Seven Genuine Political Nightmares That You Haven’t Had Yet (But I Have)

Note: Please don’t tell me these nightmares are inconsistent with each other. These are nightmares, damnit, not legal briefs or footnoted term papers.

Ms. Gingrich wearing the
official platinum- painted steel
helmet that comes in sizes S,
M, L, and XL

1. I have gone to sleep. I wake up because the TV is blaring that there has been a coup d’état. The good news is, Donald Trump has been deposed. The bad news is, he has been deposed by Newt Gingrich. Gingrich’s first decree is that every woman must wear a hairdo like his wife, Callista’s. Those who for reasons of incompatible hair cannot do so will be issued platinum-painted steel helmets in the shape of Ms. Gingrich’s hair. In the midst of all this, I go to the men’s room, where some nincompoop who thinks he’s playing a practical joke slaps a Calista helmet on my head. Next thing I know, I am arrested by an enraged cop bearing a strange resemblance to Mike Pence, for using the wrong bathroom.

2. Government employees, entering their ninth year without pay, go on strike. President For Life By Popular Acclaim Trump calls out the Army to arrest them. The next day the employees go to court, insisting their arrest is illegal under the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude. Within 24 hours, working on an expedited basis, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, Speaker of the House Rick Santorum, and the Republican governors of 57 of the 60 states (California has been divided into six smaller states; Wyoming and Montana have each been divided into two, and something else happened in Texas but I forget what ) ratify the 13th Amendment’s repeal. While they are at it, they outlaw contraceptives and restore Prohibition.

3. A big scandal arises when Ann Coulter is caught in bed with Donald Trump. Enterprising journalists discover that Rudy Giuliani has paid Melania Trump $170,000 to shut up about it. But she still keeps bringing it up with Donald, night after night, making it impossible for him to tweet.

4. The following week, Trump is found in bed with Rudy Giuliani.

                          

5. While Sarah Sanders is on vacation at an evangelical summer camp, a crazed atheist activist with an icepick runs up to her and stabs her in the backside. This sets off a spurting nine foot high geyser of yellow fat that will not stop, and cannot be stopped no matter what paramedics from a nearby ambulance corps and a team of doctors attempt. The fat forms a mighty river, complete with rapids, that flows into the ocean and creates a massive bloom of purple algae that kills all sea life and also peels the paint off boat bottoms. I wake up from this nightmare feeling terribly shaken and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. However, water from the tap is full of purple algae. I then realize that waking up from the nightmare is part of the nightmare, too. I slap myself across the face several times, and finally really wake up.Then I turn on the television set. Donald Trump is still president. Now I’m not sure whether I’m still having the nightmare or not.

6. I am at sea in a lifeboat with Mayor Bill De Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, both of New York. Suddenly, a malevolent swordfish comes by and pokes a hole in the bottom of the boat with his bill. The boat begins taking on water fast. I grab an empty coffee can that for some reason has Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s picture on it, and begin to bale out the boat. It is exhausting work. I can barely keep up. Finally, panting, I tell De Blasio and Cuomo I can’t do it any more, and ask them to help. They immediately begin arguing, each insisting the other should bale out the boat. Finally, the lifeboat sinks. De Blasio and Cuomo both swim away. I start to drown. Fortunately, the swordfish comes by again, feels some remorse, and lets me climb on his back while he swims to shore. When I finally stumble onto the beach, I am personally arrested by Donald Trump on suspicion of being an illegal alien because I did not enter the country at a legal port of entry.

7. There is a sea of humanity. A massive wave of people —tens of thousands of them — are waving placards bearing political slogans. Suddenly, Kim Jong Un parachutes from a helicopter to a platform on the Mall in Washington, D.C., carrying a big red box wrapped in festive paper and ribbons. He walks up to Donald Trump, who happens to be sitting on the platform on a folding chair, and tries to hand him the package. “Season’s greetings!” Kim says to Trump. “From now on, we’re all saying Merry Christmas,” says Trump. He folds his arms across his chest and refuses to accept the package. “Season’s Greetings, you slimebag,” Kim says. “Get ‘him out of here!” yells Trump. “Get him the hell out of here. Rough him up on the way out!” Just then, Kim presses a previously unnoticed button on the side of the box and the nuclear bomb inside explodes. Washington D.C. goes up in a mushroom cloud. When the smoke clears, the city is a flattened wasteland of ashes and rubble. Just then, a manhole cover in the street is pushed up from below. Mitt Romney climbs out of the hole and declares himself President.

