December 7, 1941  A Day That Might Live in Infamy.

 

Flash:

Naval Intelligence claims Pearl Harbor attacked by Japanese.  

    The President is dismissive. 

    “Could've been Japanese, could've been other people. Could be a 400 pound Guatemalan who came across the border from Mexico. Nobody knows, folks, nobody knows.”

    “We know somebody bombed our ships,” said Hamilton Fish, Republican leader of Congress and prominent Isolationist.  “But did they actually sink them?  We have no proof. Could be, they just sank themselves when the tide came up.”

    The president’s sons Kermit and Franklin Junior denied meeting with the Japanese envoy at a sushi joint in downtown Bethesda.

    “If we had met him, which we didn’t, we definitely didn't talk about our hotels in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagasaki. We just asked him, if it was possible, when they break our naval code, for them to just sort of give us the intercepts, to use against Clare Booth Luce, that's all. Oh, and could we shoot some of their endangered white tigers?”

    Fritz Kuhn, the president’s adviser and former leader of the German American Bund denied connection to a congressional fifth column of isolationists working with the Nazis.

    “We have nothing to do with Republican Isolationists who, like us, are working to destroy American democracy from within.  They're just using all our efforts for their own purposes; preventing universal healthcare, destroying the New Deal, isolating America, and connecting with other rightwing mafias.  They're doing all this like it was just their own idea and not even giving us credit for helping them. They have no integrity. It just makes me sick. We're both on the same side here, folks. There's no use denying it.  They're just trying to escape the consequences of their actions by pretending, you know, that they're really, really dumb. 

    Harry Hopkins, son-in-law and foreign advisor, broke in…

    “It’s not treason, just a misunderstanding. We acknowledge that there is a race war, a clash of civilizations that will determine who rules the world, and the American people, the white ones that is, should not have let the previous administration take back our Nazi summer camps in New Jersey and Long Island.  We must lift the sanctions on war materials shipping to Germany. And cut out that Lend Lease stuff and those old destroyers.  Oh, and I’ll be attending their rally in Madison Square Garden. It's a fun time! Lots of banners and marching around.

    Said FDR, “I know Tojo. We were on a radio broadcast together and we’re good pals, although I never met him.”

    Previous Republican President Hoover said,  "I met Herr Hitler. I looked into his soul and it's pretty dark in there, but trust me you can trust him. I know I do. And I’m not stupid,” he added.

    "See, that’s all you need to know about Hitler," added Neville Chamberlain. “We have peace in our time, a piece of France, a piece of the Sudetenland, practically all of Poland…”

    The President was pressed at his Roosevelt Island Resort.

“So I had dealings in Tokyo.There were some geishas of course and nobody has better geishas than me. Nobody has more beautiful geishas, except they have tiny tits, so they can’t be tens, maybe six and a halfs… so I grab some of them by the hoo-hahs, I just walked up and stuck my tongue right down their throats to their uvulas… You can do that if you're famous like me. The golden showers, I don't think I did that. They don't have pictures of that, do they? Those guys are always taking pictures. You can't get them away from our naval installations. They're just fascinated by big ships, do you think?”

    Press Secretary, Sean Joe Goebbels, speaking from the Presidential Yacht, “Wow-I’m-Rich!”, in the Roosevelt (previously the Potomac) River, corrected that. 

    “Whatever he said he meant when he said it. It’s just not operational now. You have to pay attention to something as soon as he says it. It’s only fact for about 10 seconds or so, then another reality kicks in.”

     Reacting to a question from Haley Collingwood, he added…

    “It's not true he can't walk. He could walk if he wanted to. He just doesn't want to. He wants to swim, and if he's not near water he can't swim, can he?  So that chair is just there to get him to water and we're tired of the fake news about that, so I’m not gonna talk to you again. That’s right. I don’t have to talk to you.

An’ don’t take my picture, neither.”

    In response to the lying press pressing on the fake news of an attack, the President said again, "Never happened, and as far as Pearl Harbor there's a lot of smoke but no proof, no smoking gun. Some smoking ships, of course, but no gun.  You can’t find a gun. I’ve sent people to Hawaii, they haven’t found a gun. They haven’t found a birth certificate neither. So, no gun, no foul. Let's move on to my Championship Golf course, my steaks and my Roosevelt Institute of Higher Book Learnin’ and Success, Trademark, Copyright Roosevelt Empire, 1941.”

    He waved his arms around a lot, made that circle thing with his fingers and continued...

    “Why there aren't any Japs for miles and miles, just ask Nimitz about that.  Everybody knows that my Navy is the best navy in the world. Nobody has a better Navy than me. And I know more about water than all the Admirals combined. I drink lots of it. No, folks, our Navy is the best.  It's just sailing the wrong way." 

    European leaders are aghast.  Winston Churchill said,  “Looks like we can't count on the Americans anymore, folks. Looks like we’ll have to find those sunlit uplands on our own.”

    The President was tweeting now, something that won’t be invented for seventy years. But he was on a Fireside Chat on the radio. 

    “Golden showers, naw,  that's just like a Shinto thing. Beautiful geishas pissing on my head for the glory of their ancestors. A sign of their great respect for me, don’t you think?”

    I mean that's what they do there, they just drink and drink and then just open their stomachs for fun. I mean you party with them, they stay up all night, things tend to get a little weird. You don't suppose they have pictures do you?”

    At the Hyde Park White House Championship Golf Course and Rehab Resort Eleanor remarked, “It's costing New York millions to protect us from him. But it's worth it."

     "I’m still pissed the secret intelligence service assigned me to him. Shoulda been Franco or Stalin, you know, somebody with class. What kind of a honey trap is this? He’s a moron. They coulda used that girl from Monkey Business, one or two of his secretaries, or that Marla person, again.  He’s very rich so I just don't listen. I just like to stand there and glare at him.  But, as long as he keeps me in bling and lesbian girlfriends I don't give a damn and neither should you.”  

    He was chatting again:

    "Warm Springs Resort and Waterslide is doing gangbusters. Of course some of the guests have to be recovered from the bottom of the pool. Polo is a terrible thing. But occupancy has doubled since we took office and you should really try the chocolate cake.  It’s just the best. Oh, and Walter Winchell, overrated, from the failing New York Post.  He sucks. And, I’m not packing the court, but there’s some Spanish type people in there. Very Unfair. Sad."

    And future Bridge Troll J. Edgar Hoover took over the Office of President while FDR was busy chatting away: 

    “We asked the court to reconsider the ban on Jewish refugees. They could be spies undermining our Christian-valued  nation. They could be Terrorists. Look at the Stern Gang. That Issac’s a Bastard. I’ve got a file on him."

    "They’re doing just fine in those refugee camps, so those are false reports from the international Jewry press.  They're getting showers, they're hard to keep clean, those Jews, they're not like us.  The Trains run on time, thanks to Hitler and Musso, and they have big ovens, big things to keep them warm in the winters, so you know we don't need to let more of them in. They’re doing just fine."

    He said, “Make America Hate Again,” said Martha Gellhorn speaking from the Winter Press Room outside of Owlfart Saskatchewan.    

    Kelly Ann Goebbels demurred. 

    “Didn’t say hate."

    “Sure he did.”

    “Slip of the tongue, then. Or brain.”

    “So, he did say it?”

    “Didn’t.”

    “Did. We have it on film.”

    “Didn’t.”

    “Did. Did, Did, Didn’t Did!”

    “Those of you wanting the actual truth, you better watch your step,” Kelly said, gnawing on her riding crop and snapping it across her boot.

    “Is that a threat?”

    “No, it’s minus twelve out there. And I’ll yank your credentials so fast… Now, next question… you there, Hans from Der Sturmer.”

    Rinehart Previous, Chief Staff Denier, concurred.

    “He said great. You just heard hate, cause you hate us. But we hate you right back double. We're going to repeal and replace all of you by the way, repeal with extreme prejudice.”   

    So, the fake news was busy lying, …something about a Great World War in China and Russia and Europe and things. In North Africa and the Mediterranean, and the North and South Atlantic. But the Pres was pretty confused about where all those places were. And if it would hurt his hotel business. Before leaving for golf, he chatted again.

    “Reports that American citizens have been rounded up and placed in concentration camps are untrue fake news,” he typed with his very small fingers. "They are undocumented illegals or look just like they would if they were. They snuck into the country illegally across the failing and misnamed Pacific Ocean, because I’ve been there and threw up. Very Sad."

     "So we're going to put a big wall up to stop that, and the ocean. A big wall, the greatest wall ever. Nobody builds a Great Wall greater than my Great Wall. Chinese hoax to make American Wall builders non-competitive, folks, believe me. Forget God, forget global warming. I alone can do it.  Around the seashore. All around America. And Guam is going to pay for it."

The Last of the Hyphenated-Americans

 

Speaking as an Off-White American, I am done with it.  I will no longer self-identify as a unique minority with special insights, grievances and demands of other Hyphenate-Americans. I will have no truck with Black-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans or even Irish-Jewish-Native-Neurotic-Americans.

