Fever Dream

Do you hear that lonesome whistle blow? Wooooo-wooooo! It’s the last train to Palookaville pulling into the station. At this late hour, two passengers get on: Kamala Harris, mom jeans and blazer, rheumy red eyes, half-gone on chardonnay. . .  and an elderly gentleman with a goatee in a colorful but shabby red-white-and-blue suit, famous long ago as “Uncle Sam.”

     There’s an election on, in case you haven’t noticed, imminent even. Kamala, everyone seems to agree, has blown it. Can’t answer simple questions pitched by friendly ringers in the “news” business. Hiding somebody else’s agenda is a tough assignment, you see. All she can really do is cackle or simper and, let’s face it, that gets humiliating fast. Joy has turned to despair. Her punched ticket says “one way.”

     Whose idea was it, anyway, over at party HQ, to put her up to this contest? She wishes she knew, as she gazes out the window at the sad lights of the little towns streaking by — East Chugwater, Erehwon, Tanktown, Loserville, onward into the night to the end of the line. How’d they manage to yank her out of the Naval Observatory, where she was comfy and cozy watching Netflix rom-coms with Doug, chardonnay refills on-demand, all the Doritos a gal could munch? She was a lover, not a fighter, she repeats to herself, but the self-consolation doesn’t quite avail.

Uncle Sam sits stoically five seats behind her. He is resigned, knowing very well why he is on that train, too. His own country is sending him into exile after swindling him out of his history and his posterity. He doesn’t even recognize the place anymore. What happened to Sandburg’s city of big shoulders? Who turned the fruited plain into a hellscape of muffler shops? How did the heroes of Iwo Jima transition into a legion of TikTok influencers with pierced faces and scrambled brains? When the train gets in, he has no place to go. Perhaps he’ll sleep in a ditch.

     You entertain these drear hallucinatory conceits despite the giddiness about Donald Trump’s seeming triumph over adversity — botched assassinations, court cases hatched by malice-crazed ninnies, blob-generated calumnies, conspiracies, ops, and hoaxes galore. And for Halloween, they painted a Hitler mustache on him, just for fun. It remains to be seen what marvels of ballot legerdemain have been concocted by Marc Elias, Esq, lawfare artist supreme, destroyer of the nation’s faith in itself.

     But say Mr. Trump overcomes even the planned epic voter fraud to capture the prize. What then? You’re entitled to feel nervous. The army, under Department of Defense directive 5240.01 has just been licensed to gun you down. This is a new thing. Now isn’t it a queer moment in history for a move like that? What are they expecting, anyway? And, by the way, who exactly is the varlet in the chain-of-command who issued that directive? (Or did it just bubble-up out of the ruling blob like some sulfurous gas from a Yellowstone fumarole?)

     People of good faith have reason to believe that the country is about to be blown apart. By another odd coincidence, an outfit called the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International (AFCEA) has scheduled an “exercise simulating a cyber-attack on critical infrastructure” for November 5 in Atlanta, Georgia. That’s election day. In a big swing state. Whose idea was that? Is there already not enough that might go wrong that some treasonous moron had to kick the risk of fiasco up another notch? Or might it be cover for another Three Card Monte caper with the Georgia votes? This is the sort of thing that will dog poor old Uncle Sam’s mind as he tries to fall asleep in that drainage ditch on the ragged edge of Palookaville.

       Or perhaps what we’re witnessing is a fabulous bit of what George W. Bush once called “strategery” by the Party of Chaos. Five minutes after Mr. Trump gets elected, a certain unseen hand flips a little toggle somewhere in the banking system that tanks the economy so hard and fast that 2025 will make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a Hamptons clam bake. . . for the next four years we become a land with no money and no way to generate money. . . and MAGA / MAHA is left to suck eggs in the cold and dark until 2028 when the Democratic Party returns in full Maoist mode, riding in on a unicorn cavalry to rescue us. . . . Nah. . . .They just blew it.

      So, more likely, we’re seeing the suicide of the Democratic Party. Even CNN is starting to back away from them, as from a convocation of lepers. They can smell the odor of necrosis. Plus, their own instinct for survival has kicked in. They have a business to run. They want to be around to cover the treason trial of Alejandro Mayorkas — a sure thing to jack those sagging ratings back up. Maybe even Kamala Harris will be called out of retirement to testify and we’ll find out just what was going on in the White House in the summer of 2024, when “Joe Biden” — remember him? — was rattling around the joint like a BB in a packing crate, howling for his ice cream, and no one was around anymore to hear him.

To lift your spirits in this difficult time, here’s a video of Americana I wrote the script for nearly forty years ago, to remind you a little bit about who we are. Enjoy!