worked in the canonical 20th century blue collar job? That was pure serendipity. There's no way Wurzel backer would have transformed himself into a campaign mascot If he'd been Dwayne the drywall guy Between the meteogenic double-teaming of Joe the plumber and Joe the Joe six pack identified vice presidential candidate Republicans populist pitch was more explicit and energetic than at any time since Nixon and Agnew ignited the culture Wars 40 years ago Their partisans were adrenalized piling into Palin's rallies with placards bearing their first names and job descriptions But outside of the Republican base. There was no rush to enroll in the Joe six pack nation Of course, there are lots of reasons for that Some had feared that Palin might incarnate Joe six pack a little too authentically and Joe the plumber turned out to be something of a loose spigot But whatever candidates happen to be carrying the Republican standard in 2012 It isn't likely they'll be bringing along any of this year's Joe's when they make their way back to Ohio and Pennsylvania That's the risk of populist rhetoric. What sounds plain folks in one ear will sound patronizing in another Not withstanding Henry Wallace's glorious speech or Aaron Copeland's even more glorious fanfare to the common man The common man has never been crazy about being referred to as the common man And with a notable exception of Homer Simpson Most people aren't comfortable having their socio-political identity reduced to a beverage preference whether it's for beer or Chardonnay Americans may still feel a nostalgic affection for the picturesque working-class characters that the name Joe evoked in the last century But when they catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror, well, it's funny, but they don't look Joe-ish Let me Let me also read one very very briefly one a poem as my seventh-grade English teacher used to call this I wrote it is the last piece in this book the years of living dangerously and It actually appeared as a blog posting and language log not not a fresh year this Was something I did at the time when The spammers were all you know how they put little bits of prose or whatever into the spams to make them pass the filters But they were all sticking in little bits from Hiawatha So I wrote this In my inbox every morning scads of spam Solicitations each to fool the filters you strewing in the better and the body random lines from Hiawatha and Nekomas warned her often get your clear at all and come pills. Oh beware of Maja Kiwis Make your wife or girlfriend speechless lie not down upon the meadow safe prescription medication and Nekomas fell affrighted Over half a million clients Downward through the evening twilight free FedEx on every order till I have the sense of hearing the entire fucking cosmos Droning unenjambed insistent in tetrameter troche ex lulling me to drowsy numbness Wahononin Wahononin may already be a winner