Binders Full of Women

We have joined the huge numbers of people whose years-long assumption that a house was a good long-term investment is not necessarily so. Like almost everyone I grew up with, we scratched together a barely adequate down-payment--long, long ago--and ever since have rolled over the small profits each house sale provided, with whatever extra we could add to it, in order to buy the next place to live in.

Our most recent home, in Minnesota, is probably about to sell, but there will be no profit. There might have been a sliver of residue, but a realtor has to have a share, too. In fact, we are supplementing the sale price.

For that reason, I have been smarting under the realization that people like Mitt Romney--people who know more about money than I do, and who have a hell of a lot more of it--are doing quite well. But this is not really about house equity. It is about that other decades-long teenage and lifelong ambition, also unfilled.

Mitt says that when he was the governor of Massachusetts, he wanted more women in his cabinet. He reports that, in answer to his request, he received "binders full of women". Just like that! Hearing that was like a flashback to my high school years; not to what actually happened in high school--that was a barren and dismal time--but to what I went to sleep dreaming about, and woke up lamenting the lack of. All I ever wanted was shelves and shelves of binders full of women. Not resumes. Not garage calendars. Women! And all Mitt had to do was ask!

I understand why Mitt's grandpa went to Mexico when the U.S. government said Mormons could not have more than one wife. Mitt's grandpa packed up his binders and moved to Mexico.

That, incidentally, is how Mitt is able to identify as just another guy whose family came to the U. S. as immigrants: first you take your binders out of the country, and then when the time is right--that is to say, when it gets uncomfortable there--you become an immigrant, just like all those guys and kids and women who come here to find food.

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