YOU HAVE NOTICED by now that our alleged representatives, the people tribunes all look alike. It doesn’t matter whether Democrat or Republican, female or male, they look like a picture I saw once of Dan Rather “relaxing” in his backyard at home. Dan was wearing pressed levis. You could have cut butter with the crease. Beside him was a large, effete-looking dog, maybe an Afghan. Dan’s wife was togged out in a tennis outfit and was conventionally attractive in the manner of wealthy American women. Looking closely at her picture, especially her eyes, I thought I saw the same kind of despair I once thought I saw in the eye of Joan Kennedy, Teddy’s wife, who ol’ Ted has put through the wringer more times than once. Taken all together, the tableau of the Rather’s home made me yearn for the mayhem of say the American frontier two hundred years ago. I wanted to leap his fence, beat up Rather, throw the Afghan in a pit to fight a mountain lion and drag Mrs. Rather off for a round of intense counseling.
I GET SIMILAR FEELINGS every time I get a press release from some politician. You may be interested to know that most newspapers print accounts of what our representatives are doing written by employees of the representative. The newspapers, even mine, are inundated with accounts of the doings of Dan, Barry and Dougie written by one of Dan’s Barry’s or Dougie’s drones. Boxcorp, in fact, seldom appears in public these days, leaving everything to “a spokesman for Congressman Doug Boxcorp, D. California, announced today that the Congressman has decided to live permanently in the first class section of TWA Flight 323 to Washington. Persons or corporations with a net worth of better than 1.5 million are welcome to join the Congressman at any time night or day in first class. The rest of you are requested to stay out of the Congressman’s face because your poverty bums him out.”
WHAT WE NEED is a person who can truly represent us, a person just like us, someone who is as crazy, dumb and ugly as we are, someone who runs out of gas on the freeway and after he hikes four miles to the nearest service station the attendant won’t give him the a gas can because he’s short a buck on the deposit. Life is like this for more persons than not in the Redwood Empire.
MIKE KOEPF will not only get my vote, he will get the fifty votes of people whose absentee ballots I control because Mike is exactly the kind of guy who does not represent business as usual. He doesn’t represent business at all, which is another reason for voting for him.
WHEN I SAW KOEPF’S flinty face peering back at me the other morning from a page in the Press Democrat, I rejoiced in my heart. As I read the story of his candidacy, I looked for the snide remark, the snicker from people who know it is impossible for an ordinary working stiff to get elected to state or national office in America.
REMEMBER HOW the party hacks and the big money boys hated Oscar Klee? Koepf’s a lot like Klee, Like Klee, Koepf has actually worked for a living. The hardest work Bosco has ever done is register for law school.
BOXCORP IS A YOUNG MAN, still under forty, but he’s got a net worth of nearly three hundred grand. Koepf has a hard time paying his phone bill. Koepf has also put in years doing the hardest and most dangerous work there is in this country outside of coal mining -- commercial fishing.
KOEPF DID A TURN in Vietnam back when nobody knew Americans were fighting there. His opponent, a Ken Doll creation form somewhere back east, came from the kind of privileged background that enabled him to elude Vietnam. As we know, Vietnam was fought by the white working class, blacks, and hispanics. Guys like Boxcorp hid out in college until the shooting stopped.
CAN A GUY LIKE MIKE KOEPF beat some amoral slicker like Boxcorp? Probably not, but for the first time since Oscar Klee, Empire voters have an opportunity to cast a vote for a real person. When’s the last time you had that?
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