ENCHANTÉ – One Hundred Days
Fred and I sat at a cocktail bar on the Champs Elysées in Paris talking with Napoléon. He had agreed to a four hundred thousand dollar fee to come back from hiding and talk to us about his one hundred days. Our funding was sponsored by anonymous Wall Street backers.
“Mr. Napoléon, thank you for being here. It’s a pleasure seeing you again after we dumped our history books.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Napoléon said. “It’s pretty boring up there in St. Héléna. This comeback gave me the opportunity to frolic with Robert Branson on one of his Virgin Islands. As you know from history, I adore virgins. But I loved Josephine.”
Virgin and Josephine
“We do remember that, your highness”, Fred said. “We also remember you were beaten by the Russians in 1812 and sent to St. Elba. You know we still have problems with the Russians. Our opposition party says they meddled in our recent elections. What’s your view?”
“Meddling in someone else’s business has been Russia’s prime sport during the centuries. Nothing new. Remember Raspoutin? It surprised me that your opposition party kept their doors wide open for them to walk in and take all those pictures and listening in.”
“What would you have done?” I asked.
“I can’t speak for your opposition party but we solved these issues by marrying a Russian princess. Or for your opposition leader having a liaison with a Russian prince. She could have prevented all that. I heard Mr. Putin was available. He has a load of testosterone. Didn’t she give him half of your uranium? That’s a nice dowry.”
“But the opposition party is accusing the other party that it was their good relations with the Russians that made them lose the elections, ” Fred explained.
“I was also told that the losing party had fireworks planned accompanied by Tchaikowsky’s 1812 overture. That’s a major Russian piece of music and composed after they beat me. Mr. Putin may have put a stop to the music because he didn’t want to publicize his laison with the leader of the opposition party. Maybe that’s why they blame the other party now.”
“You know there’s much talk about the first one hundred days in American politics,” Fred said.
“So I’ve heard. My one hundred days coming from St. Elba seem to have gone viral once more. But as usual the American media gets it backwards. My one hundred days came at the end of my illustrious career.”
“Why do you think that 200 hundred years later this is still so important?” Fred asked.
“Because I didn’t achieve anything in those days. You remember I had my Waterloo.”
“But here in the US they want politicians to achieve everything in their first one hundred days. All the media are making that their sole news story,” I said.
“It only shows that in two hundred years you guys have learned nothing,” Napoléon said. “My final one hundred days were only meant to firm up a legacy to be remembered. As you see, I’m still remembered.”
“But here they want a list of major achievements,” Fred tried to clarify.
“Oh, I had achievements all right. I first beat the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians. Then Wellington got me because I suffered from hemorrhoids in my saddle.”
“So what do you think of our first one hundred days?” I asked.
“The concept has been bastardized. Except warfare, you shouldn’t achieve anything serious in those days. What would you have to show for in the next one hundred days? And the next? All you have to do is sit quiet and blame your opponents for making your country look bad.”
“You think we look bad?” Fred asked.
“You sure do. Everybody in the world wants Obama back. He talked but did nothing, that’s good politics.”
“But when the monarchy took over, they banned you to St. Helena,” I recalled. “And nobody wanted you back.”
“I went there on sick leave,” Napoléon explained. “Then my premiums went through the roof, so I couldn’t pay for them anymore. Otherwise, I would’ve been back again. To fix Napoléoncare.”
“Couldn’t you use your Veterans Care? As the Commander in Chief?” Fred asked.
“I would have to ride a horse for forty kilometers before reaching a hospital or doctor. I couldn’t because of my hemorrhoids. And they couldn’t come to me because they were too busy taking care of the dying and the burying. After two hundred years, you still have the same problem in the US.”
“It seems hard to get things done in one hundred days,” Fred philosophized.
“You said it,” Napoléon agreed. “The previous reign in France gave me a mess! Think of my achievements in the fifteen-some years of my reign! Catholic religion reinstated; monks were no longer suppressed; people got their land back; I reinstated law and order, created the Napoleonic laws and established a Constitution; I modernized education and got rid of common core; I revitalized the sluggish economy and improved agriculture; I sanitized taxation, and rebuilt the military! I made France great again. Vive la France!”
“That’s impressive,” Fred said. “Did you copy that from the Trump Administration?”
“You got your timeline wrong. The Trump Administration copied it from me.”
“How did you do all that?” I asked
“Executive orders, my friend. If they weren’t executed, I executed the non-executors.”
