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An old refrigerator perches on my front porch, there's a 25-year-old pickup with a gun rack and expired license plates parked behind the woodshed, and my house sits across the street from a church in a little town that is 100 miles from a real airport or even an interstate highway. I've been married to the same wonderful woman for 23 years; we have two kids, a dog, a cat, a guinea pig and more bills than money to pay them.
So Vice President J. Danforth Quayle must have been
speaking for me last week when he praised the America of
Norman Rockwell and the small-town values he celebrated
and
blasted the cultural elite
which mocks
Quayle.
Good for you, Dan. It's about time somebody important started caring about us decent hard-working salt-of-the-earth folks in the American hinterland -- the sort of country that Ronald Reagan fled when he abandoned the corn fields of Illinois for a shot at Hollywood.
On your next vacation, you'll go to a wholesome down-home spot like Mosca or Mancos instead of decadent Aspen or ritzy Vail. While relaxing, you'll forego the elitist and expensive pastimes of golf and skiing, and instead take up a proletarian diversion like snooker or woodworking.
You'll use your bully pulpit to hammer at some inequities in American life. The last time I checked, the hospital here got only 66 percent as much Medicaid reimbursement as a city hospital would for the same procedure; there's a good place for you to start.
Then you'll fight for more money for Amtrak, which serves a lot of little towns. More train service might replace some of the bus service that disappeared during the pell-mell transportation deregulation of the Reagan era, which left thousands of towns without any public transportation whatsoever.
You'll also go after the FCC for giving cheaper long-distance data-transmission rates -- subsidized by rural customers -- to those cynical, amoral slick sharpers who live in large and wicked cities.
You'll rail at Wall Street until Main Street merchants have access to credit and goods on the same favorable terms as the national chains that anchor shopping malls. You'll certainly fight for higher wages, so that one parent can afford to stay home with the children.
There's plenty more you can do, Dan, and I should be thrilled that us traditional rubes in the boondocks are finally getting some attention.
But the truth is that Quayle is just indulging in some election-year blather. If he really believed all that stuff about small-town virtue, he wouldn't be in glitzy Washington; he'd be stacking two-by-fours at a lumberyard back home in Indiana and hoping that he'd get to see John Mellencamp play at the local armory someday.
Quayle wants us to believe that anyone who sees him for
what he is -- a shallow hustler and a shameless hypocrite
-- is part of an elite.
In some countries, you must be born into an aristocracy. In others, it takes years of expensive and exclusive private schooling to join the elite.
But here, all you have to do is mock Dan Quayle -- impossible to avoid if your IQ gets into the double digits -- and you're part of the elite. This opportunity to join the elite is freely available even to us plain folks in isolated little Norman Rockwell towns. Who says the American dream is dead?
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