ArcaMax

This morning, I had breakfast in a street corner joint called "Rosaria's." Rosaria is the woman who owns the place. She cooks. One of her daughters waits tables. One of her nieces waits tables.

I paid $8.99 for a pulled pork omelet that came with hash browns, toast and coffee. There was plenty of pork in the omelet, and the waitress came by three times to ask if I needed more coffee. I did.

There's no off-street parking. I'd parked about two blocks away. Construction workers sat next to a mother who bounced a screaming child on her knee, and maybe four different languages banged around the room.

It was exactly the kind of place where politicians tell us "hardworking Americans" gather, the same way they tell us that hardworking Americans sit at the kitchen table to pay their bills.

Maybe that's how we want to think of ourselves, as diner and kitchen table people, not as Starbucks and laptop people.

"America's hardworking families sit around the kitchen table, and they pay the bills, and they wonder if they can afford to send their kids to college," the politician says.

Don't these people have any other furniture in their house? They gotta do everything on the kitchen table?

"My husband and I were laying naked on the kitchen table, and I pushed him onto the floor," the hardworking American wife says.

"Go put your pants on," she says to hubby. "We gotta pay the bills and then decide if little Boris can go to the junior college."

"Absolutely," says hubby. "Run a wet rag over the table, and I'll go get the old cigar box where we keep the bills."

And the electric bill gets wet from the water the rag leaves on the table, and you can't read how much you owe, but you think it's $150, so you send them $150, but it really said $439.86.

So, when you only sent $150, they shut off your electricity, and now you have to eat all your meals at a diner with other hardworking Americans. People go broke that way, or they go broke because they get addicted to OxyContin, and they die because it isn't really OxyContin, it's that fake Chinese OxyContin that's loaded with fentanyl, and when the cops come to pick up your body at the homeless camp, they put on gloves and a mask before they take the pills out of your pocket.

But they're not quick enough to stop Bruno the Police Narcotic Dog from touching his black German nose to one of the pills and going down on his side, all four feet curled inward toward his belly, which is exactly the position they found you in when they got to the homeless camp.

The police dog will get a four-hour funeral attended by members of 13 area police departments. Your friends, if you have any left, will try to raise money on Facebook for your funeral expenses. They'll need to raise about $2,000 but will only raise $439.86, which would have paid your electric bill.

So, the county will stick you in a hole for free, and your cousin Ciara will keep the $439.86, and Bruno the Police Narcotic Dog will get a gravestone with his smiling, noble dog face laser-engraved on the gray surface. Someone in the homeless camp will take your tent.

Things aren't priced at what they're worth. Some dogs live better than people. If you're working-class, one wet rag will push you off the kitchen table and into the homeless camp.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.