53

Wednesday, March 3, 2021, 12PM Central Standard Time

“Taco Wednesday,” Pete said. “how I’ve missed you.”

“How are you feeling?” Mike said.

“Fine,” Pete replied. “It was just a cold.”

“You had everyone here worried,” Mike said.

“Keep everyone guessing, is my motto,” Pete said.

“I thought Janet was going to start crying,” Mike said. “I think she digs you, man.”

“Well,” Pete said, “can you blame her, really?”

“No,” Mike said. “You are a mountain of a man and well-beloved in the community.”

“Where’s Angelo?” Pete asked, as Janet hove into view.

“He’s in the hospital,” Janet said, wandering over after thinking she had heard her name mentioned. “The virus, I guess.”

“No shit,” Pete said.

“How long has he been sick?” Mike asked.

“Well, at least a month and a half, from how he’s been coughing around here, but now I guess it’s the full-blown pneumonia.”

“Poor guy.” Janet scoffed.

“Just because he got sick don’t make him some sort of a saint,” she said. “He was a pain in the ass before he got sick, and he remained a pain in the ass after he got sick. Besides being a nasty drunk.”

“Well,” Pete said, “maybe if I had his problems I’d be nasty too.”

“We all know you’re a nice guy, Pete, but there’s no need to go all Francis of Assisi on us,” Janet said.

“Well in that case, I need a drink and three tacos,” Pete said.

“And the same for me,” Mike said.

“You, you could use some Francis of Assisi,” Janet told him.

“Are you even Catholic?” Mike asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Janet said.

“Nothing,” Mike said. “Just, I didn’t think St. Francis was that big a celebrity in Protestant churches.”

“I saw the Mickey Rourke movie,” she replied.

“Okay, now I get it,” Mike said. “That was Mickey’s pre-having-work-done, beautiful-beautiful-man phase.”

“Good a basis for a religion as any,” Janet said.

“As are tacos and beer,” Pete said.

“Coming right up, St. Francis,” Janet said, and turned away toward the kitchen.

“I told you she dug you,” Mike said.

“As you say, why not,” Pete said.

“Why not indeed,” Mike said. “But as long as we are talking about religion… maybe you can answer me a question.”

“There you go again,” Pete said, in a Reagan-like voice.

“That’s pretty good,” Mike said. “Another hidden talent. But riddle me this, Batman.”

“Okay,” Pete said, wearily.

“What does ‘In God We Trust’ mean?”

Pete put his elbows on the bar and began massaging his temples.

“They asked me, ‘Have you been undergoing any stress lately?’ And I told them, ‘I can’t think of any.’ And it’s only now that I realize what it was all along.”

“No, seriously,” Mike said.

“I’m seriously getting a migraine.”

“No, I have a point.”

“It’s on the top of your head,” Pete said, “and yet somehow it’s a pain in my ass.”

“‘In God We Trust.’ It’s everywhere around here. But what does it mean?”

“Uh… we trust in God?”

“Okay. So, if you trust in God so much, why do you have to spend all sorts of taxpayers’ money to put that phrase on license plates and billboards and in classrooms and on public buildings and, I don’t know, in lady’s rooms, for all I know?”

Pete was still massaging his temples.

“I’m serious,” Mike said. “If you believed in God and trusted Him, or Her, or It, then wouldn’t you trust Him, Her, or It enough to not have to plaster that phrase on every flat surface in the state? If you really trusted in God, then you’d trust that you would not need to do much of anything, right? Trust in God means, you can relax. ‘Let Go and Let God,’ right? But that is not what I see the kind of people who push ‘In God We Trust’ doing. They aren’t trusting God at all. They think unless they have that phrase written everywhere, then really bad things will happen.”

Pete turned to Mike and said, “Friendo… you think you might be overthinking things a bit?”

“Why can’t everyone else be underthinking things?”

“So once again, everyone else is wrong and you are right?”

“It’s been happening so often lately,” Mike said. “But let’s humor you.”

“That would be a first.”

“Let’s say I’m being too literal.”

Pete scoffed. “What, you, Coach? Too literal?”

“Okay, let’s say the meaning is some broader point. It means, ‘We are God- believers.’”

“Okay.”

“But not all of us are, are we?”

“I’m starting to have less trust in God right now.”

“And even those that do believe in God don’t have the same concept of ‘God,’ do they?”

