36

Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 8PM Eastern Standard Time

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

“You want any wine?” Vaneida asked her guests. “Ice?”

“Nah,” Janice said. “Trying to cut down.”

“Really? …You?” Vaneida asked Jenna.

“Sure,” Jenna answered.

“And you?” Vaneida said, holding the bottle toward Joe.

“No, I’m still working on mine,” Joe answered.

Vaneida poured herself a little red wine and replaced the bottle on a side table.

“So here we go,” Janice said. The four of them watched the television in silence.

The President was moving through the House chamber, mobbed by grinning lawmakers, only the nearest to him wearing masks either sporting the flag, pro-President slogans, or simply worn ironically.

“I thought the virus was gone,” Joe said.

“I heard from a friend of mine at the Department of Commerce that he makes everyone he meets wear masks and gloves and use disinfectant,” Janice said.

The chamber contained only Republicans; the Democrats had boycotted the State of the Union, both out of rage at what they regarded as a stolen election, and out of an expressed continuing concern over contagion, which they had announced was once again killing Americans who dared venture into public places.

“Look at his latest Toot,” Jenna said, holding her phone out.

–<() Watch the State of the Union tonight! Democrat Governors who refused to support National Virus Recovery whose Capitols are now surrounded by very good people should cut a deal, or face the Anger of Real Americans!

“How’s your eye?” Joe asked Jenna.

“It’s okay. It still hurts a little, but it’ll pass.”

“You mind if I take a look at it? I’ve got a little medic training. The only thing you have to worry about at this point is infection.”

“Uh, okay,” Jenna said.

Joe came over and kneeled in front of Jenna. He carefully scrutinized the area above Jenna’s eye.

“They gave you some stitches?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, it looks like they did a decent job,” Joe said. “No redness or inflammation. I would just watch out for any discoloration, especially any redness around a whitish area. Probably have a little scar, but it’ll just be something to brag about later, not like the first thing people will notice.”

“Well that’s good, I guess,” Jenna said.

Joe sat back down and they continued watching. The President was about to speak. He raised his hands up, palms out, to quiet the crowd. They simply cheered louder, though the sound was altered a bit by the few masks. He grabbed the rostrum and nodded, looking from side to side grimly.

“He looks like Mussolini,” Janice said. “Same gestures.”

Finally, he deigned to speak.

“Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress who actually showed up, and my fellow Americans: The state of the Union is great.”

Thunderous applause.

“Since the last time I spoke to you,” the President said, pausing to sniffle, “our nation has been under assault by enemies both visible and invisible. The visible enemies aren’t visible to you tonight because they decided not to show up. They are cowards. They deprived me of my rightful first term, they impeached me, they called me names, they rooted for the virus to kill you all, they tried to accuse me of so many awful things. But they failed, and America succeeded. So here we are, and WE are America, and America is great.”

The watchers in Vaneida’s apartment barely even bothered to roll their eyes.

“The invisible enemy – not the invisible enemies I just spoke about, who failed – failed – to destroy me, but the invisible horrible horrible disease they tried to help destroy America and me – that Invisible Enemy has been defeated. By me. Personally. It’s gone.”

Thunderous ovation.

“But we can be even greater than the great we have made America already,” the President said. [Sniff.] “So tonight, I will lay out my plan, and it’s a great plan, a greater plan, to be honest, to keep, and make, America even greater again.”

Clapclapclap.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Jenna said.

“Hey, finally an accurate slogan for all of America,” Janice said.

All four of them laughed.

“My first term was stolen from me – from you, really,” the President said. “So, in this, my real first term, we will finally be able to drain the swamp the way I promised you last time. Last term the Democrat party attacked me from even before I took office. With their Deep State allies” [long sniff] “and Angry Democrat prosecutors, they enacted a Hoax upon the American people. They thought they could overthrow a legitimate election, destroy our democracy. But they failed, and they are losers. Losers!”

“He’s insane,” Janice said.

“He’s President, though,” Vaneida said.

“You coming around to our point of view on that, Joe?” Janice said.

“I never thought differently about what the outcome should have been,” Joe said. “But it’s true that those Republicans don’t play. Not by the rules, anyway. They are about never giving an inch. They don’t believe in moral victories. We probably have to be more like that.”

The President was laying out a catalogue of grievances.

“They criminalized mere politics,” he said. “They never accepted that they could possibly lose an election to an outsider. They began their secret war against the American people even before I took office. They persecuted anyone who worked with me or for me. They made it a jailable offense to associate with me. They aligned themselves with foreign enemies against me. They got the Fake News to say horrible horrible things about me.” [Sniff.] “They got in the way when I tried to make peace around the world. I saw through them. I refused to cooperate. They thought the virus would stop me. But it didn’t. They said I was lawless. But it is they who are lawless. And now they will get what they deserve. The American people are demanding that they be called to account. Many of them are surrounding state capitol buildings right now, demanding their rights from un-American Democrat governors. And the Real Americans will not rest until they are given their rights.”

