How are your fingernails looking today?

Scott Ott felt a gag when he heard the newly elected House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy refer to himself as the son of a firefighter and the grandson of a cattle rancher:

The politician continually conjures his blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth ancestors and waxes nostalgic over the hardscrabble conditions they endured, as if they suffered long in hopes that some day they’d spawn a politician. He does this because we Americans admire hard work. We feel a deep kinship with the land and admire those who till the soil. We stand in awe of one who rushes toward danger to save others. And we know that such men have become too rare.

The politicians want some of that to rub off on them, but in their hearts most of them know they wouldn’t last a week in grandpa’s world. They’re talkers, and readers, and greeters with clean fingernails, fine garments and a musculature sculpted (if at all) only for show.

Second, there’s the attitude that being a congressman is somehow better than being a rancher or a firefighter — as if it’s higher on the evolutionary tree, a saltation so spectacular it could not have been anticipated in the previous generation.

“If you hadn’t elected me,” the politician seems to say, “I might have got stuck plowing fields, castrating hogs or running into burning buildings. But things turned out much better for me. I’m a glorious politician, freed forever from the burden of getting bread by the sweat of my brow.”

Footnote: I know my grandfather, who reared me and three brothers , would have bragged to the grocery clerk if he had lived two more months and had seen me elected as a county commissioner. He worked 35 years shaping cold steel into railcars. He stormed Normandy and would have done the same at Japan if not for the bomb. I’m not worthy, nor able to unlace his boots, and I could never walk in them without looking foolish. Getting elected to office is not an exaltation, but a humbling. It’s dropping down from your hind legs to be fitted with a saddle, and a pack.

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