A Midwinter Night’s Dream in 2022
Machiavelli and Murphy sip brandy (Cardenal Mendoza) in their comfortable overstuffed chairs at their club at eternity’s end and, playing cards, discuss the latest news. Pseudo-president Biden is in desperate political trouble, as is his political party, and with them the Deep State. Hardly anyone believes the corporate media but its members remain blissfully unaware, of anything, they only need to read from teleprompters: whatever the intelligence agencies wrote.
The two old pals had been laughing at the machinations in the Ukraine when a servitor brought Murphy a news flash. Laughing, he threw down a newly marked card: “Steven Breyer had just announced that he was resigning from the Supreme Court”. Nicholai’s eyes lit up. Oh the opportunities this presented! Murphy looked on slyly, agreeing, … but with plans of his own.
“Michelle Obama” they both whispered. And then they chatted, … although not all that honestly. They had style though.
Nicholai saw her as the answer to the pseudo-president’s problems as well as to those of his party which had been nervously waiting to be slaughtered in November. Oyez vey!! Nancy Pelosi had just announced plans to run again. But, a black woman intimately tied to Obama, what could be better! Competence and experience were irrelevant, only politics mattered. It would also eliminate her from competition for the presidency at the next election, something too many people in his party were apparently considering. And after all, only the next six years really mattered. Kamala would understand, in fact, she might also be thrilled. Anyway, did it really matter what Kamala’d been promised or what she thought (assuming she thought). Blacks loved him no matter what he’d done in the past and now he’d give them a reason to stand up and cheer again.
And it would put the GOP in a horrible spot. If they fought the nomination it would energize the Democrats’ base, and if they acquiesced, it would depress theirs. Check!
But not “mate” Murphy whispered to himself, not mate. Snickering under his breath as he was wont to do, he rubbed his hands in glee and excused himself. A bathroom break but one from which he didn’t return. Lost in his imaginative reverie, Nicholai barely noticed.
Murphy sneaked off to pour even greater delusions into the mind of another former first lady already busy dying her skin a much darker tone and planting evidence, with the connivance of her many friends in the media and her buddy Elizabeth Warren, to prove that she had a number of ancestors of African descent. “After all”, Elizabeth was saying, “don’t we all”? “Think of Lucy after all”?
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently a strategic analyst employed by Qest Consulting Group, Inc. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at www.guillermocalvo.com.
