In a song entitled “Rainmaker,” Bruce Springsteen sings about the reality and consequences of desperation. When “parched crops are dying ‘neath the dead sun” and when “we’ve been praying but no good comes,” a rainmaker “comes crawlin’ ‘cross the dry fields like a dark shroud.” A rainmaker who promises to make it all good again. A rainmaker “who says white’s black and black’s white” and “night’s day and day’s night.” A rainmaker who claims what you are clearly seeing is not the way it really is.
Springsteen sings, “Sometimes folks need to believe something so badly they’ll hire a rainmaker.” We do that, in desperation. We hire, or vote for, a savior. Often, when we do, in that desperation, we get a charlatan. It’s hard to think clearly in desperation.
To get hired, he said he’d protect Medicare and Medicaid. His party has slashed Medicaid funding in the budget. He supported the slashing. To get hired, he promised he’d support federal assistance for daycare. He recently said he can’t do that because we have to fund a war and other important things.
This unwanted, unwarranted war is about the only thing he has accomplished outside of lifting his metaphorical hind leg and marking territory, covering the scent of anyone who has gone before, including John F. Kennedy, and imposing his scent on anything new. And when it runs down the side of whatever it is he marks, it forms a “T”. There is nothing but an “I” in his constant and exclusive “Me, me, me.”
Charlatans, eventually, are exposed. I hope, here in the spring, Easter-new-life time of the year, there is a resurrection of common sense and common decency whereby a nation and its elected officials no longer put up with this rainmaker.
Kerry Boese, Jamestown, ND Verified by phone Monday, April 6 – LAO
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