Posted: Friday, 06 March 2009 10:25AM
I Want Joe Biden
Steve Corbett Reporting
Friday, March 06, 2009
Let’s get it on, Joe Biden.
I want to meet the vice president of the United States and Scranton native at high noon at Steamtown Mall in the heart of downtown Scranton. I want to settle our differences man-to-man, once and for all, with an arm-wrestling match.
I want “The Brawl at the Mall.”
Why let talk show mega-mouth Rush Limbaugh have all the fun with calling out President Barack Obama for a no-holds-barred debate?
I, too, want a piece of the action.
I want to teach Biden a lesson that’s long overdue for this so-called “scrappy kid from Scranton,” characterized as such by a namby-pamby Obama during last year’s political campaign hustle.
Besides, this is personal.
Biden used my city as fodder upon which to craft a theatrical image of himself as some kind of working-class hero and blue-collar champion. Anybody who knows anything about Biden knows he fled hard coal country when he was ten for the greener pastures of a moneyed Delaware suburb.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he then told tales about his ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Try as I might, I still cannot find any evidence that Biden’s characterization of his roots is true.
I spoke last year with Sean Smith, Obama’s Pennsylvania campaign director, about the controversy, and he promised to get back to me with details about the mix-up.
He didn’t keep his word.
With Smith now heading up public relations for the Department of Homeland Security, I have more faith in what the Taliban press office says.
But that’s a fight for later.
For now, I want Joe Biden.
And I want that apology I asked for when it became clear that Biden was again engaged in his penchant for stretching the truth.
Those of us who do have ancestors who worked and sometimes died in the coal mines do not take kindly to people who use us for their own purposes and then forsake us when they get what they want.
My grandfather worked 45 years in the coal mines after coming to Scranton from Ireland. My dad and some of his brothers dug anthracite in a bootleg hole located where the post office is now near the Minooka section of the city.
And not that many years ago I sat n the Mountain Girls Café near Tower City watching silently as men with faces blackened with coal dust and lined with grief returned from a recovery mission that took the lives of two of their own in a deep mine accident.
My grandfather’s mining lamp is bronzed and sitting in a place of honor on the mantle piece in my Scranton home.
I’ll use it to light my way to the “Brawl at the Mall.”
Of course I do not expect Biden to accept my challenge that could leave him on the scrap heap in the old neighborhood.
But maybe he’ll change his mind if he realizes just how seriously some of us coal crackers take his insult. Still, I don’t expect to see Biden in Scranton anytime soon. He used us and now he’s off to what he considers bigger and better things.
No place is better than Scranton.
And maybe Biden’s sister and mother will take that message home after they attend the Scranton Irish Women’s dinner on St. Patrick’s Day.
I’ll even arm wrestle Biden’s sister if he’s afraid to face up to my one-man truth squad. Maybe Biden will ask his 90-something mother to stand in for him. But if he’s got even a trace of the scrappiness he supposedly possessed during his childhood in the lace curtain Green Ridge section of town, he’ll be ready to wrestle and ready to say he’s sorry for portraying himself as something he is not.
Like it or not, a real Scrantonian carries a grudge.
We forgive, of course, but we never forget.
That’s why I want Joe Biden.
He can lie, but he can’t hide.
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Corbett
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