THE MAN'S MAN
Yeah, he was our man. We had chosen well and chosen true. There he stood looking like Coop in High Noon. A man made of granite standing all alone on a dusty street in a dusty town, calm, capable hands steady in the air just above his holster, but you could
feel the tension. Yeah, our guy was ready to cut the bad guy down like a rattler and make boots out of him.. The guy looked the part all right. Ready and
able to grind baddies into the dust, with shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows and with a slight, “come and get me you bastard” smile on his face. Instead of guns our guy had a bullhorn and was telling ordinary folks to get the hell out of Dodge for their own sake. When he spoke, he sounded like us, made a few small errors such as mixing up words and whole sentences, but who wouldn’t under such ornery circumstances. Our guy was nothing like the other sheriff, Kerry, who used big, show-off words and even spoke French and told us boring stuff we didn’t want to hear. What we wanted to hear was from a guy who would protect us from the towel heads. Our choice had the look of a protector, small eyes that squeezed into pee holes in the snow when he was angry, a face reddened and bleached out hair in front from the hot Texas sun. You could tell this guy whacked more Texas brush before noon than a brush fire could lick up in a week.
We didn’t know a hell of a lot about him. But we liked the cut of his custom jeans, and the way he wore plain old Tony Lamas that nobody ever wore anymore.. We admired the way he walked out on the rubble, never looking down or stumbling on shards and body parts and he.told us that we had found a protector in him.. Fancy words don’t keep terrorists off your land he told us..You got to take it to them, and here was a guy who could do it. Or so we thought. He didn’t turn out quite as well we expected, but he was a man’s man and that’s enough for most of us. So we just kept our fingers crossed.
Now that he’s leaving his post, what have we got? A good looking young kid with words that roll out of his mouth like honey on hot toast. He knows them all, and what’s more he
got a lotta info.. It’s hot out here in the sun, and this kid is ticking off every friggin’ problem our fine country has, and we don’t want to hear about those headaches, not when the temp is 104 and we’re standing body to body in a bandstand not as big as my front porch. True, we don’t know much about him. He could be an actor for all we know. We also got ourselves a lady who wants to be president of the US, and she talks to us as if we had been hauled into the principal’s office at school. Or as if we had just learned English as a second language. And we know more about her than we want to know.
Us guys loved that man with crinkles from the sun around his eyes. And what have we got running for prez now? A man who knows so many words and has so many heavy thoughts, it makes you want to go lie down in the shade somewhere, and a woman who wishes she could send us all to our rooms.
This new guy talks about “change” just like the one we had. But “change” from what?
9:58:31 AM 
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