Ruby Chandra de Montevideo rose to greet the trembling Senator Willow. She coldly extended a chubby but far from jolly hand to the latest in an admittedly very short line of faux-Democratic bêtes-noires.
‘Well, now if it isn’t Senator Deborah Mooonaaa Willow.’
Deborah’s trembling knees now had an uncomfortable squirm to accompany them.
This old practice of weaponizing names was not unknown to the American political scene.
But then, it was hardly unknown to her, either.
How many generations would it take for her to feel free to walk down the street and know…
You know, really really know, that her fears about being picked up suddenly in the night and taken to ‘Freedom’s Bay’ were groundless?
Sure, her father was an Iraqi interpreter.
So what?
Once an Ayyyraaab, always a fucking traitor.
And then that other guy.
Dickie Klindel.
Her heart leapt.
With terror, not love.
Dickie Klindel.
Arabs are not the enemy of our nation. Unpatriotic Arabs, on the other hand, cannot expect special privileges we do not accord to all the other parasites and vagabonds marauding around this… this…
What did he even say again?
***
‘Fuckin’ good shot, son!’ roared Saul Friedman.
Otis gracefully laid down his club.
‘Meaning precisely what?’
Saul stuttered, almost burping half a pint of finest Mama’s Special.
Otis wiped his brow with distaste.
‘Unless you have a birth certificate saying ‘Marcus Murdoch Spengler’ on it, it would be advisable for you to avoid making such comments in future.’
Saul Friedman blushed head to toe.
‘Yeah… y, yeah-yeah-yeah, sorry boy,’ he spluttered. ‘I, I-I-I meant, just a, a fuckin’ hot-damn good shot, is all, is all my, my-my-my-my-er, my good friend, son. Fuckin’ good shot, that’s for sure!’
Otis furrowed his brow, albeit somewhat less disdainfully than before.
‘Quite an eccentric fellow,’ he mused, almost Anglo-generous in his aristocratic bearing. ‘You have probably heard me and my people are good at golf. Am I so very wide of the mark, then, now?’
‘Oh, oh fuck yeah!’ Saul gushed, trying hard to remedy the situation and perhaps overcompensating just a smidgen, as Otis Spengler would no doubt have it.
Saul continued to run his mouth off, albeit in such a naively genial maner, that Otis practically had to staple his lungs to his ribs to avoid being incapacitated by the surges of hilarity he imagined surging through his rocking ribcage.
‘I mean, you guys, golf? No frickin’ shit, I mean, ohhh boy! I swear! You people are the fuckin’ best at that shit, no frickin’ shit! Ooo, can you people golf!’
Otis drily raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you by any chance acquainted with my elder brother, President Barack Obama?’
Saul paused a moment and frowned, suddenly lost in thought.
Relishing the moment, Otis paused; and with the delicate, pirouetting delicacy of a Venetian ballet donna di arte, enunciated:
‘Or as some would no doubt be inclined to inquire…’
Saul’s face fell like a stone.
‘Barack Hussein Obama?’
Saul’s face practically exploded with dire-apologetic energy.
‘Oh w-w-w-w-w-w-w-well hell no, no, n-n-n-n-w-w-w-well-well-well what I really meant, it’s like heh-heh-heh, er it’s like, ya see-see-see, well no, no-no-n-n, well it’s really more like this, heh heh…’
The master of intrigue had not lost his touch after all.
Now then.
Now, then, this was gratifying!
Hook, line, and sinker.
Another worthless and buffonishly unprincipled career politician, squirming at the end of the line.
About to empty the jaws of the awesome leviathanic media beast, to be munched, mangled, and spat out without mercy.
‘… I’m not like that,’ Saul finally pleaded weakly.
Another pause.
Ohhh, the artistry!
‘You are all the same to me,’ Otis haughtily declared, as he headed in the direction of the caddy-shack.
Saul hung his head in humiliation.
Dully, he twitched his neck, and then looked down again. He fiddled with the clinking coins in his pocket.
‘Just two cents left,’ he weakly murmured.
All of a sudden…
Oh, God!
‘All the same?!’ he roared, as he waved left fist in a frenzy of buried memories.
‘Now just you wait ‘til I frickin’, til I frickin’…’
Thud.
Fuck! What the hell was that?
Frickin’ post!
Urrrggghhhh! Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘Hm. I see you’re having a rather athletic time of it. Shall I assist you a little?’
Saul grunted in agony.
‘You look after yerself, a’right?’
‘Hm. Are you quite sure… young man?’
Ohhh! The delight! To see another dodgy politico rolling around in the mud like a felled Goliath.
Or should that be…
Ungoliant?
