You probably thought you knew Al Gore's life story by now. As told in the New Yorker a few years back, the outlines are these: "Gore was a son of politics, a child of Washington, where his father served for thirty-two years as a congressman and a senator. The family residence was an apartment in the elegant Fairfax Hotel, which was owned by a Gore cousin; young Al walked across the street every morning to the Cosmos Club, where a bus picked him up for the ride to Washington's most elite prep school, St. Albans, on the grounds of the Washington Cathedral."
Well, the vice president's life has been vastly more interesting than you thought. It turns out that, before being elected to Congress and inventing the Internet, Al Gore was also the son of a sharecropper in Tennessee. Or at least that's how it sounded in Gore's March 16 interview with the Des Moines Register: "I'll tell you something else [my father] taught me," said Gore. "He taught me how to clean out hog waste with a shovel and a hose. He taught me how to clear land with a double-bladed ax. He taught me how to plow a steep hillside with a team of mules. He taught me how to take up hay all day long in the hot sun."
How preposterous. Even when he tries to slum, Gore betrays his blue-blood upbringing. Real farmers, even poor ones, have been hiring bulldozers to clear land since before Al Gore was born, or at least using chainsaws. Only a hobbyist would use an ax. Not to mention, no responsible farmer since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s has plowed a steep hillside; you don't want your topsoil to get washed away. As for the mules, it occurs to THE SCRAPBOOK that maybe one of them kicked young Al in the head.
Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson has, needless to say, been making hay out of all this. One of Nicholson's many Gore-related press releases last week managed to combine just about every Gore affectation of the last decade into one magnificent soundbite: "I suppose the vice president's hog-raising career came after his tobacco-growing ventures and some time before he went into high-tech," said Nicholson. "It was later still that he and Tipper inspired the romance novel and movie Love Story. You'd think a guy who could raise tobacco, slop hogs, invent the Internet and inspire a best-selling novel and movie -- all by the time he was 28 -- could afford to give more than $ 353 a year to charity."
Well said.