The customer is always right

Robert Showah

Opinion Editor

However far we have fallen as a country, Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing: the American people are entirely blameless.

Whenever I visit relatives in Connecticut, I always visit Stew Leonard’s, the world’s largest dairy market, known for their fresh groceries, amazing aromas and friendly service. So friendly in fact, upon entering Stew Leonard’s a giant block of granite beholds an engraved message: “Our Policy: Rule 1: the customer is always right. Rule 2: if the customer is ever wrong, reread Rule 1.”

While my love for Stew Leonard’s is everlasting, this is a bad policy for Stew Leonard’s but also one practiced by politicians. Instead of telling Americans when they are wrong, or when they are the cause of a problem, politicians don’t just take, but snatch the blame.

Politics 101: Any group of campaign nerds or political junkies will tell you it is always about the next election and that politics is perception – shallow, empty, superficial perception.

But we aren’t going to worry about them now because this is about identifying a problem that if ever resolved will help our democracy, not continue to hurt it. After all, the world of political executives and legislators isn’t an intellectual arena but largely based on the perception of a situation rather than any rational concept of objective reality.

By playing the “It’s not you, it’s me” card on Americans, politicians reinforce a couple of generally awful ideas into the minds of people.

First, that they (the politicians) are shackled servants shipped to a far away land to do our bidding.

Second, more specifically, it encourages the people – the drivers of this democracy – to not question themselves or hold themselves accountable when times get rough.

Third, and perhaps most consequential, is the idea that since Americans cannot handle the truth, especially the inconvenient ones, politicians have to either tell half-truths or full lies, of which become the new truths of where policy is sometimes created from. It’s a vicious cycle.

An additional part of the problem is what I like to call the “intelligent contradiction.” Politicians talk plenty about how smart and sensible Americans are, yet strategize endlessly as to whether what they say or do is flawlessly perceived. Americans aren’t that shallow, but perhaps shallowness begets shallowness.

Americans ought to do more and take it upon themselves to make sure that they are putting enough into their democracy so that their representatives have something worthy of representing, and that all they are doing is not sitting on their throne they did nothing to earn waiting for their congressman to come and shine their shoes.

We chose a representative democracy because a direct one would have resulted in total chaos, not so that everyone can sit back and be ignorant of politics up until election day.

Take the recession, for example. The media had no problem emphatically citing greedy financial institutions as the cause of the near collapse simply because the media and politicians play to the same crowd.

So, it’s no surprise that Americans who were living outside of their means did not receive much attention as causes to the recession.

During the 2008 vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin was asked whether credit lenders or the people themselves were responsible for the subprime mortgage meltdown. Palin, like a good politician, blamed the credit lenders saying: “Darn right it was the predator lenders, who tried to talk Americans into thinking it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house.”

Yeah … or, it was the idiot who though he should apply for a loan to buy a house he couldn’t afford. Remember, the customer is always right. Approved! Approved! Cha-ching! Cha-ching!

Maybe the next time I visit Stew Leonard’s I will tell them how their policy is no good, then they’ll have no choice but to agree with whatever I say no matter how ridiculous it is.