I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night.
No, the reason I am voting for Obama is more complicated. The year was I was a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old, she was a prominent international author—and we were lovers.
Usually by her. Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing. Well, whatever. I was seventeen and some of the nuances were lost on me. She was always changing the way it was pronounced. But I knew better than to challenge her.
You could get de-Objectified very quickly in those days. But not usually, because I was underage. And my dad sometimes stopped by there on the way home from the mill. Still, those were such wonderful times. Sometimes Ayn and I would read the newspaper and just sit around feeling a blind fury. Other times we would spend whole afternoons not pretending about things, with no cheating.
Some days we would stride about, feeling violently alive. There was always so much to do. Sometimes we would stare at each other with the concentration one would use when walking along a naked girder in an unfinished building.
