FOAF Stories and Caius Mittensius Coriolanus

Well, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevahda is a smooth operator, I must say.  Yesterday it was all over the news that Harry says he heard from a Bain investor that the Mittster Man paid no taxes for something like ten years.  Does Harry know whether that's the Truth with a capital T?  Well, no, he confesses, but still….  It's a clever move, sort of like "beating" the fox from his lair, no?  What's that you say?  Oscar Wilde called fox hunting, "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable"?  You may very well say so; I couldn't possibly comment.  I rather like Harry Reid.

Now Mitt Romney is in something of a bind – either he must put his taxes out there for the hooting, sweating, jeering plebes to see (a rabble straight out of Shakespeare, no doubt), or continue to take the fallout for a charge that may or may not be more than a cleverly insinuated FOAF story.  If I were Mitt, I would feel a bit like Coriolanus at present, "forced" to self-deport my own dignity and privacy in a quest for the consulship that a man of my stature just naturally seeks like salmon head upstream towards the latter part of their days.  In other words, Senator Reid has firmed up the "truth or consequences" matrix Mr. Romney is up against for the next 97 days: the governor can't do the kind of self-defining candidates need to do because his money is talking over him, and as we all know, when money talks, it talks loud and long.  Money may or may not have meaning, but it certainly has no manners. 

Neither do some of the former governor's fellow Republicans – you know, all those television and radio pundits who seem eager to pile on the criticism right along with gleeful Democratic talkers – I get the sense that Romney's party compradres don't believe he has a decent chance at victory, or they wouldn't be talking about him the way they do: if you don't mince your words in the pundit biz when you're talking about your own side, I think it's a pretty good indication that you're not worried about having to eat what you've uttered in a few months' time.

What would it mean if the possible FOAF tale turned out to be true?  Well, it would mean that Mitt Romney is part of a hyper-privileged investor class that sees no reason why it should pay any taxes at all – that would far surpass Mr. Romney's own suggestion that (as I'll put it more boldly than he did) anybody dumb enough to pay more taxes than he or she owes is ipso facto too dumb to be president of a great nation, or perhaps any nation whatsoever, including Borat's fictionalized Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.  Brewing potential translation of Mr. Romney's remarks: if what you owe thanks to the wonders of complex accounting methods is "nothing," then you're an idiot if you pay taxes. 

Hmmmm…. That wouldn't play well with wage earners in Peoria, would it!  I mean, the vulgar end up each year looking and feeling "like insects pinned and wriggling on the wall" thanks to those pesky W-2 forms their employers are required to send Uncle Sam before tax time.  Not so with the very, very rich, whose income has an almost magical way of vanishing into thin air with a wave of the accountant's wand and a few words muttered from the magic book. 

I don't mean to be unduly harsh with a candidate so many people almost lovingly call "Mittens."  I think we should treat all candidates like the fallible human beings they are and not reduce them to "bots" and so forth.  I sincerely wish Mitt Romney all the good things life can bring, excepting the presidency.  Indeed, he already seems to have many or all of them, and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.  But there's no denying that when a fellow runs for president, he's in for quite a bit of poking and prodding – some of it more or less civil, some of it much less so.  It's rather like having the Quartian fever, I should think – to paraphrase Joyce's hero Dedalus about his mother's last delirium, "everything you always wanted to keep a secret comes tumbling out."  It's best not to get into the business if you covet your privacy and dignity above almost all else.  The political world automatically translates those qualities, if such they deserve to be called, into arrogance and a Nixon-grade fetish for secrecy.