Barney, We Knew Ye, and Knew Ye, and Knew Ye

Massachusetts politicians do not serve, they reign. We, the ruled, watch half-amused and half-ashamed, viewing their antics to kill the long winters between football and baseball season.

In general, they do not disappoint us in the antics department. With some regularity, they engage in public drunkenness, private sexual hijinks, outright theft and, sometimes, a stew-thick dumbness born of the conviction that eating ethnic food at church festivals and attending wakes qualifies one to make policy outside the neighborhood.

I saw Ted Kennedy in his last years, when he appeared to be a life-sized "Irish drunk" doll. I saw him at a rally for a campaigning mayor, a mayor whose post-industrial city was nearly paved with crack cocaine vials and shell casings.

At one point in the rally, Kennedy, who had approached the podium with very small steps indeed, pumped and small, freckled fist in the air and attempted to bellow, "We will win!"

Barney Frank I saw a great number of times, as he is the congressman in my part of the state. He is soon to retire, having been reigning since the Middle Ages, when Massachusetts politicians wore bearskin suits and were all named "Brian Boru."

The first time I met Frank, I had walked through the dark, winter-lashed parking lot of a union hall to hear him comfort recently laid-off workers.

"There is funding available for job training," he said.

The former workers, most of whom were dying for a cigarette, looked down at their cups of free coffee.

And, at the end, they applauded.

Well, you're supposed to applaud, right?

I have always been amazed at the noble forbearance of the American worker. Frank had almost nothing to offer them that night, nothing they could use, but they applauded, the way you do at meetings where they make you do the "company cheer."

As a reporter, what I got from Frank was a significant amount of rudeness, an amusing amount of arrogance, several bad jokes and a number of quotes that teetered between defiance of capitalist principle and simple ignorance of how money really works.

I can remember Barney Frank speaking after a bank merger that had cost a number of people their jobs.

Frank promised to "look into" bank mergers that cost people their jobs — something I, other reporters at the event, all the newspaper photographers and most of the bank employees in the crowd recognized as either arrant bullshit or a tremendous misunderstanding of what it means to employ and to be employed.

I watched Frank get cheated by bank and mortgage sharpies, too. Put a politician, either liberal or conservative, in a room with six bankers, and the pol comes out without his wallet and, more importantly, without your wallet. Bankers do not bank, investors do not invest and speculators do not speculate for the benefit of the masses, and a politician who thinks they do will find his constituents sleeping under cardboard.

Which a number of us are, in the part of America where Barney Frank speaks in union halls.

And in your part, too, which means you have your own elected, tremendously concerned, misunderstand-er to provide you with antics and "funds for job training."

On a practical note, when you drag your blue-collared butt to the "job training" class, remember that you will never have as good a job as the people who run the program. It's designed that way. Your poverty feeds the guy in the "job center," and he, if not you, is grateful.

As he leaves what fine writers call "the national stage," Frank will be postmortemed and analyzed, lauded and demonized.

But if you live where he worked, you know that things got no better during his time in office.

And it seems to me they should have.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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