Clapclapclapclapclap.

“So, to begin this, my first real term, we must bring these un-American traitors to justice. I will be having my Attorney General investigate these people, and see what ties they have with anti-American forces around the world and across this great country.” [Sniff.] “They will not get away with their attempted coup. And never again will they be allowed to threaten the legitimate will of you, the real Americans.”

Clapclapclapclap.

“Do you think he means that?” Jenna asked Vaneida.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Vaneida said. “I guess I would say, would you have thought four years ago that he was going to do all the shit he did in the first term? Fire the FBI Director who was investigating him and then admit to obstruction of justice on national TV? Say he believed the Russian president when he said he didn’t try to sway the election in 2016? Just stop having press briefings? Blackmail a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his election opponent? Vandalize the government, replacing all the people who knew anything with amateur sycophants? Endorse concentration camps in China? Defend and ally himself with real fascists and Nazis? And a thousand other things like that? No, I can’t say he won’t do all this stuff he’s saying he’ll do. I hope he doesn’t, but I can’t say he won’t. What can stop him now?”

The President sneered and sniffed haughtily and began speaking again.

“We will appoint judges, and yes, multiple more justices to the Supreme Court, multiple, at least, who will uphold the law and not legislate from the bench. No more will socialist schemes be forced on an unwilling public. No more will business be shackled by unfair rules. No more will good religious people be unable to follow their consciences in their workplaces and homes.”

“And we know how you’re all about the conscience and religion,” Janice said. “You are one solid religious guy. …Hey, look at the Vice President.”

The Vice President, sitting behind the President, had assumed a seraphic, faraway look at this mention of religion.

“Either he’s about to get Raptured, or…” Jenna left her thought unfinished.

“Or he’s finally taken that crap he’s been processing since 1977,” Janice said.

“And we will finally begin to see an end to the horror of legalized abortion,” the President said, sniffing again.

Vaneida shook her head. “How many abortions do you think he’s been personally a party to?” she said.

“More than zero, anyway,” Janice said. “Hey, what’s with all the sniffling? You think he’s got the virus?”

“I think maybe…” Jenna made a gesture to indicate someone snorting an illicit substance.

Joe got up. “Bathroom?” he asked.

“Down the hall, on the left,” Vaneida said.

Joe walked off. This is like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, he thought. Running comedic commentary on the idiot…who is so idiotic he is squashing everything that these folks want.

He didn’t know quite how to feel about it. It had been some time (maybe forever) since he had felt he was squarely in the President’s camp. But he was not all the way over to the liberal wing of the Democrat party, either. For one thing, he still called it “the Democrat party,” at least in his head. For another, there were so many issues on which he had failed to develop a solid stance. Abortion? He had never really thought about it. Affirmative action? Business regulation? What did he know about these things? All he knew was that Max seemed to be a lot nuttier than Vaneida. He could not find anything on which he really differed with Vaneida, as they took one issue at a time and she explained what she thought. But after a year or so, he still had this picture of America as a shining city on a hill, like Reagan said. He felt it was still out there, that America where noble white men strove for freedom and justice. Reagan. The Kennedys. FDR. Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson. But Washington and Jefferson had owned slaves. Reagan had said terrible racist things, and had never fought in war. FDR interned the Japanese. The Kennedys were sociopaths about women. Nothing was untainted. It bothered him. We’d killed literally millions in Vietnam. Even Martin Luther King was a womanizer.

He had wanted America to be good. Now he wrestled with how to reconcile his ideal America with the flawed, sinful America that actually existed, and still have enough idealism to move forward.

He washed his hands and looked in the mirror.

And then, too… you’re not being straight with any of the other people at this State of the Union watching party, he said inwardly to his reflection.

** *
In the living room, the women watched the President going on.

“These Democrats have a choice. They can choose to be part of America, or they can choose to fight against us. The battle is joined for the future of this country. We are on the side of right, on the side of the future. On the side of the Founders of this country. They are on the side of ‘We Can’t.’ We are on the side of ‘We Will.’”

Clapclapclapclapclap.

“Triumph of We Will,” Jenna said.

“Hey Vaneida, you get any answers from Joe about his ‘You guys’ tirade in the van?” Janice asked her.

Vaneida shifted in her chair.

“Not really,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since then until now, anyway.”

“Should we throw him up against the wall?” Jenna said.

“Hey,” Janice said. “He’s mine. …As regards interrogation.”

The other two laughed just as Joe came back in the room.

“What’d I miss?”

“Oh, just more of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” Vaneida said.

