Walking the Wall

Without a lot of details – the statute of limitations may not have expired – I’ll tell of the foolishness of childhood. There was a place where a narrow wall connected two buildings. The wall was about fifteen feet high and I have no idea why it was built in the first place; it seemed like a waste of brick and mortar.
However, for reasons of their own - reasons better not discussed here - three boys, two twelves and a thirteen, were in the habit of crossing over on top of this wall. Beneath the wall on either side was a hard cement pavement. Those were the days when adrenalin addiction was fed by personal experience rather than frantically manipulating colored shadows through imaginary threats. A fall from the wall could have really meant “game over.”
The three boys had all learned balance beam skills on the tops of fences. They had learned by failures and successes that when one walks a fence or the top of a wall, one doesn’t pay attention to what’s on one side or the other, one fixes the eyes on the end of the fence or the roof of a building at the end of the wall.
What, one may ask, does this have to do with politics? I write this in an effort to explain one of the candidates for president. Radio talk show hosts, Republican and conservative (the two are not necessarily synonymous), are frantically urging John Mc Cain to take a stand on the economy, to fight back, to expose the culpability of Democrats and, more importantly, to expose how failed liberal ideology is the driving force behind the present credit crisis. What the talkers fail to take into account is that John Mc Cain is a fence walker. He isn’t looking at liberalism or conservatism, he’s looking at the end of the fence.
We may complain about ideology-driven politics, but the fact of the matter is that without an ideology to set one’s course the only destination is the end of the fence. Mc Cain likes to boast of being a maverick, of reaching across the aisle to Democrats – very liberal Democrats – to pass liberal bills. Then he claims to be a conservative. The boys on the wall would understand. When you’re about to stagger right you wave the left hand to reestablish balance, when you’re about to stagger left, you wave the right hand, but the real goal is to go neither right nor left.
Mc Cain has taken firm stands on some issues: the war and the abortion issue for example – he has also taken a firm stand on limiting free speech via Mc Cain / Feingold. But when it comes to the economy, which is after all the real rudder that will turn the ship of state either toward socialism or freedom, Mc Cain keeps his eye on some distant point that he imagines to be somewhere between the two.
Obama on the other hand, is ideology-driven. I shudder when I think of what I believe that ideology to actually be. To be the least alarmist let us say he is driven to turn us to the left, toward socialism. He’s getting plenty of assistance from Congress – Democrat crooks and Republican fools are hurrying to help him turn the wheel.
But I am not writing about Obama, I’m writing about Mc Cain. He has said he doesn’t understand economics – he tells the truth. He doesn’t understand and he obviously doesn’t trust conservatives to educate him on the subject. I think he doesn’t consciously adopt the philosophies of John Maynard Keynes, the man who inspired the end of the gold standard in America and started us on a decades-long game of monopoly, but he has just cast a very Keynesian vote for a very Keynesian bill. Well, the game may be over and when the board is folded you can’t buy bread with monopoly money.
When Mc Cain has fallen off his fence he has landed in someone’s yard – Republican sometimes Democrat at others – but now he’s on a high wall that firmly separates right from left. When he falls he’s going to be hurt. Please John, look over there, conservatives have lifted a ladder for you – please come down before you fall.