Such a tasteful entry deserves a vision of burgers within burgers.
Dear diary,
You have the prez, and then you have the viss prez. I’m talking about how it is here in this pit called Paradiso. Our preschool teachers inform us that the founders of this realm devised the finest system of government possible: no improvement can be made to it; for it has checks & balances. This means that no single branch or placeholder can seize all the power for himself alone, because the other branches will oppose, will resist, will check that greedy one: thus, the Freud-Jung (yin & yang) can remain in balance.
So, like I said, you have the prez and the viss prez. And you have the Divine Right of Kings, which blossoms into Family Rule: nepotism. That means that when George H.W. keels over and yields up the ghost, his only begotten son Lil W. nabs the kingdom. He elects himself prez.
Now the prez is sort of like a king on steroids. Seriously, the only thing stronger than the prez is Lil W’s viss prez. There is no check or balance to the viss prez of W.
And people usually hate the country’s ruler. At least that’s how it has been during my stay here. Twoscore years ago I chose to be thrown to Paradiso for my vacation; & since then, I’ve loafed thru sixteen prezzes, total. (In the Bible, a period of forty years is considered a single generation; it also frequently stands for a time of probation.) People hated the very first prez (Bossman Ron); they hated the second proportionately (Clinton Eastwood); the third (Sir Clinton Rodham) split the country into civil disobedience; the next (Name Redacted) wrenched this chaos around and aimed it outward and made the whole galaxy hate us; then the prez after that expanded the star-wars from numerable to infinite; and the current prez is loathed by all but his followers.
It’s funny: No matter how low a prez sinks, he always has followers. Only sages and prophets lack followers. Prezzes always maintain some vast subsection of the country that claims to approve of them. I wonder why this is.
Our furnace-land of Paradiso has been parading its prezzes from time immemorial. In other words: before I was born, there were prezzes extending off into the horizon. So, altho I haven’t personally experienced each of their kingships, another fun fact we’re taught in preschool is that all the prezzes, from the creation of the world till this instant, shared a similar appearance: [here, one or more words is missing from the manuscript]. I’ll now explain this terminology.
The creatures on this planet are born with a variety of gradations of shades of sheepskin covering their heart, but the heartless viss prez, who controls the way that language is allowed to be used, demands that all the pinko-gray hued creatures be known simply as “blanc”; and all others, no matter what color their fur, or whether or not it glitters or sparkles, are to be filed as just plain “mauve”.
So all the previous prezzes in planetary history were tainted blanc; and they were cantankerous and brutal. Why is this? Because the rule book says that, in order to serve as the prez, one must be at least 35 years of age – that’s extremely cantankerous – and you must be ferocious, threatening, vicious – all of which terms are synonyms for MALE-ish, which means bloodthirsty savage – you must worship warfare and bankers.
Banks love war because it has the effect of shaking money into the air, like flakes in a snow-globe; they unleash their representatives into the atmosphere with suction harpoons to snatch the flakes out of the sky; then they return to their respective banking hideouts and discharge the moneyflakes from their vacuum packs into huge gold vaults, which are like swimming pools turned sideways; and therein the flakes melt and congeal into coins.
But recently a prez was born who broke all the rules. His mother was blanc, as was proper – her name was Dorothy from Kansas – yet his father was mauve – Bosco Baracus from The A-Team. So, being that all past prezzes were blancmange flavored, having issued asexually from Moby Dick, the people call this latest leader The First Mauve Prez.
But think how this will appear when time re-inverts. When we have an infinite line of all MAUVE prezzes stretching into the horizon, this same soul will be called The First BLANC Prez. It won’t matter that his father, in addition to playing a sergeant on TV, worked in reality as a senior governmental economist, because every prez in history had two such parents – the only thing that’ll count is that his mother was an economic anthropologist: that’s unheard of.
But the weirdest aspect of my home planet’s perfect government is that, although it is technically endless, it has a terminal point. The end happens when one of the prezzes is so bad that even Jesus the Second awakes. Every prez gets 50% followers and 50% haters. But the prez who is currently prez at the time that I write this, after all the blanc prezzes and then the long counter-eternity of mauve prezzes, is the baddest prez yet. He’s the first gray prez. For his father was an hairless landlord, but this clever son found a way to keep fleecing onlookers:
He draped the pelt of a goat upon his baldness, & affixed it round about to the back of his head. (Genesis 27:16)
Now this deception angered half the populace, and yet it thrilled the other half exceedingly. So Christ-2 awoke from his dreamless sleep. Then, binocularing down from the clouds at this worst prez ever, Jesus shouted “W.T.F!” which, being interpreted, means “Who in the swamp croaked and made thee king?” And the worst prez answered “You.” And Jesus begged him to explain, so the prez said, “You gave your life so that my sins are forgiven; you dyed my strange wool toupee blanc as Pence.” (Pence is the most blanc viss prez yet invented. His stage name is Snow White; and, when topless, they call him Tuppence, on account of his paps.)
