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But Who Makes The Candidates’ Beds?
Once upon a time there was, and presumably still is, a retired admiral who wrote a book telling us to make our beds. The book apparently sells well, for it is still on display in the bookstores.
Make Your Bed – yeah, that’s a big seller among teenaged readers.
The irony is that admirals do not make their beds; they have servants – formerly called stewards but now folded with other service workers into the catch-all “culinary specialist” rating - to do that for them.
One wonders if the fellows who made the admiral’s beds for him have read the admiral’s book on the making of beds. Maybe they asked him to autograph their copies.
The matter of the making of beds connects with the presidential candidates we heard rattling their dentures, hearing aids, and outrage at each other in Las Vegas the other night.
Does Bernie (such a cozy, cuddly name) Sanders make his bed in the mornings? Does Amy Klobuchar? Does Senator Biden make his bed or does he just give it his patented weird stare? Does Senator Warren break into PTSD tears when she recalls once having seen a poor man making his bed?
Michael Bloomberg thinks farmers and plumbers are stupid, indicating both a lack of humility as well as of perception of reality, so one does not imagine him meditatively making his bed before toddling off to a day of wheelbarrowing his billions of dollars about like Donald Duck’s Uncle Scrooge.
Almost all presidential candidates babble patronizingly about The People, The Little People, The Working People, Les Deplorables, arrogantly stamping our lives with rows of adjectives: black, white, the cringe-worthy “people of color” thing, brown, working-class, female, Joe Sixpack, male, soccer mom, straight, LBGTQ-and-a-partridge-in-a-pear-tree, rednecks, young, middle-aged, old, evangelicals, and on and on.
When a presidential candidate looks at you and me, I don’t know that she or he (one candidate cannot be “they”) sees you and me; she or he sees a stereotype, a vague blur in a voting bloc that must be group-addressed from a catalogue of cliches. To the candidate class we are not individuals, but only cardboard figures that decorate the sets of the Potemkin Villages of their bubbled minds.
Consider the line-ups of presidential candidates in either of the dominant political parties: who makes their beds, drives their cars, makes their morning coffee, cleans their floors, screens their calls, repairs their plumbing, serves their meals, and carries their briefcases?
Will those who make the candidates’ beds vote for them?
Now about your bed: when the moon is aligned with Mars and the Secret Hidden Planet Cucucucu you can stand your mattress on end and it will make itself. Really! NASA said so! You can look it up on the InterGossip!
That’s about as believable as the fantasy that admirals make up their own beds.
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