My father’s family arrived in this country as refugees in
1939. They came with no money and spoke no English. They were resettled in
America at government expense--the moochers--and various placement services—more
taxpayer dollars down the drain—helped them make a new start in a new land.
Ten years later and living in New York, my father attended
Queens College. This was part of the City University of New York system that,
from 1847 until New York’s budget crisis in 1975, charged no tuition. A more
upstanding approach would have been to take on backbreaking loans and pay
tuition to a for-profit school such as the University of Phoenix, whose CEO
makes millions annually while graduating 9% of his students. But such fine
private institutions as this did not exist then, and my father, the parasite,
used public money to improve himself.
One would think that with two strikes against him, my father
would have been done mooching. But having cadged a free degree from New York,
now he turned to Uncle Sam. Having served in the Army, my father went to grad
school on the GI Bill. Had he been a true patriot, he would have rejected that
benefit in the spirit of smaller government, and like you, Mitt, paid for school,
as your wife said, “by selling off stock a little at a time.” Thank goodness today’s
vets, who continue to drain us through the post-9/11 GI Bill, can be brought
into line by the tough love of congressional Republicans. Last week these
vigilant lawmakers wisely shot down a veterans’ jobs bill—after all, vets got an
all-expenses paid holiday in the desert, and maybe a college degree, on the
necks of the taxpayers. It’s time these moochers finally gave something back to
their country.
Having sucked the teat of the taxpayer on and off until he
was twenty-five, you would think my father could have at least become a banker,
or if private equity firms had existed in his time, a centimillionaire. Instead
he became one of those moochers that Paul Ryan’s blonder brother from a
different mother, Dan Quayle, derided for loafing in faculty lounges--a college
professor. Real patriots, of course, loaf on golf courses. Instead of creating
wealth by firing people, my deadbeat father inspired thousands of students to
become moochers—to seek financial aid and go into parasitic fields like
linguistics and literature, not job-creating ones like corporate raiding and risk
arbitrage.
Mitt, my father’s name was John Kronik. He was an immigrant
and an Army veteran. He was a PhD, a speaker of four languages, and he only owned
one home in his life—which makes him a failure among the $50,000 a plate set—and
of course he paid for it by mooching off the mortgage tax deduction. You may
pay for your multiple homes the new-fashioned way, with cash, Mitt, and you may
be in the 53%, but you’re no John Kronik. And I hope I never have to start a
letter with “Dear President Romney.”
Sincerely,
Geoff Kronik
Geoff Kronik is a writer from Brookline, MA with a recent
MFA degree from Warren Wilson College. My fiction and essays have appeared in
Salamander, The Lancet, Opium, SmokeLong Quarterly and elsewhere.