‘Hm. Urrrgghh-fffrrrgghh-ur-ur-ur-ur-UUURRRGGGHHH! Just a frickin’ post. Fuck knows why they planted them there. Frickin’ jerks. Frickin’ urgh, urgh, uuurrrgghhh… OOOHHH SHIT!’
‘As you wish,’ high-Darcied Otis.
And that was that!
A rustling in the bushes.
…
Captain Catty-Glance was on the march.
***
‘Senator Willow, I believe we are going round in circles. It does appear that for the past hour, you have done nothing but moralise and make abstract, idealistic appeals to highminded pacifist norms. That is, whenever you have not been conducting the usual self-serving, defensive apologetics for your utterly appalling speech, with its gushy unpatriotic sentimentality, its whimsical populist superficiality, and, dare I say it, its apparent failure to…
Well, shall I say, its…
Less than fully critical attitude towards a certain anarchistic overgrown vulgar-Zionist student activist by the name of Saul Terence Magilligan Friedman.
‘Do you what you want,’ murmured Willow; tense and wavering, at her end of her very last of wits.
‘Oh. You think you know where the wind is blowing, do you? What a great prophet you must be, indeed! Now, there’s a certain school of thought that says if a prophet could be stoned between the temple and the veil of mercy, it would be the greatest thing that ever happened to us! Because it would rally people around the throne of liberty, and our kingdom would advance and prosper for a thousand years. All hail, hallowed Prophetess Mona: priestly benedictions be upon thy head, and may the worthy nostrils of Cleopatra be enlarged for evermore!’
A dig at me?
Or at Saul?
Or both?
Oh, why should I even care any more!
‘You were such a clever woman. Why, I had such high hopes for you. You could have been the second woman president.
But you belong to the past.
The world is changing.
And we all needs must change with it.
For it is utterly intolerable that the greatest nation on earth, the beacon of this great grand and eternal liberty of ours and of all humanity, should dare to arrogantly vaunt itself against the tide of history.
Humanity is One.
Our World is One.
And if this so, then we must make sure this ‘One’ is truly unique, and not merely counterfeit and cowardly.’
My dreams will always be greater than your dreams.
‘Oh, will they now?’
Wait… did I just say that out loud?
‘Your dreams are certainly bigger. Too big to be accommodated by reality. This is politics, not poetry class. But if it were, I should still give you an F, for philosophical idiocy and dreamerymongering, even then.
‘Because you yourself, for you part, are rather more worried about these narrow principles and dogmatic moralisms of yours, than with the greatness and splendour of this coming world we are now creating, and is ever nigh; every footstep fulsome, as the age of glory descends upon our tabernacle with freedom in her wings.
‘Ah, entry by troops. Empty by troops, dear girl! The first blasts of the coming summer rain.’
Ruby’s gorgeous, scarlet tones purred and ululated, like Persian wine, the splendour; seas of wine and secret honey, upon yon peaching, fawn-like breasts of our holy virgin ruddy.
I rise on the storm
And I soar on the waves
Democracy’s banner
Dread crest of the braves
I need no high splendour
Or any defender
The good of Humanity
What else? … I remember
The incantation faded into silence.
The room was silent too; but the air brimmed and gestured with the utmost of malevolent intensities.
Ruby’s snow-white, stubby fingers poured a glass of water. The coolness of the ice, the bracing, healing stillness of the spring refreshment as it glugged and clinked, showering blessings, coy and ever-luresome.
Senator Willow finally raised her eyes.
‘I… do not… believe… in the greatness and the splendour of this world.’
Ruby feigned horror. It was only momentary. ‘Oh, well,’ she Nixoned out, with a substantial degree sub-Johnsonian nonchalance. ‘Everybody has their own way. Yours is out that door. What a tragedy that a person in whom I had first placed my hopes, the one person I believed in and trusted and had faith and confidence in more than anyone in all the world…
You… you damned LIAR! You trust no-one. Do you even trust yourself? God knows! Oh, God knows if anyone or anything in this world matters at all; only Ruby Chandra Montevideo, and her stupid, STUPID wars!
Should decide that the beauty and glory and richness of reality is too meagre, and she seeks some heavenly paradise of pacifistic idiocy, somewhere, well, somewhere up there, God knows where?
I have told you a thousand times I am not a ‘pacifist.’ I’ll be hanged by the goddamn neck before I let you get away with that one.
‘Well, I think you may leave. Take your dear old letter. Shred it, burn it, no-one cares what you do with it. Take your bridge, and bury it in the sea. Bury it in the forest. Bury it in the… in the sand. Yes, the sand. Now, I am quite sure, that that will really do us nicely.’
Ha! Do you think I don’t understand what you are saying?
