Rommerica

While I was working and handling family responsibilities I didn’t have time to do a lot of “thinking”. Now that I have more time I can, if not think, remember. This morning my mind wandered back to elementary school. I recall the bookmobile that made a weekly stop and set up a table outside the principal’s office and for a nickel or a dime we could buy a Dr. Suess, or Tom Swift, or Hardy Boys book. And in the economy of the time even a child could finance his own library, or movie tickets, or ball games by taking soda bottles back to the store to collect to the two cents or nickel return “deposit”. But there was also an additional weekly visitor to the school – a bank. All of us students were encouraged to open saving accounts and we were handed little cards where quarters, dimes, and nickels could be inserted and the bank representative would receive our bounty and update our accounts accordingly. I mention all this not just to bore you with my reminiscences but because, if my memory is accurate, we received five percent interest on our savings accounts. Now that I have more time to ponder the capitalism of my youth and contrast it to that which is extant today the more alien Mitt Romney seems to me. It isn’t an ideological detachment, or material jealousy I feel, but a gut feeling of “difference”. To me he represents the capitalism where the interest rate on savings accounts are now preceded by a decimal point two zeros and the first prime number while bank CEO’s are paid millions, tens of millions, or maybe even hundreds of millions. His coiffed typecast “presidential” bearing and difficult logic on onerous taxes and regulations, which didn’t prevent him from acquiring a two hundred and fifty million dollar “got it like that” permanent political campaign lifestyle, just rubs me the wrong way. For our children, in a non-unionized work environment, the simple expectation of a lifestyle that was once considered “middle-class” now requires they borrow a couple of hundred thousand “education” dollars and lifetime debt from a bank in which Mitt owns shares and sits on the Board of Directors and is “unapologetic” about his success. It just doesn’t seem like the America I remember; now where the unabashed and accentuated difference from the struggling masses is the prime recommendation to be our First Citizen. For a muggle like me it seems that a new unsavory mutant capitalism has supplanted the Constitution and common decency as the valuator of societal correctness. And the image of Mitt Romney, to me, seems to be its poster face. Who could have imagined an American politician running on the platform of “several mansions for me and austerity for you” and millions of cash-strapped Americans fawningly calling it “competence”? The historically cantankerous “common man” has been replaced by the Citizens United Stepford American; a capitalist Frankenstein, mobile but soulless. I awoke this morning with some insight on why the conservative message doesn’t appeal to me. I may be betraying politically incorrect “class” identification, but conservatives and their presumptive champion never seem to be talking “to” me. They always seem to be talking “about” me. The genesis of all the wrong in the world is founded in the unwashed and un-rich. If only I was rich, then I’d understand. Well succinctly –I’m not and I don’t.