Yet Another Christmas Carol
“The nation appears to be having a kind of moment involving a gross, naked emperor and a bunch of people noticing this isn’t a nudist-friendly zone.” — Jeff Childers
Hitler was dead, to begin with. As dead as ein Türnagel. At least no one had heard him squawk since the Russkies cracked bottles of Dunkelbrau at the Brandenburg Gate, April, 1945. Nobody ever called Joe Biden “Hitler,” but around his gloomy place-of-business, known as the “White House,” they sometimes called him “Joe Biden,” with a titter and a smirk, as they called “a lid” on his bewildered day and stuffed him into the nearest broom closet.
“Joe Biden” was a mere babe in pram when old Adolf bid farewell to his smoldering Reich. But, eight decades later, after being jammed into the Oval Office by his chauffeur, one Barack Obama, the grasping, scraping, flinty, clutching, covetous old bird, sometimes known as “the Big Guy,” from whom no match had ever struck the fire of an original idea, or a good idea, or even a sound, workable idea, shuffled to his bed-chamber in the lonely compartment known as the White House “residence” on Christmas eve.
“Humbug!” he maundered to himself as he struggled aboard the cold presidential bed, absent lately of the doctor who once claimed to be his wedded wife. “Humbug” was the new flavor that Ben and Jerry had concocted just for the holiday, a “green” ice-cream featuring pureed mealworms and cocoa bean husks for a satisfyingly punitive crunch. Was Dr. Jill dead, too, now, old “JB” wondered, like his old pals Senator Byrd, and feisty Strom Thurmond and other members of “the firm?” (Or was she in the arms of that scoundrel, Emhoff?)
“Humbug,” he mumbled as he fell off into a cruel, blank slumber. He awakened — he knew not how many minutes longer — to a snorting noise, as of pigs rooting in a forest, followed by a thin, sonorous wailing that might have been the revenant of some once-mighty bombast in the Nuremberg Zeppelinfeld. And then resolved out of a mist the very figure of Hitler, his once-smart, gray Führeruniform tattered and threadbare, and the whole of his body wreathed in rotting sausages, the reek of which might have driven a rank of the stoutest, blondest SS leutnants to their knees in abject surrender.
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“What do you want of me?” “Joe Biden” cried, but this ghost of Hitler only wailed again and beckoned with gnarled finger. Suddenly, “Joe Biden” seemed to be flying out in the night air across a great swamp, and then north over the Beltway, to Scranton, Pennsylvania. The scene: a slagheap behind the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company, 1949. “JB” is a boy again — oh, to be a boy, with loose joints and a clear mind! — playing with his chums, Bob McGee and Sonny Donahoe. They are reenacting the last days of World War Two. “I’ll be Ike,” says Bob, always a leader whom “Joe” liked to please. “Sonny, you be Omar Bradley. And “Joey,” you can be Hitler.”
“Joey” loved playing Hitler: a few minutes of fulminating histrionics! Then, his hand mimicking a Walther P-38 with the muzzle pointed behind the ear, and the plosive pow! And then, writhing upon the heap of cinders acting out the Führer’s last moments.
“You were so good at it!” the ghost wailed. “What happened to you?”
“I wish I knew. Everything’s a blur now. But tell me, spirit: was I really a good you?”
“One of the best!” the ghost of Hitler moaned and dissolved into vapor.
“Joe Biden” wakes again in his bedchamber. It is flooded with bright light and trappings of the holiday: a tree festooned with what appear to be gleaming glass ornaments shaped like dildoes. And before it, enrobed in scarlet and muskrat fur, the cheerful figure of Senator-elect Adam Schiff, grinning from ear to ear, with a wreath of holly about his lightbulb-shaped head. The light is blinding.
“What are you doing here?” the president asks. “And remind me what your name is, if it’s not too much to ask.”
“I am the ghost of Christmas Present,” Mr. Schiff intones, as though dispensing yet another rumor of Russian collusion. “Come, take my hand.”
“That would be gay,” the president cries, shrinking from him. “Not a joke!”
“Is there a gayer holiday than the Yuletide?” the ghost asks with a belly laugh. “Come!”
“Joe Biden” can’t help but obey. He is out in the night air again, flying across the Potomac, but only over to the cluster of hotels known as Crystal City on the south bank, hard by the DC airport, and then clean through a window on the tenth floor of the Marriott Hotel there. The room is filled mostly with men, powerful political figures of distinction known to cable news audiences from sea to shining sea. Liquor bottles lie strewn everywhere and a small pile of white powder is heaped on the coffee table surrounded by short straws. Everyone present is in various kinds of costume and stages of undress. There, on the sofa, is Rep. Swalwell, wearing what looks like a diaper, in the arms of the ambassador from China; there, Senator McConnell, in an outfit much like the little checked frock that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, being spanked by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, trussed up in the many straps of a leather harness over his blobish torso; there, bundled together in a wing-chair, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and former Rep. Liz Cheney, writhing in the fleshy transports of amour; and squatting on the credenza before the flat-screen TV is White House Monkeypox “Czar,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, naked but for the Schirmmütze officer’s cap worn at a jaunty angle upon his shaven head, seeming to direct the goings-on.
“You must pardon them all,” the ghost of Christmas Present declares.
“Pardon them. . . ?
“Yes,” the ghost commands shrilly. “Pardon them all, all, I say, preemptively!”