‘Now, then… Ms Willow. Do you have anything else to say? Or dare I ask? There are quite a few hours to go before daybreak. Shall we stay up all night.’
‘I have but one thing to say,’ Senator Willow breathed, with an air of menace that even animated the normally cold-as-sea-washed-infants Ruby Chandra Montevideo; supreme leader of what was once the party of Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean and Teddy Roosevelt; and was now the loathsome, pestiferous, irredeemably humanitarian crime gang of LBJ, Barack Obama, the Clintons, and Brakeman Perrins, that horrific beast of Boston of most unhappy memory.
But especially LBJ!
He would have them beat-up dirty sheep-ass munchin’ up this fuckin’ spunked-up hogweed for a thousand years!
Senator Willow’s lungs were meagre in the eyes of many; but by God, did they pack a punch, when they were needed!
Senator Willow drew in her very last breath…
It seemed almost literally so…
‘Either kill me, or take me as I am! Because I’m damned if I’ll ever change!’
Ruby was caught on the hop. Who could have thought a feeble non-interventionist salad-muncher like Willow could have bellowed forth like this. Like some kind of blazing hawk in mid-arrow’s ignomious plunge!
‘Marquis de Sade? That’s where you get your ‘high truths’ from, then? Ha! Ha! Ha!’ cackled Ruby, rubbing her hands for a furious delight that, just for one fleetingly ecstatic moment of political orgasm, transported her far beyond the crabbid, narrow dome of her liberal-interventionist Golden Kosmos.
Ruby roared and roared. ‘I’ve heard it all now.’ She practically screamed. ‘Get out! Get out! Get out! You shan’t misspeak again!’
Willow stormed out of the room and headed for the door.
A certain lurking and lingering ‘leading light,’ such as he was, whistled to blazes; as though his future Democratic nomination campaign depended upon it, and upon nothing else whatsoever under the earth or under scarlet hellfire paradise itself.
‘Do that again and I swear I will break your neck!’ she whispered furiously.
‘Hey, baby! Well, some would say that’s actually kinda hot! I mean, there’s a certain school of thought; well, tell ya what, chicken! I would fuckin’ love you to break my fuckin’ long one? Huh? Huh? Huh-huh-huh?
‘Well, I guess you can just call me L B F! Little bitch fuckin’ Willow fun time frenzymications, all the way, baby!’
‘Just drop your stupid dick, just, all that stupid, stupid heap of waste-man-tissue of yours and let me the fuck outta here!’ warned Willow, waving her slender palm in warning.
‘Mmm-hmmm. Where’s that coy-dee-coy-ass little handy goin’?’ gushed her merciless tormentor, grasping them hugga-buggah twinsome-winniefuls vesselkins ah Democratic sacrament as firmly as ever any Grand High Priest of generations past could squeeze, could squidge.
The liturgy could never be complete, however, until he had stuck his warm, moist, reeking swinetongue down her enticingly disobedient throat; awaiting in establishment-choral piety the final benediction.
Any hole’s a goal!
‘It’s now or never, sweetheart,’ he grunted. ‘Something’s goin’ down, and it ain’t the number of Lebanese orphans, that’s for sure, my hot-damn cute-ass little honey-muffin! Let me just sample that fuckin’ Sweet-Ass Pacifist Kool-Aid o’ yours… oh Jesus H. Johnson baby, but do you just gush o’ somethin’ special! Wikileaks should be all over my girl like last month’s fuckin’ Poon-Tang-a-Boomie-Bang-a-Thailand-Surprise!
‘Woof woof! Girl gone full flamin’ honey-drippin’ Indo-China with man dem coquettish cocoa-mama shyness… Oh, by fuck if I could be inhalin’ that salty goodness right now!
‘Wahhh, now let me be just, be fuckin’ leavin’ like every last fuckin’ corner of that slender funsize ass-‘n’-bag-fuckin’-greatest-hits bonus o’ yours drippin’!
‘Ohhhh my gosh, does a good Democrat dick-waver liks that fuckin’ moooiiist ‘n’ sweeeeeeeet little pussy o’ his!
‘Urrrggghhh-hur! If you’re man dem girl gonna be my Eva freakin’ Brown to my vanilla white boy special, then let me be your Lyndon fuckin’ Goering, baby!
‘Oooooo! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shiiiiiit! Shit, I mean like fuck, ooo it’s like there’s a good little darlin’ babycakes… oooooo, fuck yeeeaaahhh! Here comes the Little Willow fuckin’ future-Presidentializing-Expressy baby….
‘Ohhh, fuuuccckkk!’
Senator Willow screamed. But that hand had always been destined to be there.
To be there.
Just there.
In her…
In her own body.
And he alone.
