The Candidates

A new election to discuss, my Lobolians. A new election for the United States of America.

For the next four years, somebody else is to rule this massive old giant of a nation, a nation barely 200 years old but with the soul of greece and rome and hidden fires stoked through centuries of feudalism.

According to John McCain, the beacon of liberty would be a massive bonfire, surrounded by the mighty soldiers of liberty and defended with the stoic hearts of Americans.

According to Barack Obama, the beacon of liberty is something of a talisman, lighting the way to a union of Kenyans and Kansans and his own birth to his attempt to prove that any little boy (although he kept a little girl from doing the same) could grow up to be president.

Yeah, that parenthesis got you, didn't it? Hillary Clinton was a little girl who could have become president, but a little black boy got the nomination instead. And an old white man who grew up as a little boy hearing that Pearl Harbor was bombed--and to my ears, dang did that age him--also is trying to prove that HE can be president.

And on the streets of St Paul, where protesters rumble with cops and where the Dorothy Day Homeless shelter has been hidden from view by plastic on the fences--a homeless man who was once a boy is also trying to be president of the United States. It is not he who will stand at a podium with cameras blazing. But he is running anyway.

Which of those stories prove the most about America?

Comment please.

Roman Wolf