“With faith in God Almighty,” the President said, “to guide us to further greatness, we stand united – we real Americans stand united – to bring America to its destiny as the great great nation we know it is and can be.”

Standing ovation – clapclapclapclapclapclapclapclap.

“Now the Democratic response,” Jenna said.

Joe barely restrained himself from saying, “Really?” He had a fairly low tolerance for politics, he decided.

“Who’s giving it?” he finally asked.

“A congresswoman,” Janice said. “Have some more wine.”

Joe passed his glass to her. She filled it up almost to the rim.

“Whoa,” he said.

“Just getting you drunk so we can figure you out,” Janice said.

“There’s…not a lot to figure out,” Joe said.

“Oh, I think maybe there is.”

“Let’s watch,” Joe said.

“And now the Democratic response to the State of the Union, from Representative Jamie Evans of Kansas, broadcasting by Skype from an isolated location.”

“Had to be from the heartland,” Janice said.

“And a woman, and black,” Jenna said.

“And a Democrat,” Vaneida said.

Joe looked at her in slight confusion. She looked back and raised her eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Obviously.”

“We Democrats have boycotted the man who says he is President, who has not been duly elected by the people according to the Constitution. The Constitution demands 270 Electoral Votes. He got 269 – maybe. A recount in Nebraska has yet to be undertaken, but federal judges have declared that it must go on, according to the law. The Inauguration almost two weeks ago was a sham and a charade. It never should have taken place. The election was not valid.

“We used to mock countries whose leaders mounted sham, fixed elections like the one we just saw. We used to go around the world and tell them that they should do it the way we did it – with a free, open, fair, unobstructed vote based on a free and open and honest exchange of views. Well, since 2016 we no longer do it that way. We are the object lesson of what to avoid, not the paragon of electoral virtue and hope we once were. Not only did this so-called ‘President’ reinstall himself in office without actually being elected, with the help of his formerly great, now beyond-corrupt party, a party that now serves merely as a craven group of minions providing cover to this would-be all-powerful dictator; he and his party accomplished this crime via mass suppression of the vote in every potential swing state, as well as every Republican state.

“If you were a Republican in 2020, there was no way you could run on your record. You certainly could not point to promises kept, or good times brought to pass by your doing. In his first Inaugural speech in 2017, the then-President spoke of ‘American Carnage.’ He was speaking at a time when unemployment was at 4.7 percent. GDP growth had been slow, but steady, between 1.5 and 3 percent for seven years, constrained by Republicans’ unwillingness to stimulate the economy when a Democratic president might get the credit. Job growth had been positive for 76 consecutive months. Violent crime had been declining for two decades, and was near a 50-year low. This he called ‘carnage.’

“Contrast this with the situation we see today. After the gigantically expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in 2017, the economy cruised on a sugar high for two years, then hit the iceberg of the virus. We almost instantly went from 3.5% unemployment to about 20% – we may never know the true number – as our economy completely stopped. And why did it stop? Because our government has ceased to function. Because you have ceased to demand from your government the kind of excellence that John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and the Founders – and Okomo! – demanded. You have been taught by the Republican Party to never expect anything from your government. And under Republican rule, nothing is exactly what you got. We have armed white supremacist gangs taking over federal facilities in remote and not-so-remote areas, and menacing our polling places in our cities, and threatening federal judges and the elected legislators and governors of many states – with zero federal response. Armed gangs of desperate people are looting stores and robbing banks. And what does this ‘President’ do? Attack the desperate, while letting the armed and dangerous run wild! Nonviolent citizens protesting true injustice are being pulled into unmarked black vans by who knows what kind of federal ‘law enforcement agencies,’ apparently working on behalf of this President’s political interests.

“Now this unelected pretender can babble all he wants about how unexpected the virus was – even though his own people warned him about it. He can say how unpredictable it was – even though his own people predicted its exact course and begged him to take action. He can try to blame Democratic governors for the terrible toll this virus took – even though it took just as terrible a toll, in the end, in states governed by Republicans. And he still minimizes it even after he himself got it – or so we are told.

“But one thing he can never say is that the United States did not have the highest number of cases, and the highest death toll, from this virus, of any country in the world. And that includes China and India, two nations each roughly four times the population of the United States.

“China and India. Now I am kind of an old lady. When I was growing up in Topeka, we did not have much. But we had food. And my mother would say to me, ‘Jamie, you have to eat everything that’s on your plate, because there are children in China and India who do not have enough to eat.’ And I would eat that food, and thank god I was not in India or China, where I might not have enough to eat. But now, in America, in Topeka, we are having food riots. We have people who have not worked in almost a year, who have not been paid, whom the government of this man has abandoned. Some of them are holding up food pantries and grocery stores. We used to be the shining beacon for the world. Now it is we who are pitied by India and China, because it is our people who are going hungry. If there is one symbol of this nation under this President, it is armed guards holding off hungry crowds outside supermarkets. This is what he has led us to! THIS is American Carnage, my fellow Americans! And it is he who has brought it to us, through his incompetence and his complete indifference to the sufferings of others – no, his joy in the sufferings of others.

