Caveat Emptor

Actor-comedian Eddie Murphy once delivered a stand-up routine in which he mocked advertising slogans emphasizing the purportedly low prices of retail goods. He recounted his experience in a particular store, which featured some product accompanied by a sign declaring, “What a bargain!” A true bargain ought to be self-evident, he reasoned, and any item requiring special notice to that effect, if purchased, probably wouldn’t live up to its billing. Murphy’s comedy bit underscores the venerable maxim caveat emptor, “Let the buyer beware.” Shoppers should not automatically take advertiser’s claims at face value.

This phenomenon, intolerable enough in the world of sales, has an egregious parallel in the geopolitical realm. It counts as a supreme and perverse irony that certain of today’s most oppressive governments have allowed for their nations the most populist-sounding names. The Oxford American Dictionary defines a republic as “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives,” and democracy as “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state.” Nonetheless, the regime in China, which imprisons and even massacres its own citizens for ideological “crimes,” evinces no ironic sentiment regarding its country’s full name, the People’s Republic of China. Nor does North Korea’s megalomaniacal dictator Kim Jong-Il appear to find facetious the official name of his personal totalitarian backwater, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. These names make specific claims about the state of political life in their respective countries, claims which stand in stark and outrageous contrast to established facts.

The inclusion of the ambiguous adjective “People’s” in both names adds a provocative new layer to the issue. Unlike “republic” and “democracy,” “People’s” does not denote a specific form of government. However, a compelling definition emerges from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In his immortal line “of the people, by the people, for the people,” Lincoln suggests as criteria for a “People’s” government that the people must actually institute, comprise, and benefit from it. If America does not always live up to these ideals, at least its constitution provides a legal framework which, in principle, makes their achievement possible. Conversely, China and North Korea make a pretense of populism only in shameless rhetoric designed to intimidate anyone who would call attention to the rank hypocrisy of their leaders.

Yet lest their lofty self-identification prove nothing more than a cruel charade, the Chinese and North Korean governments have distorted Lincoln’s third criterion in order to qualify as “for the people” in one profane sense. Like deranged parents who believe that abusing their children prepares them for the hard realities of life, China and North Korea have adopted a paternalistic mentality which maintains that, contrary to appearances, they actually do act in the best interest of their citizens. The fact that the citizens themselves do not recognize this, and continue to clamor for freedom of expression and political self-determination, merely reflects the very immaturity which their rulers intend to beat out of them. One can almost imagine Jong-Il or China’s Hu Jintao telling his subjects, “This hurts me far worse than it hurts you.” These tyrants have masqueraded as having offered their people a bargain, but the people have rejected it as a raw deal. Americans should too, acknowledging that communism’s alleged populist republicanism has never amounted to anything more than a farce.