Business Owners Only

Based on the rhetoric, I conclude that all delegates to the Republican convention in Tampa were business owners. Specifically, men and women who built their businesses themselves, from scratch, with their bare hands. Proud people! Independent people who neither need nor accept help, not from God or anybody. The delegates do acknowledge, however,   the positive influence of their parents — impoverished immigrants all — who sacrificed everything so the next generation could be free, business-building Americans. Also allowed on the convention floor were qualified spouses, those who stay at home for the benefit of their home-schooled children.

— John


2 thoughts on “Business Owners Only

  1. Funnily enough, I actually do run a business I built with my bare hands, and I mean that literally — a massage practice, wherein the only income generated is produced by my bare hnads. I dare any of the Tampons of Tampa to top that. And funnily enough, I want Social Security to be around when I need it, and for my government to sponsor health care plans that I can afford, and a union for my profesion even though I am an independent pratitioner, because kids coming out of massage school are being exploited by BUSINESS OWNERS who never get their hands greasy in massage cream or load a basket of sheets into a washing machine themselves, sweat-shopped in glossily packaged “Massage Heavens” where you pay $50 for a massage that I have to charge $80 for to survive, and the actual person who bent her back for an hour gets $18 of that, and you’re “encouraged” to leave a $30 tip.

    These people wouldn’t know hard work if it bit them in the ass, like it bites me every day.


    • I paused to think of you when I was writing the post. You actually WORK with your hands. Working with one’s bare hands was once nearly universal. If you count using tools with your hands, it’s still not unusual. Bricklayers, nurses, truck drivers, chefs, and many more work every day with their hands. One of my grandfathers was a master plumber. He could massage iron pipes with his bare hands, so to speak. He built a small plumbing business, including a heating and plumbing supply store and a crew of working plumbers. One day during the Great Depression, the bank sent someone with a gun to padlock the store.

      One of my great-grandfathers owned a primitive gas station. He worked with his bare hands, and the work killed him. I’ve heard eyewitness accounts of him working outside on his back on the ground underneath a car. In winter! Then one day, he was fixing a flat. Hard to imagine, but that involved separating the rubber tire from a steel wheel, with the help of some kind of prying device that I can’t even picture, and wrestling a thick rubber inner tube out of the tire. The wheel exploded from the contraption that was holding it, hitting the old man in the face and breaking his jaw, which the doctors then wired shut. He died soon thereafter of pneumonia.

      Of course, to say that someone “works with their hands” is an oversimplification. You are simultaneously working with your brain, because the knowledge and experience in the brain directs the actions of the hands.

      But we digress. The point is that the business worshippers in the Republican convention hall are an exclusive, homogenous herd. They know little about real work; and think “building a business” means clever speculation, international arbitrage, and legal and accounting maneuvers to redistribute real wealth from others to themselves.


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