The Donald Trump, Cuomo-Nixon, Dead Tree Parks Department Blues

Two years ago, the New York City Department of Parks cut down a
tall, leafy mature tree that stood here. Recently, they replaced it
with this obviously dead sapling. More complaints below.

If it seems I’ve been posting to this allegedly political blog at an unconscionably slow pace recently, you’re absolutely right.

I have a theory about why I feel about as incentivized to post most days as I feel a yearning to hike up to Central Park and take a long drink of water out of its algae-choked lake. Yes, you guessed the reason.

Donald Trump.

Trump not only sucks the oxygen out of the room, he also sucks it out of human brains. How long can anybody go on even thinking about that zombie, much less writing about him regularly? 

I wake up each morning wondering, “Now what the hell has he done?” I rarely have to wait until nightfall before I find out. It’s usually another dispiriting commission of horror-by-tweeting, if not by firing of somebody who sneaked into his administration despite demonstrable competency, if not yet another new diplomatic or racial contretemps.  

Whatever the news, our phony president will label it as “fake news” the minute it boomerangs back on him and whacks him in the teeth.

So I need distractions. That’s why last night, here in New York, I sat down to watch a one-time-only debate between the Democratic Party’s primary candidates for governor of New York, the incumbent Mario Cuomo and his challenger, the actor Cynthia Nixon.

The Cuomo vs. Nixon prizefight

Prior to watching, I felt that although I vastly prefer Cynthia Nixon’s political outlook to what I regard as Andrew Cuomo’s crass opportunism, she simply lacks the political and managerial chops to be a successful governor. I mean, one rank amateur in a position of considerable political power these days is more than enough.

Her inexperience was already showing before the debate. She is pitifully under-financed, inept at raising funds from small contributors the way Bernie Sanders can, and uninspiring despite her mostly spot-on political positions, her name recognition, and the fact that I’d really like to see a woman take charge in Albany. 

So it was my intention to vote for Nixon in the primary, not in hope that she’d win it (she can’t possibly) but as a way of demonstrating to Cuomo that some of us loyal Democratic voters think he’s a bit too much of a hack apparatchik and a phony. We need a better Democratic governor overseeing a vast infrastructure, most of it in a condition of decline, decay and decrepitude. And no, decline, decay and decrepitude is not a three-headed redundancy. Each word has a slightly different meaning.

Zinger for zinger

both turned out to suck

Unfortunately, the “debate” was one of those shouting matches that turn far too many TV discussions into a chaotic approximation of  a callithumpian. Instead of intelligent debating points, we got an exchange of insults, put-downs, and zingers. This all confirmed  my deepest fears, that Nixon is an unworthy featherweight, and Cuomo is a mindless weathervane whose direction can be divined by checking on which way the political wind is blowing. A plague on both of them.

Which leaves me….what? Nada, that’s what. I can simply withhold my vote in this primary. Come the actual gubernatorial election, I will not, in good conscience, vote for any Republican at this moment in American history. Perhaps I can find some weird rump party to throw my vote away to. Is there still an American Vegetarian Party? (Not that I’m at all a vegetarian.) Is the Rent Is Too Damn High Party still active in New York State? Or do I have to write in Weird Al Yankovich’s name to express my rage and frustration?

I think that I shall never see

my Parks Department plant a tree

Go to the New York City Department of Parks website and you can find a one-paragraph prose poem in honor of of trees that ought to be entered in a Most Promising Nine-Year-Old poetry contest — assuming we ever get around to having a contest in celebration of immature authors who praise the obvious. I quote:

Our street trees are living breathing parts of our communities (though they often go unnoticed). They bring us shade in the warm months, shield us from the cold in the winter, and provide fresh air for us to breath all year long. To better grow and protect our urban forest it is important to get acquainted with your NYC trees.

This is why I was surprised, in fact startled — no, in fact shocked!— when more  than two years ago, the very same Department of Parks came down our street with a truck and a chain saw and sawed down two gorgeous, leafy old trees that had provided not only shade, but also some respite from the clouds of carbon monoxide  and other noxious gasses that passing cars vomit into the faces of passing pedestrians.

