Who is "you," White Man?

Through a happy confluence of events I was unable to watch John McCain’s acceptance speech last night. Just as well, I guess, as I see by comments today that it was a pretty bad speech that featured, as I knew it would, his years as a POW. I confess I was surprised, however, when I picked up our local bundle of wood pulp that sometimes pretends to be more than just another Republican “rag.” The headline on the front page, in bold one inch letters, read “McCain: ‘I Work for You.’” I assumed he must have been addressing the oil companies and the corporations whose lobbyists surround him and serve on his staff. Who else could he have been addressing?

Surely not the millions of veterans he has voted against time after time after time.

Nor, I suspect, could it have been the thousands of people who lost their savings and pensions as a result of his economic advisor, Phil Gramm, when Enron collapsed.

I don’t believe it could have been the millions who have had their homes foreclosed as a result of further actions by said economic advisor, Phil Gramm.

It probably wasn’t our troops in Iraq who have voted 6 to 1 for Obama and want to return home, troops McCain would like to keep either there, in Iran, or elsewhere, presumably forever.

I also suspect it was not the rising numbers of the unemployed who find themselves in that situation as a direct result of the tax policies, regulations, and corporate loopholes promoted by the Bush/Cheney administration, that he, McCain, has voted for 95% of the time.

I rather doubt it was the millions who slave for a most unsatisfactory minimum wage, held there for years because of the unyielding resistance of his party.

And I don’t imagine it was the millions of brown and black faces so conspicuously absent from his nominating convention, a pitiful few lost in a veritable ocean of white faces.

Doubtless it was not those untold thousands upon thousands who might benefit from stem cell research that he and his cronies oppose.

Perhaps it was the thousands of women, both single and married, who might have compelling reasons to require a legal abortion, who he wants to drive back into the alleys with their coat hangers. No, I don’t think it was them.

Certainly it wasn’t the 47 million Americans who are without health insurance that he seems completely indifferent to.

As most Social Security recipients do not want it privatized, as his party desires, it couldn’t have been them.

I guess the “you” that he was speaking to, in addition to the oil and other corporate interests, must have been those, like himself, who can afford $500 shoes, multiple houses, million dollar parking lots, and $300,000 for their wives’ convention attire. He has said he would like everyone to be rich. Unhappily, there aren’t that many heiresses to go around. But don’t be misled, these people are not “elitists.” To be an elitist you must have gone to college and law school on borrowed money, graduated, and be “uppity.” These are strange times we live in. The McCain everyone knew and admired in 2000 has morphed into a candidate as phony as the proverbial 3 dollar bill, and has also, I think, fatally compromised himself, probably into extinction. Let’s hope Palin goes with him as quickly as possible.

Favorite (short) poems:

Weathered dock
half as long today
I too
have wished to vanish
into winter mist

Fred Donovan