“I promise to trust in any God that makes you shut up right now.”

“So what can it possibly mean? I think it means, ‘You had better say you believe in the kind of God I believe in, or you are not one of us.’ It’s sticking it in the faces of those who may not want to knuckle under to the kind of fundamentalist literal Protestantism that passes for Christianity lately in this country. White, Republican authoritarianism, supportive of the President, without much connection to the actual Jesus Christ. It’s taking something sacred that should be beyond politics and stealing it for their side. Like they’ve done with the flag and the military. As a patriotic American, I object. And as an admirer of Jesus Christ, and a stickler for grammar and meaning, I object even more. If they actually trusted in God, they would stay completely out of politics and would not have to do billboards or license plates. They would actually TRUST IN GOD that all that stuff would work itself out. So, they clearly do not trust in God. Okay, I’m done,” Mike said, and took a swig of his beer.

“Thanks be to God,” Pete said. “You’re making me wish I was back in the hospital. So, tell me, what’d I miss last week?”

“Just my kid,” Mike said. “Came through town for his job.”

“Really? How is he?”

“Good, I think. Still a little cryptic about his job.”

“Well like I said, it’s got to be better than being over there.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You still upset about a grateful nation expressing its thanks to him?”

“Of course.”

“Thattaboy.”

Mike smiled.

“Well, I have another question,” he said. Pete began to massage his temples again.

“Apparently,” Mike continued, oblivious to his friend’s distress, “I’m an elitist who wants to silence everyone, because I think my opinions are smarter than everyone else’s.”

“Glad to hear you’re coming around. The first step is to admit you have a problem.”

“But I’m a little stuck because there’s something I just can’t understand.”

“Of course you can’t.”

“Well, whenever I disagree with some Alabaman or Texan about politics, I am an elitist pig who wants to silence them.”

“Correct.”

“And I can accept part of that. I AM an elitist pig, I guess.”

“You’re really coming along,” Pete said, sounding a bit relieved.

“Thank you. My question is this.”

“Two questions on one Taco Wednesday? I don’t know if I will survive that.”

“You’ll be fine. Here’s my second question. Now when I disagree with some Texan or Alabaman, I’m evil because I think my opinions are smarter than theirs.”

“Yes?” Pete said, uncertainly.

“So, my question is: What opinions of theirs do they consider to be dumber than mine?”

Pete’s eyes narrowed and he stared at Mike. “This sounds like another trap.”

“No, I literally have had people tell me, ‘You think all your opinions are superior to ours.’ But that’s what opinions ARE, right? I mean, when they disagree with me, do they think their opinions are inferior to mine? No. Somehow, when I think they’re wrong, I’m an elitist. But when they think I’m wrong, well, they’re just great Americans.”

Pete continued to stare.

“And when they disagree with me, it’s merely a difference of opinion, whereas when I disagree with them, and present facts to support my opinion, well, I’m trying to silence them. What’s that about?”

Pete thought it over for a second.

“Okay, I do think that liberals think they are always right and I do think they think that people who disagree with them are stupid.”

Mike thought it over.

“But again – how is that different from when you disagree with me? Should I say you always think you’re right? I mean… you DO always think you’re right when you express an opinion, right? That’s what opinions ARE.”

Now it was Pete’s turn to stroke his chin and take a swig of lager.

“There’s just something about how liberals express opinions. ‘Anyone who thinks different is stupid.’ ‘How could you be so stupid to think this?’ ‘Well I went to Harvard and this is what they taught us there.’”

Mike took his own swig and considered in turn.

“Well, what the right tells me when I disagree is ‘You’re a baby-killing atheist and God hates you.’ I think I’d rather be called stupid.”

“I don’t know. There’s something about being called stupid. It makes you want to lie in wait and seek vengeance on whoever does it.”

“Not me. Maybe the difference is I really don’t think I’m stupid. If someone called me stupid, I would just laugh. Maybe being called stupid when you think deep down that you might be stupid is what really gets people angry.”

“There’s my elitist boy, right there!”

“No, I think I’m on to something here. Now let me stipulate here…”

“‘Stipulate.’ That’s just the kind of word to use when you want to communicate with the poorly uneducated.”

“…Ha ha. Let me just state here for the record, I do think I’m stupid. I think everyone is stupid in 90% of stuff.”

“Thank you for using small words like ‘stuff.’”