No doubt the tree-killing parks department would claim that the trees were “diseased,” whatever that means. They were big, sturdy, leafy, and in no visible danger of falling that I could see. Moreover, subsequent events convinced me that this city’s Department of Parks wouldn’t know a thriving mature tree from a chewed up pencil.

More than two years after they cut down the leafy trees, after constant badgering and pleading by individuals, and at least one building’s co-op board, and my City Councilman, the city came by last spring and planted two frail-looking saplings. One may yet make it, and twenty years from now — far beyond the time I am even vaguely likely to be alive according to  the actuarial tables — we may yet have a full-fledged adolescent tree growing in that spot. 

The other? That little toothpick of a disheveled sapling looked dead when they planted it. I didn’t say anything because, hey, what do I know about trees? But despite all kinds of rainfall, and sunshine, and summer warmth, its pathetic leaves have not un-shriveled. They just limply hang there, brown, brittle and lifeless. I am finally coming to terms with the fact that the parks people spent God-knows-how-many dollars to cut down a living tree and replace it, more than two years later, with a dead tree.

I suppose I could get my City Councilman back on the case. Maybe  if I did, a year or two from now somebody would come by again and cut down the dead sapling. And then, with continued badgering, they’d come by two years after that, and plant another sapling.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if that one turns out to be dead, too.

Three cranky cranks for a chilly week — the lottery, negative Republicans, and Andrew Cuomo, a most embarrassing Democrat

#1. I won in the big Powerball lottery! 

How much? $2. How did I do it? By not buying a $2 ticket. 

I also win $1 per drawing in hundreds of other lotteries by not buying tickets for them, either. 

#2.   Here's how to control Republicans.

Early on in the Obama administration, Republicans learned a new game. Whatever the president was for, they were against. And vice-versa. This has been so effective that they’re likely to continue on doing the same thing if another Democrat is elected president.

Well, Mr. or Ms. President, here’s the antidote. Come out in favor of the Tea Party program. For example, say that you want to cut taxes for the rich. The Republicans will immediately pass a law taxing the living hell out of the rich. Insist that you want to arm every man, woman and two-year-old in the United States. The Republicans will then ram through gun control. Announce that you want to outlaw Obamacare. They’ll pass a law saying you can’t touch it for at least a century. Here's a song to help you remember that:

What it comes down to is, the average Republican congressman or senator has the negative mentality of a petulant six-year-old. That mentality was enshrined, years ago, in this song from the off-Broadway musical, The Fantasticks.

#3.    I’d like to leave you singing, but…

Despite the upbeat music, I’ve got a downer for Democrats. It’s our fellow Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. Unlike his father, who I still admire, Andy’s a political hack, currently doing a terrible job of hiding either his ambitions for a higher office or the stiletto secreted under his cloak. Some examples:

He pretends to be a champion of the homeless, to disguise his cutting back on New York City’s budget. Look, I’m not a huge fan of New York City’s mayor, Bill  de Blasio. But I’ll give the mayor credit for at least trying to do something about providing housing for the homeless. Cuomo, who until recently did nothing, nothing, nothing for the wretches of society, saw his nemesis de Blasio addressing the homeless issue and couldn't stand the attention deBlasio was getting. So what’s Cuomo doing?

He steals from college students. Instead of directly providing de Blasio with funds to assist with the mayor’s program to provide more permanent housing for people who can’t afford it, Cuomo now declares himself a pal to those without a roof over their heads and provides some funding — which he has stolen from the state’s regular contribution to the city’s higher education budget. Other cuts will hit the city’s Medicaid recipients. So he helps the poor by stealing some of the money set aside to help them and for the middle class in other ways. With friends like Cuomo, the poor don’t need enemies. The bastard.

He's a friend to the corrupt:  Cuomo has a penchant for palling around with corrupt political crooks. From an article some time ago in the New Yorker magazine:

“I’m very big on giving other people credit,” he told me. “It’s the whole collegial thing. That’s how I get what I get done done.” Most recently, in his State of the State address, on January 21st, Cuomo said that he would soon be going on a trade mission to Mexico, and he displayed a PowerPoint slide of himself, Skelos, and Silver, all wearing sombreros.

Former state Senator Dean Skelos and former speaker of the State Assembly Sheldon Silver have both since been arrested, tried, and found guilty on corruption charges. Meanwhile, even before the corruption trials, a nervous Cuomo closed down a commission investigating political corruption.

Hmm. I wonder why?