Thus Christ Jesus the Second lost his marbles and summoned the End of the World to appear. Yes, centuries of rapes and murders, he can sleep thru; but this was too much: a prez who breaks all the checks & balances of The Perfect Republic and becomes an autocrat overnight? In just two years, all the genius rules that the founding fathers encoded into the blueprints for this system were torn in tatters by one bumbling dolt!
Such well-built orders, adamantine, unbreakable – how can they be bent so easily, so quickly? I suspect that they’ve been decaying for a long time now. Enzymes from past administrations’ve been abrading these laws for eons.
That reminds me – Did you ever hear the bible story of the king who gets murdered on the toilet? (Judges 3:15.)
King Eglon of Moab was a tyrant: a brutal dictator. And he ruled over the children of Israel for eighteen years.
Now when the children of Israel cried unto God, because of their oppression under the hand of this fascist king, God raised them up a deliverer: Ehud, a Benjamite, a man lefthanded. By him the children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon the king of Moab:
Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length; and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh. And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man.
Ehud said unto Eglon, “I have a secret errand unto thee, O king.” And the king said: “Quiet on the set!” (which is filmmaker speech for “Silencio!” like the mauve-haired woman says at the end of Mulholland Drive); thus the cast and crew cleared the stage, leaving Ehud alone with Eglon.
And Ehud drew nigh unto the king; and the king was sitting in his summer parlour, a luxurious bathroom, upon his golden receptacle. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. Then he arose.
And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly: And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw back the dagger from his belly; and the dirt came out.
That also reminds me: I recently finished reading David Lynch’s memoirs, where he gives his brief theory on the assassination of JFK – he says Lyndon Johnson killed him. JFK’s viss prez. This memory was triggered either from the topic of regicide, or because Johnson liked to rule—that is, to conduct presidential meetings—literally while sitting on the toilet. Doing business while doing business.
Abram Lincoln was also assassinated. Or am I remembering wrong? (My view on the man is influenced by Gore Vidal’s novel Lincoln, from his “Narratives of Empire” series, which I greatly enjoyed.) If it turns out that he wasn’t really assassinated, then I apologize for the misinformation: Lincoln lives!
But when presidents fall, nations mourn. That’s how the rule book says we’re supposed to behave. Yet the fact remains that 50% of the populace hates its leader. Because there’s the red team and the blue team, and nobody’s allowed to refrain from cheering. (It is illegal to cast a blank vote, like they all do in José Saramago’s novel Seeing, which I also thoroughly loved and just re-read.) So if you’re a fan of the red team, and the leader is from the blue team, you’re supposed to don funeral garb on the day that he dies. But in JFK, the 1991 film directed by Oliver Stone, I recall a scene of some patrons in a bar: suddenly a voice declares from the television that Mr. Kennedy has been gunned down; then some of these patrons mutter comments implying that they are less than distraught to hear this news. Upon which, I, the movie’s viewer, in shock at their attitude, whisper aloud to myself: Perhaps they did not see eye to eye with the president.
I don’t believe that any person is all-good or all-bad. I think each of us is a mixture, and some lean more in one direction than another. But I think that people do get addicted to certain attitudes, and to certain pursuits, the same way that drugs can be addicting. People get addicted to glamor, and to the pursuit of riches. It was proven scientifically by the ghost of a stockbroker that the love of money is the root of all evil. I myself am addicted to art, to poetry – I ruin relationships for the sake of my obsession: this religion of aesthetics, perception, beauty, humanism & whatnot. But at least my belief is secular. (Unless I succeed in making a sect out of it.) Doubt is just as important to me as faith.
So let’s not blame the evil oligarchs for being so evil and oligarchical. Instead, let us patiently accept the poverty that they crush us with. When we expire, homeless and starving, our blood will wash away their selfish crimes. Then the next generation can play this game as well, and die quicker than we did. That’s real progress. It will repeat till the sun freezes shut.
P.S.
As a coda, I add this semi-irrelevant quote from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature:
The Holy Ghost is within us. It is the thing that prompts us to be real, not to push our own cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and high falutin, above all not to be too egoistic and wilful in our conscious self, but to change as the spirit inside us bids us change, and leave off when it bids us leave off, and laugh when we must laugh, particularly at ourselves, for in deadly earnestness there is always something a bit ridiculous. The Holy Ghost bids us never to be too deadly in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of ridicule: everything.
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