Clearing RNC debris, one last pundit offers a sweeping view

Scott Richards was on his lunch break, sitting near a small mountain of debris left by some of the hordes of media elitists who descended for a few days -- like a locust plague -- on St. Paul last week. Richards, 55, is a temporary day worker who was part of the crew doing the "tear-down," cleaning up the convention site. He also was musing about the strange spectacle we call a presidential election.

"It really don't matter much who you WANT to get elected," he was saying. "The corporations pick the presidents. Just like they started a war and started the Age of Fear. That's how they rule nowadays: Fear."

I wasn't expecting to hear from a free-spirited philosopher when I visited the parking lot at Kellogg and West Seventh in St. Paul, across from the Xcel Energy Center, which was dominated last week by a palatial FOX News work center that was larger than most buildings near downtown.

I had just wanted to see the junk FOX left behind.

There was lots of it: Bowls of half-eaten chicken wings, apples, packages of tape, scores of empty boxes that once contained portable fans, cordless drills, computer printers and even a bug zapper to keep the Minnesota state bird off the talent. And much more: Chairs, carpet remnants, tarps, a plastic FOX News "boater" like the kind of hat convention delegates used to wear and long fabric billboards for FOX news personalities that I last saw decorating the security fence, featuring weirdly distorted images of such personalities as Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

According to Scott Richards, I would have found better pickings if I had come to the FOX dump right after the convention: Workers clearing the site watched as a group of women carried off a flat-screen TV and other items from the pile, which is headed for a landfill. Richards said the workers didn't intervene because a) the stuff was going to be trashed and b) the women were good-looking. But the workers did help themselves to food and soft drinks that had been abandoned.

The other networks, I'm sure, left other garbage piles. But FOX, which last week claimed that the Democrats had left thousands of small American flags to be trashed in Denver (the Democrats denied the story) piqued my curiosity. I didn't see any flags, but a Third World family could have lived off the pile of FOX leavings for a while.

"The kings and the queens came to town," said Richards, who works when he can as a laborer, a landscaper, whatever he can find. "I've been at the bottom of the food chain long enough. I'm tired of being kicked around. The poor man is being burned alive."

Richards told me he grew up in Detroit and that his dad was an auto executive from whom he is estranged. Richards belongs to no party but is a tree-hugger, for sure: "The cottonwoods and the poplars -- the tattle sounds they make in the wind -- those trees make this place hypnotic," said Richards, who reads Kerouac and Sandburg, loves art and poetry. "Mendota is a fantastic place to ride a bike. Too bad you can't eat the fish from the river."

On his lunch break (he had pizza), Richards was perusing a book about how to make sure your kid doesn't lose his Christian faith when he goes to college. He had found it in the pile; it was autographed by the author and had a blurb on the cover from Hannity. Richards himself is a Buddhist who practices, and studies "brotherhood."

"I'm just recognizing the fact that we're all from the same family," he said.

Most of the temporary workers on the site were black. I asked what they thought of the presidential election. None of them cared much for it. But they were amazed by the prodigious spending track left by Hurricane FOX.

"Elections don't matter to me," said Gregory Robinson of St. Paul, 40. "I'm still going to be stuck doing low-paying work. Politicians ain't nothing to me but liars. When Kennedy was president, they said you should get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work. But it don't happen that way no more."

Hanson and Robinson were lifted in a cherry picker to the top of the high FOX tent, where they began removing tarps from the framework. That left me where I started, with Scott Richards, who was unbolting a metal stairway that stood by itself in the parking lot. The stairs, like certain bridges I have heard of, went nowhere.

"It's a government run for the rich, by the rich," he said. "The machine is programmed for one thing: Out-of-control profits. People are in agony all over the world but the media are locked down and just give the corporate spin.

"The president already has been elected."

I don't believe that. But I picked a FOX News boater off the pile and put it on.