Joe Walsh is honestly the kind of guy who, upon seeing a doddering old lady fall down a flight of stairs, will say, “It’s her fault for not using the elevator.” And who upon being told that he owns the building and had the elevator removed after she moved in on the basis of handicapped acessibility, will then say that he was only acting according to his business interests. And upon being told that the local building code does require an elevator, will say that the law is what’s wrong with America. And upon hearing that the old lady was a decorated war hero, will sneer that this does not impress him. And who, upon being told that his own small children are playing at the top of the stairs, where the railing is most rickety, will shrug that this is not anything that concerns him. And upon being given a generous donation from investors in ball bearings, will agitate for a law that all stairways need to be covered with them. And upon being told that this will cause more old ladies to fall down the stairs, will deny the existence of gravity. And upon investing in the local emergency room, will push them.
Joe Walsh is the comic-opera caricature of a Republican, a guy you would call a detestable stereotype if some novelist bothered to invent him, a vapid, selfish, me-first white dude who sees public service not as a responsibility but as a scam, a way to increase his own stock at any cost to his own soul, an object as greasy and pitted as something you find in a spittoon. He’s a a man immune to conscience, devoid of knowledge, a used-car salesman with a punchable face and a priority list that consists of nothing but sentences that begin with the word “I.” In any disaster movie, he will be the guy who laughs off the reports that the swimming pool is filled with piranha, questions the manhood of the investigator who says, “No, seriously, look, there are the piranha, right there next to the skeleton of the cow,” who says that there are no such thing as piranha anyway and if there were they would be the fault of anyone who swam there, and who put up signs telling people to swim there; the guy who you hoped got bit in his raisin-sized dick by the third reel. Joe Walsh is life’s designated asshole.
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