Is America Creating Un-American Jobs?
Wallace, Gromit, and the very silly notion that job creation (or trousers) can be good or evil.
Wallace dons the wrong trousers.
When you’re a parent of young children, as I was three decades ago, you end up watching an awful lot of junk on TV, but occasionally you encounter something great. Into that rate latter category I place the 1993 Wallace & Gromit short, The Wrong Trousers. You can watch it here. Wallace is a lovable eccentric, an English tinkerer who speaks with a thick Yorkshire accent. He is mad in equal measure for building Rube Goldberg contraptions and savoring domestic pleasures like taking tea and nibbling on cheddar cheese in his lace-curtained parlor. Gromit is Wallace’s faithful beagle and best friend. (They take tea together.) Wallace & Gromit are conjured via stop-motion animation, a technology already obsolete when their first short, A Day Out, was released in 1989. There are two Wallace & Gromit features, The Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Ware-Rabbit, with a third on the way. Their inventor is the British animator Nick Park. He is, I think, a genius.
In The Wrong Trousers, which won a Best Short Oscar in 1994, Wallace gives Gromit a pair of automated trousers that allow you to walk on the ceiling. This leaves Wallace short of cash, so Wallace rents his spare room to a penguin, against whom Gromit takes an instant dislike. The penguin is secretly a criminal named Feathers McGraw, who commits robberies disguised as a chicken. McGraw rewires the pants so that they can be operated by remote control, puts Wallace in them, then sends him off to steal a diamond from the city museum. And so on. The comedic point is that trousers can be a force for evil—there are good trousers and bad trousers and you’d better take care not to pull on the wrong trousers. A conceit that I find hilarious in its very endearingly English way. (For some reason it isn’t as funny when you call them pants.)
I bring Wallace & Gromit up because conservatives have come up with a new meme to pooh-pooh the Biden economy’s record of robust growth. Yes, President Joe Biden is creating lots of jobs, concedes Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican and chair of the House Education and the Workforce committee. So, too, concedes the Wall Street Journal edit page. But, Foxx and the Journal edit page insist, they’re the wrong jobs. They don’t mean poorly-paying versus well-paying jobs, which would be a legitimate distinction. They mean the jobs being created are in, well, un-American sectors of the economy like health care and city and county government. The notion that there would be patriotic jobs and unpatriotic jobs strikes me as being just as silly as the notion that there would be good trousers and evil trousers. Plus this critique is based on all sorts of false assumptions. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece, which you can read here.