“He speaks of the virus as the Invisible Enemy. I would say to you, the people in desperation are the Invisible Americans. They are his true enemy, and they are invisible to him, and he is waging war on them ceaselessly. Why? Why? Because they live in a ‘blue state’? Mr. ‘President,’ hunger has no color. Not anymore. But you don’t care. We used to have accurate counts of the number of hungry and poor in this country, and we used to take care of them. Now, and I can tell you this, as a Kansan, he has dispersed the people who used to watch out for these Americans. He took the Economic Research Service of the Department of Agriculture, and he transferred the entire workforce to my part of the country. He did this on purpose so that two-thirds of them would resign, and stop counting these Americans, and they could be invisible, the way he wants them to remain. And so, they starve out of sight, and are never counted, and he makes up whatever numbers he wants. His party makes it impossible to apply for benefits, so that he can say no one needs them. He took a huge fraction of America out of the calculations for unemployment, so he could show an ‘improvement’ leading up to the election.

“And he urged governors to reopen their states, against every bit of advice and wisdom of the medical experts, far too early. He held his super-spreader rallies. And the result was tens of thousands more deaths. We tore our society apart over Vietnam when I was a little girl, over 58,000 Americans killed. Well, last year alone, in less than three months, we had more deaths than that from the virus! In just four months, we had doubled Vietnam’s death toll. In six months, it had tripled. That is American Carnage, my fellow Americans. He didn’t care. He wanted to open the mall up, even if it killed 50,000 more people, 100,000 – it was all about him! American Carnage!

“Now he seeks to distract you further with talk of retribution against those who tried to uphold the law against him. He fired anyone who dared investigate him and his friends, and then had their replacements investigate them. He has divided this country, and profited – not just figuratively, but financially, materially – from that division he knowingly, gleefully sowed. And unless we all get together and stand up, and demand the kind of government that befits a free people, now, he will finish the job of destroying 244 years of the American experiment. He said American Carnage would end under his rule. Instead, it truly began under him.

“He is unfit to hold any office of public trust in this country. He ‘won’ re-election” [here she made quote marks with her fingers] “through vote suppression and lies, just as in 2016 he won with foreign interference and lies. We cannot accept this if we want to ever again be a free people. And my fellow Americans, getting this one man out of office is not enough. Unless all those who committed crimes on his behalf are brought to justice, unless the name of ‘Republican,’ that adjective that Abraham Lincoln was once so proud to wear, that name that thrilled millions of slaves who were freed in its name, sadly, unless that name is now made a badge of shame in this country, we will never again be a truly free people. If in twenty or fifty years someone in this country is heard to say, ‘Oh, that President, you know, he had some good ideas, he was onto something,’ then we will have lost everything that ever made us proud to be Americans. We must be prepared to fight, my brothers and sisters. Fight for your rights. Fight for bread for the poor – who now number 100 million. Fight for your home, you millions who face eviction. Fight for proper protections at work. Fight for your health. Fight for your grandma. Fight for your children’s future. Fight this evil man! Demand a full accounting! Demand 270 Electoral Votes! People speak of ‘Re-Impeach the President.’ There is no need for re-impeachment, because only a president can be impeached, and he is not the President at all!

“My fellow Americans… I am hanging out a shingle for liberty now, and it reads: HEROES WANTED. And that means you, ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes life is not fair. You have to choose between comfortable, silent cowardice, or running to danger to be a hero. This is one of those times.

“Answer the ad, ladies and gentlemen. Answer the ad. HEROES WANTED. God bless America, ladies and gentlemen. But YOU’D better bless America too, my brothers and sisters. This may be our last chance.”

Joe was on his feet now. He didn’t even recall getting up. He looked around. The others were on their feet too.

“Where the hell was she last year?” Jenna said.

“Wow,” Janice said. “Wow.”

Vaneida was silent.

“That was…” Joe began, then trailed off.

“That was fire,” Jenna said.

“A year late and a dollar short,” Janice said.

“She dissed our banner,” Vaneida said, laughing. “You notice that? But otherwise, that was some oration right there.”

She walked over toward the kitchen.

Joe followed her.

“I need to talk to you about something.” Joe said. “Something serious.”

“Really?” Vaneida said. “Okay. Not now, though. I gotta host this.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “Dinner maybe?”

“I have a lot on my plate this week,” Vaneida said. “Administrative crap. How about a week from tomorrow?”

“Okay,” Joe said, and walked back out into the living room.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian