He was getting far too old for this. For god's sake, he was an hundred and nineteen. Or was he seventy? Or thirty? He was so old that he could not remember how old he was.
And there was no end in sight for his presidency. He was the most popular President in the history of the United States of America. His supporters were the most loyal, and their numbers increased all the time. At the beginning of his presidency, there was hope that it would end. But then he got re-elected to a second term. There was still hope for him--then his followers repealed the twentieth-second amendment, the quickest change to the Constitution in the history of America, and he was elected for a third term, and then another...and now, it felt like he had been in office forever. Quite simply, he was now President-for-life. Sure, every four years, someone ran to oppose him, but his supporters constantly reelected him--his opposition never got enough votes to weaken his hold on the presidency.
His hold, he thought, more like his supporter's hold. He hadn't even been sworn into office when he realized that the office was the worst possible job in the entire world. But his supporters did not care, all they cared about was remaking the country in their own image, and he was their tool for doing exactly that. True Americans, they called themselves. More like true nagging citizens, he thought.
True nagging citizens--not to be confused with devoted nagging citizens or real nagging citizens. And nothing like independent nagging citizens, or caring nagging citizens. And completely different from the never zealous nagging citizens or the beautiful powerful nagging citizens. And nothing in common with the liberating nagging citizens or the galactic nagging citizens, or even the sympathetic nagging citizens. And definitely not at all like the never voting nagging citizen, who still thought that their opinions and desires should be addressed by the government, and the undeserving nagging citizens who sucked up government resources, and the undefined nagging citizens who made every freaking decision into a randomized outrage. And absolutely definitely not anything at all like the illegal and undocumented non-citizens, who not only nagged but also somehow managed to vote every freaking election, no matter how many of them were deported from the country.
To keep things straight, President Earl Midas often thought of them as the animals that the illegal political cartoonists drew them as. His true Americans with their symbol of the majestic lemming against the horde of unholy unicorns, cowardly lions, flying monkeys, groping octopuses, colorful and deadly poisonous jellyfish, brave panthers, Frankenstein monsters, angry bowls of petunias, slimy hydras, Cheshire cats, vampiric mosquitoes, insidious ink-blobs, carpenter ants, and electrifying will-o-wisps. He wasn't quite sure how his supporters overcame all the assembled opposition every freaking election, but they did.
And the true nagging citizens were all waiting for him to chirp about the horror unfolding on the television. He could not remain silent; he could not wait to find out what was really going on. No, he had to condemn someone, setting the angry mob against some villain, because his supporters demanded this from their President. He looked at the cell phone in his hand, and thought about flushing it down the toilet before going to his desk and signing the letter saying that he had enough and just wanted to go home to the trailer park that he grew up in. But no, his supporters would not let him do that.
So he started to punch in a condemnation of the horror on the screen...
NovelRama gets cheesy. |
No comments:
Post a Comment