The Bedtime Story

What Might Have Been

As we come up on the Inauguration of Sanity this coming Wednesday, I was reminded of an allegory I penned waaayyy back in September of 2020 and posted on Facebook. At the time, the insanity of the orange administration seemed to drag on and on with no ending in sight. Thus the not-so-happy closing of my chronicle. Now I am hopeful and elated for a return to a more ‘normal’ state of government. While no politicians are perfect, the new administration will at least be one where new policies will be written to benefit the ordinary American, not just the wealthy. I could list many other benefits of the new team coming in but that’s for another post. (OK, OK, I’ll mention a few: Executive orders planned right away include rejoining the World Health Organization, rejoining the Paris climate accord, repealing the travel ban from many Muslim countries, reinstate the DREAMers program, extending pandemic-related limits on evictions and student loan payments, move to raise taxes on wealthy, and repealing the transgender military ban.)

Grandpa, tell us the story again of those weird years that happened when you were our age!

Well, kids, in those stranger-than-fiction years, an orange man, who was elected as a civil servant by what’s known as a ‘college’ rather than the number of votes cast by citizens (a woman actually had 2.87 million more votes tallied), proclaimed himself the supreme ruler. He could not speak in complete or coherent sentences but there were many across the land that were enchanted by this bizarre creature, and mistook his gobbledygook for wisdom, especially since he himself professed to have a very, very large brain. He was fond of repeating such things as 'billions and billions of dollars,’ ‘winning,’ ‘believe me,’ ‘the incredible men and women,’ ‘deep state,’ and ‘sad.’ Linguists and historians are still trying to make sense of these obtuse sayings but many feel it was the syphilis, a disease grownups sometimes get and had been suffering from since 1983, behind the madness.

Folks did not seem to mind when, bit by bit, he dismantled the functioning government as we had come to know it. There were no consequences for that, or when he broke the law time after time, especially colluding with a foreign power then known as Russia. Nobody seemed to be up for the task to stop him. Anytime somebody did speak up, he called them liars, and if it was printed, he coined a phrase called ‘fake news’, which folks took for the truth, which is somewhat back-asswards, if’n you ask me. One thing for sure, he only took a liking to white folks, who are actually more pink in color. There were people back then that thought ‘white’ was supreme, so they armed themselves (the pink people), declared themselves white (pink) supremacists, and the orange man declared them ‘very fine people’. Those fine folks had been infiltrating the police forces across the country long before the orange man came along, but when he became the supreme ruler, they felt free to go ahead and terrorize, and even kill, people who were not pink but darker in hue (a pigment in the skin that makes humans various colors, which really angers some folks).

I know, it’s hard to believe all of this but hang on…

Because of the amount of drugs he ingested, he was up most of the night ranting on what was called an app in those days (Twitter, can you believe it, heehee), something everyone seemed to have on their giant personal hand-held computers (sometimes referred to as a ‘phone’ which people were addicted to and found very difficult to look away from). He railed against everybody except for the very most loyal followers who before too long were no longer followers, and then they were railed against. He mostly disliked leaders of other countries, except for the ones who also were supreme rulers, and verbally abused and attacked them on a regular basis. He alienated our country to the rest of the civilized world but as supreme ruler, he could do anything, you see. He had no use for international law, human rights, diplomacy, or anything, really, that got in the way of robbing from the government to enrich his own family and his loyal followers, especially a turtle-like man who was fossilized in the halls of the senate for far too many years.

Before the orange man took office, there was an idea that the country could go ‘green’, which was a code name for winding down the fossil fuel industry and ramping up more ‘clean’ styles of energy. This was all flushed down the proverbial toilet as, shortly after elected, he reversed a rule that oil and gas companies report payments to foreign governments, which was a rule aimed to prevent companies from bribing foreign governments and taking part in other forms of corruption. He suspended a rule limiting methane leaks when drilling on public land, reversed a rule for drilling in the Arctic, withdrew a rule regulating fracking on public land, rescinded a rule mandating that rising sea levels be considered when building public infrastructure in flood-prone areas, reversed a ban on plastic bottles at national parks (plastic was an obscene mistake that took over 50 years to clean up after it was banned in 2036. The oceans are still full of micro-particles that will last for eons), rescinded a limit on the number of sea animals that can be trapped or killed in fishing nets (this one didn’t matter too much as illegal netting of fish could and/or would not be stopped by authorities due to lining their pockets with bribes), and reversed a rule banning hunting bears and wolves. Of course, since the orange man had no head for science, he removed more than a dozen academics from the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board. Along with that he repealed the Water of the United States rule which expanded the definition of water bodies protected by the EPA. People didn’t seem to think water was essential as oil and coal back in those days, apparently.

But, I digress, children, as you see, I haven’t even talked about the pandemic that started in 2020 and lasted until 2027. The orange man refused to acknowledge that there was such a thing, stating such absurdities as, “I alone can fix it,” to “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” The guidelines he did create put the onus on the governors across the nation but after he falsely claimed he had ‘total’ authority over the states regarding reopening, he set himself up to take credit if it went well, or to blame the governors if it went wrong. Pretty sneaky, hey kids? By 2026, 4,358,210 Americans had died from the virus, mostly due to inadequate insurance, but the orange man was satisfied that most of the dead did not have pink skin (except for the 24,389 fraternity and sorority young Republicans, a few thousand motorcycle enthusiasts, and all folks from Florida and pockets of Texas, a small price to pay for freedom!) and were mostly below the poverty level.

Getting sleepy yet, kids? There’s just a bit more!

In those years, our elders depended on monies they had earned during their working years and doled out to them as they aged. It was called Social Security. The orange man had no use for this as it did not benefit him or his cronies, nor did an entity called Medicare, which, because medical care in our country at the time was prohibitive in cost except for the wealthy, was also a nuisance. He did away with all of that in 2028. Of course, there was only one political party left by then, so he could rule as he saw fit. He also divorced the Slovenian by 2024 and had many mistresses and wives up until his death in 2029. His fourth vice-president, Elaine Chao, became the first woman president immediately after the orange man’s disease-ridden body was removed from the Oval Office, which was a two day affair as he had become stuck to his chair a few months before, and had his hamberders trucked in.

By the time of the supreme ruler’s death, the entire southern and northern border had been walled in, although much of it came down from time to time with a strong wind. Most of the populace had not heard about the faulty construction since by that time, there were no journalists left in the country to report on those events, or most other events. As the major networks had been bought up by mega-conglomerates many years before the orange man even took office, most people thought what they were watching WAS NEWS, but the only real news was on PBS which was shut down in 2021, and foreign news, which was outlawed in our country that same year. The last newspaper finally caved in 2022.

There’s much more but I can see by your sleepy eyes that it’s just too much to absorb in one sitting. Sleep tight, kids and don’t let the rampant bedbugs bite!

And here is today’s moment of philosophy.