Point of View: A Bone to Pick

The last best hope for America, I’ve always thought, lay with the Kennedys, whose spirit was of the sort that would get us working with each other and for each other, but that was a long time ago, and, yes, in a different country. 

Now those stirring words have been turned on their head: “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.”

And it appears that in Donald Trump’s case, it did a lot. He came hat in hand to the capitalist welfare state, which gave him a pass at the expense of others, for almost 20 years it’s been estimated. This is the champion of the common man? This is the guy who’s going to make things right again, who’s going to make America great again? If you believe that, I’ve got a basket of deplorables to sell you, and at a great price too, the best deplorables you’ll find anywhere, exceptional deplorables. Fresh-picked. Born yesterday in fact. Believe me, you’re going to love them.

O’en will have none of it. I’ve got a bone to pick with him, he told me. It’s not the way things are supposed to be in this country. Playing around, as we do in puppy kindergarten, is one thing, but, unlike Trump, we don’t take delight in being the humper-in-chief. We take turns at being humpers and humpees. It’s all very democratic, and quite fun, but I doubt he’ll ever get it. Clearly, he doesn’t like to share. There is no give and take with him, it’s all take. 

And now, after effectively taking us to the cleaners, paying not a scent, he asks why he wasn’t curbed, says that he wants to clean things up now so that people like him won’t be able to get away with what he got away with. Yet his tax plan eschews that loophole! I just don’t trust him, and I’m a pretty trusting sort, if treated fairly.

In sum, O’en told me that contrary to what most people said, he rather liked the idea of this country going to the dogs; that they, perhaps, in their free interweaving, more closely embodied the ideals of our founding fathers than greedy humans — so-called dog in the manger types — who were ever intent on amassing more and more toys.

And remember, he said, with an engaging smile, it’s O’en for all and all for O’en.