“For example, I have never changed my own oil. That makes me pretty stupid at automotive stuff. I would be a babe in the woods if I had to repair or maintain most of the objects that are around my house that make my everyday life possible. I can’t fix a dryer or a dishwasher. I once fixed the switch for my sink disposal, and I couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. I wanted a Nobel Prize for it.”

“You’d be better off with a chest to pin it on, brother,” Pete said, taking a victory sip.

“I can’t grow my own vegetables or raise my own meat. I can’t make clothes or build a house. I can’t cure any diseases.”

“Sure. Who has time, when you’re…did you actually say ‘raising your meat?’”

“And that doesn’t even begin to address all the many intellectual disciplines I am a complete idiot at,” Mike said. “I am not a lawyer or a banker or a computer scientist. I suck at math and science. I mean, I know the basics, I could explain how we know the earth goes round the sun, but I can’t explain to you how we know other basic things, like what causes gravity, or why people have to die instead of living forever.”

“I can tell you that one. People have to die, or revenge would be pointless.”

“So, I am not only stupid, I’m ignorant, but I guess I’m comfortable enough in my ignorance that somebody calling me stupid is not going to get me angry.”

“But you went to some Ivy League college.”

“I was their admissions mistake of that decade.”

“Yeah, yeah, you can say that, but you went there and graduated somehow, so people think you, like, tie your shoes better than them.”

“Which I don’t. I also suck at shoe-tying.”

“But you have, like, a super power. It’s Super-Liberal-Elite-Man! He, merely by disagreeing with someone, can make them sure he thinks they are stupid, and make them want to take vengeance on him for the rest of his life!”

“That is one stupid super power.”

“I have to agree. But it’s real.”

“The thing is,” Mike said, “all they are doing is hurting themselves.”

“As most angry people do,” Pete said.

“Do you think you voted out of anger, that way? To punish elitist liberals?”

“Probably, to some extent, sure,” Pete said.

“But now it’s having real effects.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Mike said, “It might kill Angelo.”

“I think Janet might vote for that,” Pete answered.

“That’s another thing,” Mike said. “Can I prove that the President being a completely self-absorbed ignorant douche…”

“Hey,” Pete said. “That’s the Honorable MISTER Self-Absorbed Ignorant Douche to you.”

“…That his completely idiotic, negligent, me-me-me response to this whole virus outbreak killed any particular person? No, I can’t. That’s how stupid I am. But am I pretty sure that when you put a completely terrible person who only cares about himself and brags about how he knows everything already and is a genius in charge of, say, THE WORLD, then really really bad things are going to happen because of it.”

Pete sat still, not reacting.

“And the hard part is, there’s a delay. He can dismantle the government piece by piece, simply by firing the smart people, or just revolting them so much they don’t want to be associated with him, and we won’t get nuked or die of a virus the next day. Maybe even the stock market starts going up again for a while.”

Pete clinked his beer into Mike’s, which was sitting on the bar.

“My 401-k is actually above where it was when Okomo left office again,” Pete said. “Hard to believe, even to me.”

“Maybe we’re past the worst of the virus,” Mike said. “But there’s still no vaccine. Wall Street is a very bad predictor of where it itself will be in a year or even six months. No one knows. But that’s my point. Things don’t immediately go straight to hell when some idiot leader makes a terrible decision. Vietnam started out okay, and so did the Iraq War. ‘Cakewalk,’ I think they called it. But if you refuse to admit that, say, putting an angry self-obsessed moron in charge of the economy, our foreign policy, public health, our justice system, and the nuclear launch codes MIGHT be a really bad idea with extremely bad consequences, just because the world doesn’t end immediately, well, I might call that a word that begins with ‘s,’ if I didn’t have this idiotic super power that would make you hate me forever.”

“I could never hate you forever,” Pete said.

“Well thank you,” Mike said.

“I mean, why go on hating you after you’re dead? It would be pointless.”

“See? Now that’s intelligence at work right there.” They clinked beers.

“Here are your tacos,” Janet said.

“Thank you, doll,” Pete said.

“Any time,” Janet said, smiling as she walked away.

“‘Doll?’” Mike said. “Whoa. Talk about future bad consequences.”

“Says the man who can’t even let America trust in God,” Pete said. “We know where you’re headed in the afterlife.”

“I trust not,” Mike said. “But until then, let’s eat, drink…”

“And be annoying?” Pete said, crunching into his taco.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian