I’ve been imagining that I’m going to put some video on YouTube, saying that Mitt Romney wants everyone to live next door to retarded people. I could take some pictures of the house that’s across the street from me: it’s a home for what are euphemistically called “developmentally delayed adutls”: what we used to call “retarded”.

I haven’t done it. It’s not that Mitt Romney doesn’t bear responsibility: he signed the laws that kept the money going into some private pocket, and I’d bet it’s a pocket that belongs to one of his campaign contributors, but it’s not his fault. He did what was easy, just like shrub, just like the road-show team that made everyone on my block look like retards back when it started.

Mitt Romney wasn’t governor of Massachusetts when the house across the street was purchased. That happened in 1988, just after my wife and I bought our home. It was bought by the husband of a social worker, who took great pains to say he’d done it “as an individual”, and then a slick group of hucksters came in and did a dog and pony show that would have made P.T. Barnum envious. That was the year that Mickael Dukakis was running for president, so they sent the “A” team to deal with us yokels: one of them said that he had flown jets for the Navy, but when I asked him which aircraft, he named one that was never in the Navy inventory. They promised us that the house would be well managed, and the residents no danger. They promised us that a professional management team would be in charge, that the inmates – uh, excuse me – patients – would be carefully screened to make sure they wouldn’t molest our kids or light our homes on fire or anything else. “Constant supervision” is what the jet jockey promised.

The local paper ran a story, telling how we had all piled into the city council meeting and made fools of ourselves, and the reporter had lots of fun portraying us an backwards neanderthals who were afraid of the boogey man.

It was all nicely done: the rumors spread just before the meeting, the reporter who showed up at the perfect moment, the oh-so-glib political operatives who lied to our faces and treated us like fools. Everything slick and professional, just another day slopping the hogs.

They told just enough of the truth to cool off the marks until after the election, and the retarded people moved in, and they’ve been there ever since. They’ve added on to the house over the years, so that it now has more of God’s chosen in it, and they’ve widened the driveway because there’s always two or three cars there, and there are doors slamming and horns blaring when the shifts change and the workers go back to wherever they live.

There’s one guy who walks around the yard in thirty-degree weather, wearing what must be a salvation army suit jacket, and he was picking over the trash before he wandered away yesterday, and I have pictures of it. I’m really, really tempted to put the pictures on YouTube, and add a caption saying “Mitt Romney wants retarded people to live next door to you”, and I imagine it going “viral” and ending Mitt’s presidential bid.

Technically, my son could have resided in that house, or one like it, during his formative years. He has Tourette Syndrome, and a host of other albhabet-soup neurological issues. I spent his formative years listening to the bush-league stand-ins at my local school system, telling me how much they were going to do to help him and how effective their program was going to be and how he was going to turn out OK: always “going to” and never “did”.He has reached the age of Twenty-One, and has attained Eagle Scout, but he’s never going to go to college, never going to have even a glimmer of a hope of being an engineer like me, or a nurse like his mother.

I never expected much for being in Vietnam. I figured that I raised my hand and I took an oath, and I had to take what came with that oath, and in the end that meant taking my orders, and then I took Danang and I took Saigon, and then I took a job with the phone company and a chance to forget. There’s one thing that I did take away from it, though: I thought I was at least entitled to have my kid learn to read and write in a public school. I figured I should at least be entitled to that.

He’s going to be a plumber, like his grandfather, even though it’s the hardest of the trades and he’ll be a broken man with crippling arthritis by the time he’s Fifty, just like my dad.

I want to blame someone, and there’s something in Mitt Romney’s face that scares me silly: the hauteur of a daddy’s boy who likes to tell everyone how many home runs he hit without mentioning that he was born on third base. Truth be told, I don’t think Mitt Romney wants to be elected President: I think he expects to be annointed King. That, of course, is just my opinion, and everyone’s entitled to one, since this is America. Or at least we will be, until Mitt’s corporate masters tell him that it’s all arranged and he can suspend the bill of rights.

My brother told me that Republicans want us all to live in tents and own nothing but a TV set so that they can tell us what to think. He might be right, but I have to face the fact that I’m never going to be higher up the scale than I am right now, and I might be in one of those tents.

I wanted better for my son.