Take Me Home Country Roads
…West Virginia, Mountain Mama…
Even John Denver couldn’t take Hillary home now. She’s expected to win WV’s primary this coming Tuesday, May 13, and although some Talking Pin Heads estimate her margin of victory at around 30%, she’s already a day late and a dollar short.
In my judgement, she’s in her current state of rapid decline because she is affiliated with Bill Clinton. He was popular and well liked once but he’s old stuff now, a part of the Establishment ever since the Republicans began their own run of sex scandals and had to admit that, yes, Republicans actually engage in sex, a revolutionary development.
Now, a humongous slice of the American population today is looking for a degree of political enlightenment that isn’t likely to occur with her and Bill in the Oval Office. Change is in the air, but the Clintons haven’t yet inhaled deeply enough to clear their political lungs.
It’s quite accurate and fair to argue that I once presented a different analysis. I said that Barack was an unknown element and Americans are afraid of real change when you get right down to it. But that was before John Boy became the so-called presumptive Republican nominee and began to talk about colonizing the Middle East.
With John as Commander in chief, the Sun Will Never Set on the Rovian Empire. Americans don’t like change, true, but they want a return to the 19th Century even less. Suddenly, Americans figure, maybe Barack isn’t so scary after all.
Put that together with the lovey dovey platitudes exchanged between the John and Billery camps and many people have come to believe that she is auditioning for the role of the Oldest Living Confederate Widow.
So, given Barack’s lead in just about any marker you care to name, why is Hillary bothering with West Virginia? Even if she wins handily, as the Talking Pinheads predict, her standing in the primary will remain largely unchanged from a practical standpoint.
But we all know that emotion not logic is the name of the psychological game of politics. Tiny and seemingly insignificant matters can make or break kings and presidents. Hope springs eternal.
I hope I haven’t insulted the state of West Virginia and its citizens by counting the state itself as politically insignificant in terms of Hillary’s race for the Democratic presidential nominee. Far from it.
But most Americans rarely read or hear about WV in the corporate media unless a story appears on the sports page. The WV Mountaineers are a perennial football powerhouse. I happen to know a lot about the Mountaineers and West Virginia through the simple process of osmosis. I was once within the borders of the state for about an hour. It happened this way.
As our soon-to-be son in law drove us into the town of Cumberland, Maryland to meet his parents, I looked up and spotted a World War II B-17 coming in for a landing somewhere.
Later we learned that a traveling exhibition of old aircraft was at the Cumberland Airport, which happened to be located across the state line in West Virginia. We spent a couple of hours wandering among the planes, and that’s the sum total of my on-the-ground experience in West Virginia.
But there’s more osmosis. When our son-in-law was a student at WVU, he was a member of the Drum Line and is still an avid Mountaineer. His father also graduated from WVU, and his grandfather lived in Morgantown most of his life.
Put all of this together and I feel like an honorary Mountaineer. I want a Mountaineer cap or tee shirt or some scrap to show my allegiance. Our daughter, however, refuses to send me anything.
In the manner of daughters everywhere, she looks out for our well-being.
“Yellow is too bright for you, Dad. It isn’t your color.”
Mountaineer colors are actually Blue and Gold, but I’ve learned one thing about daughters. When they are looking out for our well being, they can be rather intractable.
Now, if Chelsea would just tell Hillary she doesn’t look good in ruddy red embarrassment. Tell her, Chelsea, so we can get on with returning John Boy to Spencer’s Mountain.
Did You Know?
The first known Mother’s Day celebration in America occurred in May of 1907 or 1908 in Grafton, West Virginia. President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday in 1914.
