John Boehner's America

"They are snuffing out the America I grew up in."

-House Minority Leader John Boehner on Obama and Democrats

The Man Who Would Be King was born in 1949 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Earl Henry and Mary Anne  Hall Boehner. Little John grew up in a time dominated by the presidencies of three liberals and a retired war hero whom today's conservatives would call a RINO. During John's eighteen halcyon years, the New Deal coalition controlled and at times dominated Congress. But John may not have this mind when he reminisced: He may be thinking about his home state, run by the Taft machine named after the isolationist who opposed the Nuremberg Trials. (After all, Taft reasoned, suppose that America started a world war and massacred 6,000,000 people. Would you really want us to be held accountable?)

Evil things were afoot in John's America: Earl Henry and Mary Anne (if she were allowed to have an opinion) no doubt looked askance at President Truman's decision to desegregate the Armed Forces. Nonetheless, America was on the brink of an unprecedented run of prosperity, despite a top tax rate of 82.1% the year of his birth and a tax rate of 91 or 92% throughout the Eisenhower Administration. Still and all, it must have seemed like a great time to bring a child into the world, what with unemployment at 3.8%, even though union membership did peak and even though the tax policy did encourage wealthy business owners to reinvest in their business rather than exercising their God-given rights to live it up like 21st Century investment bankers.

When John reflects about the good old days, one wonders whether he recalls the segregated south, Emmitt Till's torture-murder (in 1955, when young John was a happy lad of 6 with his first tanning bed still years in his future), and the white South's courageous stance of civil disobedience against anti-lynching legislation. Of course, the Supreme Court desegregated schools in 1954, another step toward socialism that must caused a concerned Earl Henry and Mary Anne (if she were allowed to have an opinion) to hold their little first-grader tight with worry.

From 1950-54, the junior senator from neighboring Wisconsin overcame profound alcoholism to wage an uncompromising battle against Communists in the federal government. No doubt visions of protecting the little John Boehners of America inspired Joseph McCarthy to destroy one life after another (all in good fun, of course).

Did 14-year old John weep with grief when the Ku Klux Klan murdered four little girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church? Did he cry with joy when Martin Luther King expressed faith that the American dream was open to all Americans? Did he express solidarity as feminists campaigned for the rights deprived his mother? As for lesbians and gays, well, Catholic Cincinnati was no doubt heavily closeted, so Earl Henry and Mary Anne didn't have to worry about Johnny falling victim to the Homosexual Agenda.

Of course, factories and cars polluted American skies and waters with impunity, and exterminators merrily sprayed DDT in neighborhoods across the country. (Did Little John trail happily in the wake of DDT trucks? This might explain his orange skin.) Mammograms did not come into wide use until the mid-60s, so Mary Anne's risk of untreatable breast cancer was much greater back then. The first colonoscopy didn't come along until 1969, so everyone had to worry more about colon cancer; discovery of the link between PSA count and prostate cancer was far in the future, no doubt causing Earl Henry to have many sleepless nights.

But maybe none of this has anything to do with why John frets that Democrats have turned America into the set of a political snuff film. Maybe what he really means is that the America for which he yearns so nostalgically was an America with white men on top and where women and minorities knew their place: In other words, an America run by Earl Henry Boehner for Earl Henry Boehner and for bequeathing to John Boehner. An America undespoiled by John Lewis and Patty Murray and Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor and Keith Ellison and Barney Frank and Raul Grijalva. An America where the new boss was always and forever the same as the old boss...

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