by Lynn Mandaville

“Today Mitt Romney is the cheese,” I said.

“What?” my husband Dave asked me over the sound of the talking heads on the television.

“Mitt Romney is the cheese,” I repeated.  “He stands alone.”

Dave caught the allusion right away.  The allusion to the old nursery rhyme-based song and game called “The Farmer in the Dell.”

I’m sure you remember it.  I played it in Kindergarten.  You probably did, too.

All the kids join hands in a circle, with one kid in the middle.  He or she is the farmer.  The kids sing as the farmer takes a wife by choosing one other kid to join him in the center.  Then the song progresses.  It goes on by the wife taking a child, who takes a nurse, who takes a dog, who takes a cat, who takes a rat, who takes the cheese.  Then the song goes in reverse order as the farmer leaves the wife (and all the others) and returns to the circle, followed by the wife, then the child, until all that is left is the cheese.

“The cheese stands alone,

The cheese stands alone,

Hi, ho, the derry-o,

The cheese stands alone.”

For some reason that game made me sad.  I guess I felt sorry, somehow, for the poor cheese, left all by itself in the middle of this big crowd of merry kids.

The song and rhyme are very old.  Old enough to be somewhat old-fashioned and a little bit politically incorrect.  But that last line about the cheese standing alone has become a metaphor in the English language for someone who stands apart from the crowd, for whatever reason.  Usually, that reason is because of being ostracized.

Sometimes the cheese is the smart kid who ruins the grading curve in school.  Sometimes it’s the uncoordinated kid on the playground who never gets picked to be on one of the baseball teams.  Sometimes it’s the woman in the office who dares to turn in her boss to Human Resources for sexual harassment.

Today (Wednesday, verdict day in the Senate Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump), Mitt Romney is the cheese, standing alone among Senate Republicans, as the sole juror to vote guilty to the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress against the standing President of the United States.

Whether you applaud Romney as a man of conscience, or revile him as a traitor to his party, you can’t deny that he is a man of courage to do what he believed was the right thing.

Romney cited his deep religious faith as the first consideration in making his decision.  He had pledged “so help me God,” when he swore his oath as a juror in the Senate proceedings.  A promise to his God is sacred.

Romney also cited his duty to country as made in that oath as an elected member of Congress, to act as an impartial participant while he weighed the facts (even though he had to rely on what was said outside the trial proceedings themselves, because no witnesses and no evidence were presented in said trial). Apparently, a promise to his country is also sacred.

He knew that all other Republicans would vote to acquit Trump.  He knew that his decision to vote guilty would involve consequences, some quite unpleasant.  He voted his conscience anyway.

I wish I could say that the only consequence would be that Romney stands alone.

But already DJT Jr. has called for Romney to be excommunicated by the Grand Old Party as a member of the resistance.

And I don’t doubt that worse is in the offing – name-calling and other forms of disparagement, even threats of bodily harm or death.

For a while life won’t be a bowl of cherries for the man who listened to his conscience.

Because today, Mitt Romney is the cheese.