“But. . . but. . . but. . . my legacy!” Cries the president.
“That IS your legacy!” the ghost retorts with a maniacal guffaw.
“Joe Biden” wails pathetically as the scene dissolves in a rank vapor of whisky and sweat.
He finds himself lying not upon his bed but on 16th Street between H and K Streets NW, in the nation’s capital. He reclines uneasily on the Black Lives Matter banner painted on the asphalt a few years back, now a bit faded under the onslaught of radial tires. But at this hour, nothing moves there and the windows of the lobbyists’ offices above are all dark.
“Where am I?” the president inquires of no one in particular. “This doesn’t feel like the beach.”
He feels something on his shoulder, turns his head, and sees, with a start of panic, a boney, skeletal hand with a few shreds of flesh still clinging to it. Looming above it, a figure in a cloak, with a hood. Two eyes burn like red LEDs from the sockets of a skull within.
“W-w-w-who are you?” the president cries.
“It’s me. . . George!” the figure says in a deep bass voice.
“George. . . ? George H. W. Bush?”
“No!”
“George plain Double-U.”
“No!”
“George, uh, you know. The thing. . . father of the country. . .whatsisname. . . ? Not a joke!”
“Not him, either, sucker. It’s me: George Floyd! I am the ghost of Christmas Future! Come with me!”
“Joe Biden” can’t help himself. He is transported magically to the Congressional dining room on a winter afternoon. Senators are milling about with cocktails in hand, some of them recognizably very old colleagues from the jolly days when he was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, before he got promoted by whatsisname, and all the trouble started, the rumors and lies about his family, something about one of his sons, the dead one, or maybe the live one, he can’t quite remember. . . Ukraine. . . Russia — it’s always Russia, isn’t it. . . those Russkie bastards! Wait, the senators are speaking! About himself, “Joe Biden” realizes.
“Hark, yo ass,” the ghost of Christmas future says. “To the voices of posterity!”
“What a grifter!” Dick Durbin remarks to Tammy Duckworth.
“Worse President in the history of the country,” Susan Collins says.
“Made Millard Fillmore look like a rocket scientist!” Chuck Schumer observes, “and they didn’t even have rockets then.”
“Good thing they finally prosecuted his whole dang family,” adds Tommy Tuberville.
“I hear Dr. Jill is ping-pong champ at Hazelton Federal Correctional,” says Lindsey Graham.
“Yeah, good thing SCOTUS tossed those preemptory pardons,” Rand Paul observes.
“But Hunter’s still on the loose!”
“Well, at least the Big Guy’s gone now,” mutters John Fetterman.
“I’m gone?” the president whimpers.
“’Fraid so,” the Ghost says.
The ghost dissolves. “Joe Biden” finds himself on the steps of the family mausoleum in Brandywine Cemetery, Delaware. The limestone crypt is covered in spray-paint graffiti, terrible imprecations and objurgations too vulgar to report in a genteel blog. “Joe Biden” lies there weeping on the cold stone in a heap. Then, suddenly, the scene dissolves and he wakes up!
He’s back in the bedroom at the White House. Sunlight streams through the windows. An aide knocks and comes in the room.
“What day is it? Where am I?” the president asks.
“It’s January 20th, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to get cracking. Up and at ‘em. Someone else is moving in here today.”
“What? What’s going on?”
“He won the election.”
“How the hell did that happen? I had it all set-up.”
“Well, sir, you didn’t end up running.”
“I didn’t.”
“Sorry. No.”
“Not a joke?”
“Not a joke, sir. Oh, by the way. Someone is here to see you.”
“Who’s that?”
“Name of Kash Patel. Has some documents he’d like you to review.”
“Never heard of him. Go ahead, send’im in. Jake told me to sign anything they put in front of me. And tell the media I’m calling a lid after that. I’m calling a lid on the whole damn thing. And tell them downstairs I could use some ice cream up here. Gawd, that’s a bright light out there. Is it moving closer? What. . .? I can’t hear you! The light! The light, I tell you! Not a joke! Hey, there’s something wrong with that light. . . ! It’s closing in. . . ! Wait. . . ! No. . . ! Arrrrggggghhhhh. . . !
Merry Christmas to all ! ! !
Coffee and a Mike Episode recorded Weds with Dave Collum and Mike Farris
It’s that time of year! In this novella, a boy runs away from home in Manhattan all the way to Vermont the night before Christmas. Tribulations ensue. “A masterpiece of comedy and pathos.” Autographed copies from Battenkill Books, Cambridge, New York.
Also for Christmas: JHK’s novel set on a hippie commune, 1967-68. “What a beautiful tale of the 1960's! It brought back so many memories of the events and emotions of that long ago time in the context of a light and wonderful story!” Autographed copies from Battenkill Books, Cambridge, New York.
What I believe needs to be a priority in the new government is an investigation of members of the Biden administration for their willfully and actively concealing the incapacity of Biden, so unelected and unaccountable people could UNCONSTITUTIONALLY run the government on their own.
That has all the hallmarks of a treasonous and coup-like adventure, and they should not be able to just sail off into the sunset after having pulled off such a criminal travesty and fraud upon the American people and the world.
Heads should roll.
" gleaming glass ornaments shaped like dildos" is an apt description of the past four years. No wait. FJB'S entire life.
Love your pith, JHK.
Thanks for the smiles.