Dear
Gov. Romney,
In his keynote speech at the
Republican Convention a few weeks ago, New Jersey governor Chris Christie
shared a litany of the “hard truths” you will tell us that “we need to hear” in
order to right the American ship. While the “truths” Christie outlined seemed
to me to be specious at best, it turns out he was on to something. You have,
despite yourself, told us all the hard truth about how you plan to govern were
November’s election to go your way. In a moment of uncharacteristic transparency,
you may have finally told the American voting public, in no uncertain terms,
exactly where you stand on issues both domestic and foreign.
To echo your own five-point plan for
America, here, in easy-to-read bullet points, are what seem to be your real
intentions for the country:
•
1)
Vilify any citizen who accepts a “handout” from the federal government as a
“victim,” and refuse to govern them. This includes the working poor, the
elderly, the disabled, students, and military veterans. “My job is not to worry
about these people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal
responsibility and care for their lives.”
•
2)
Dismiss women and people of color as mere tokens to whom — when you’re not in a
room full of wealthy white people — you must pander in order to win an
election. Joke that your chances of election would be made better were your
parents actually Mexican — “It’d be helpful if they’d been Latino” — while at
the same time victimizing yourself as a poor little rich kid who can’t catch a
break in a world overrun with liberal bottom-feeders.
•
3)
Eschew the possibility of compromise in the Middle East by advancing the notion
that the Palestinian people, and the rest of the Muslim world for good measure,
have no interest in a life devoid of violence and hate. Instead, call for a
policy of American leadership that has us “kick the ball down the field and
hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”
•
4)
Explicitly outline the social and economic hierarchy which resides at the base
of your plan’s ideology, placing financial power brokers like yourself at the
top, and those who feel entitled “to healthcare, to food, to housing” in the
most advanced industrialized nation on the planet on the bottom.
•
5)
Reaffirm that the only economies that matter in this country are not the ones
that take place around a kitchen table in a house with an underwater mortgage,
but instead move among the inner hallways of financial institutions, and that
those markets will thrive only when the magic wand of your election is waved.
“If we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism
about the future… We’ll see capital come back and we’ll see — without actually
doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”
You should know: there is a persistent
cliche about the upper echelons of the Republican party that is popular among
the liberal set in this country. This cliche paints a picture of GOP higher-ups
as disingenuous robber-barons who mete out a thinly veiled agenda from their
elected offices, serving only to line the pockets of their financiers — who
will, in turn, line the pockets of the politicians in any number of ways, both
legal and illegal — while, at the same time, pandering to the lowest common
denominator of voters. These voters, as the cliche goes, are too stalwart, too
uninformed, too xenophobic to pay attention to any issues other than those that
involve guns, religion, and the most basic misunderstanding of abstractions
like “freedom” and “liberty.” The GOP politicians use well-wrought rhetorical
techniques to secure the votes of this section of the electorate while
simultaneously enacting policies and legislation that go directly against the
interests of the voters who support them. There is an image in this cliche of a
dark, wood paneled boardroom, an inner sanctum where the Republicans gather to
discuss how to gut federal and state programs put in place to ensure the
stability of the lower classes, not because of some Randian ideal involving
boot straps and self-reliance, but instead to ensure that they and their
cronies can have as big a piece of the economic pie as possible; to reinforce
the low stature of the block that voted them in, to keep them down, so that
they may be voted in again. That’s the cliche.
I’m not big on cliches. I find them
suspicious and filled with potholes where things like nuance and specificity
ought to be. This is certainly true of the picture I just painted. It’s a spoof
taken up by political humorists, and is best embodied by the character of Mr.
Burns on The
Simpsons.
It is only a cartoon, right?
It isn’t often we, the public, get to
see inside the gilded dining rooms of $50,000 per plate fundraising dinners,
and it is even less often that we get to hear you, Mitt Romney, speak your unedited
mind. One would assume, before the release of the now-infamous tape, that were
we to get a peek inside those inner recesses, what you would say couldn’t
possibly live up to the cliche presented above. It’s too outlandish, too
obvious.
Maybe not. What appears to be on
display in this tape is an affirmation, where the cynical joking about tokenism
and xenophobia seem well entrenched in the rhetoric of this group; where a
naive isolationism stands in for a foreign policy strategy; where the explicit dismissal
of anyone struggling for a leg up in this country is an applause line. The
takeaway is shocking and disheartening, that you, this man who would be
president, believe in government only insofar as it’s role to support your
healthy bottom line.
“I was born with a silver spoon,” you
said, “which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in
America… Ninety-five percent of life is set up for you if you’re born in this
country.” Maybe it is for you, Mitt, but you might want to poll that 47 percent
of people you’re so ready to disregard. They might have a slight difference in
their experience of being born American. You see, for you, your ability to get
the best healthcare, to eat a proper meal, to have a good job that pays good
money was never in question. That silver spoon you speak of was placed in your
mouth by parents who received welfare and other government assistance after
they re-immigrated to this country from Mexico. That silver spoon was polished
by the government who thought it proper to tilt the rules of the economy to
favor someone in your family’s financial position, reinforcing that position
over and over with tax cuts and loopholes that served only you and a very few
others. So, you’re right Mitt. You should be grateful to the United States
government for your silver spoon, for helping you get this close to the
presidency with this much money in your off-shore, untaxed accounts. If that’s
not entitlement, I don’t know what is.
-- Adam Boles
Adam Boles lives and works in Tallahassee, FL. He is finishing his MFA in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His writing has appeared in The St. Petersburg Times and Versal magazine.