As a person of color, that color being 5427 on the Sherwin Williams scale, I will not refer to my self as a Beige-American or accept Gyno-Americans, Phallo-Americans, Homo-Americans, or Lesbo-Americans, which anyway should be called Vagetarians as Lesbos is just a no-account island in the Adriatic.

I will no longer refer to my wife and kids, all-left-handed for some reason, as Sinister-Americans, Or my dog as a Canine-American. I will no longer, under my breath, refer to obese people who take the center seat in aircraft and flow into my space as Fatso-Americans…that is beneath me.

Speaking of that, it is wrong to refer to people like Jeff Sessions as Dwarf-Americans, or even as Height-Challenged- Americans. I will no longer call people such as Louie Gomer and Rick Perry Retard-Americans. That word should only be used in orchestration. I will no longer refer to Mitch McConnell as a Turtle-American. Or the Pres as a Psycho-American.  One may make one exception for Steve Bannon as a Bridge-Troll-American.

We must all be just Americans because otherwise it’s just going to get too complicated. What if you were actually a Black-Fatso-Lesbo-Sinister-Gyno-Half-Hispanic-Quarter-Asian American?

See where this leads? How would we deal with you? What exactly is your problem?  Right now without Government Mandated DNA Testing nobody really knows what they are. Is Derek Jeter black, white or just a Short-Stop-American? Nobody knows.

Until we stop silly-separating ourselves due to our special uniqueness, our complaints, our past and present grievances and our hope for special privileges due to, say, that “slavery thing”, or that Commanche “Genocide” thing or the fact that some people don’t like us, we won’t come together as we must as “One Nation Under a God-American”.

So. Suck it up. You or your ancestors came to the Melting Pot to get melted down into a new identity. American. So Melt.

De Minimus

Reaching de minimus

Money is mutable. As it travels upward, it loses value.

Most people in the world work hard to get enough to eat. Once you get enough It’s less work to get too much. It’s less work than that to get better food. At the very top, the difference between a great restaurant and a great private chef in terms of money is great, in terms of better food is de minimus. 

If you don’t have a car, transportation can be difficult. You must work very hard to get a car that runs. Once you make enough to get a car that runs, you can more easily get a good car. Once you get a good car, you can more easily get a luxury car. Once you get a luxury car, getting an exotic car is de minimus. There’s nowhere you can drive it at 200 miles an hour. You are stuck in traffic with pick-ups full of lawnmowers, blurping along in second, fouling your plugs.

Finding shelter if don’t have it, is very difficult. You depend on a tent, or a lean to, or a favela. Once you have shelter, You can now live and work more comfortably, you are able to get better shelter. Once you have a house with seven bedrooms, you can’t use them all. Once you have seven houses you can’t occupy them all. 

When you have more money than you can spend for human needs, you buy silly things. You buy status. You buy things bigger, better, more expensive than your peers. You spend your time on status, on flaunting your privilege, on outspending your rivals, on showing up your neighbors.

In your seven room mansion you could have a nice painting on the wall. You spend a hundred million on a Picasso. Is it a better picture, or just more expensive? Or is it just a way to lock away useless wealth?

You could take that hundred million and actually create jobs, not just lie about doing it. You could give twenty of your servants, assistants, agents and friends five million dollars each. But then they wouldn’t need to work for you. You’d lose that key attribute of wealth, your separation from the rest of humanity, your status.

Do you buy seven Ferraris so you can drive them? Is one better to drive than another, or are you just a collector of useless things. A car too expensive to drive is useless wealth. Houses too numerous to occupy are useless wealth.

When you have enough useless wealth, you can change wives like sheets. You can father useless children. You can buy exotic pets. You can spend your time trying to find something, anything to spend it on that would improve your life just a little. Or you can just watch the zeros add up in your accounts.

Once you have enough useless wealth, you… Wait…Okay. There is never enough.

Once you have enough useless wealth you spend your life trying not to lose it.  You pay expensive experts to diminish your taxes. You buy politicians to make laws to prevent anyone else from getting your wealth. You want to keep others down. Because all you have left is your exalted state. 

Because like wealth and the material it can buy there is only so much happiness one human can have. You could try to spread it around. You could make other’s lives easier. Or you can try to keep it all to yourself. Then it’s de minimus. 

The Battle

“What pundits have called the Battle of Facts is nearly over.

The Battle of Governing is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of our civilization. Upon it depends our own American life, and the long continuity of our institutions. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Trumpish forces know that they will have to break us or lose the war.

If we can stand up to them, all may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if America and its constitution last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."