“I wish we had that system here,” Fred said. “Too many chefs in the kitchen and half of them don’t even know how to cook a simple omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Do you think America needs a border wall?” I asked.
“I solved that differently. I conquered my neighbors left and right and made them my soldiers. That’s how I got rid of them.”
“What’s your advice to America now?”
“Ask your Democrats to hire me. They need a leader. At four hundred thousand dollars a consultation I’m cheap.”
ENCHANTÉ – HAIR AND POLITICS
Fred and I sat at a bar drinking beer overhearing other guys drinking beer.
“I bet that that Mary The Pan wins the French elections,” one said.
“How so?” asked his buddy.
“’Cause she’s blond. Trump’s blond too.”
“But Hillary’s blond, and she lost,” his buddy said.
“I bet she wore a wig when she did,” the other guy said.
“No, that’s Maxine Waters, she does.”
“You mean if she put on a blond wig she’d become President?”
“She’d bleach it, then impeach it,” the other guy said.
“Noticed Putin’s hair’s blond?”
“I hear he’s auditioned for Fox News.”
“No kidding! Fox’s women are all blond; the men are bald or black-haired.”
“That’s racist,” a blond fellow butted in.
“Why? They all paint it, black or white,” someone else said.
“So to become President, you must be blond or paint your hair?” his friend asked.
“If you look at the primaries, only the blond ones made it.”
“But the former POTUS hair was black,” another guy said.
“Yeah, but he was black,” his neighbor pointed out.
“That’s racist,” the blond fellow repeated.
“You must be a liberal,” his neighbor said. “Only liberals call everything racist.”
“And you must be a white supremacist,” the blond fellow sneered, his voice rising.
“And you must keep your mouth shut,” his neighbor shouted, hammering his empty stein on the counter.
“Hey, guys, cool it, let’s have another blond!” Fred said.
Fresh blonds came along.
“I’ll have a black stout,” I asked the bald bartender.
“You must be a racist!” the blond fellow gibed.
“I knew you’d say that Blondie,” I said. “Go paint your hair somewhere else!”
“I stay right here,” the blond fellow said. “Free speech.”
“Free speech your ass!” Fred said. “You guys get always rude when you lose an argument.”
A blonde waitress behind the counter joined us arguing men.
“Gentlemen prefer blondes,” she said, handing me my black stout, staring down the blond loudmouth. “But for that, you must be a gentleman first.”
The blond fellow blushed and shut up.
“Hi, Amy,” one guy greeted her, glad that the ruckus abated. “We got an issue here.”
“Yeah, who wins the French elections?” Fred’s neighbor asked her. “I bet it’s Mary.”
“We just had elections, didn’t we?” Amy said.
“I mean that Mary The Pan in Paris.”
“Isn’t she a boxer?” Ami asked, holding up her arm and flexing her biceps.
“She wants to be French President, and she’s blonde like you,” Fred clarified.
“Like Hillary?” Amy said. “Then she must win.”
“But she’s extreme rightwing,” Fred’s neighbor said.
“I never eat wings,” Ami said, “left or right. Bad for your hormones.”
“Fred,” I said, “now she’s talking! I’m getting hungry.”
“I got nice spicy wings for you; just a minute,” Amy offered.
“But what about my hormones?”
“You’ve got white hair,” Amy said. “You won’t know the difference.”
“Right,” the blond fellow came back. “With that hair, you must be rightwing.”
Fred and I looked at each other.
“We’ll offer you another blond, Blondie,” Fred growled. “If you stop yammering. You guys lost.”
“Right-o,” Blondie cheered. “Blond trumps.”
ENCHANTÉ – Hurricane Hillary
This is going to be a rather personal essay. Matthew has left after much destruction. Now Hurricane Hillary is brewing that could be much worse.
All my followers know by now that I am a World War II kid who was liberated by the US in 1945. Boy, were we impressed by those GIs, driving their tanks and trucks, and rolling up those hated Nazis. The fun we had when the sun broke out, and we could walk freely on the streets again.
Ever since then we looked up at the US. Oh yes, there was always criticism about overpowering Washington and the CIA. But we felt safe. In the US, people believed in freedom and Christianity. They had great universities, the envy of many students in Europe.
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Then the great Eisenhower became president in 1953, just after Truman had completed the Korean war. I was in boarding school then. We still remember the stories about the “yellow danger” (China) and “the Russians are coming.” Would we have a World War III? Somehow, Truman had stopped McArthur from defeating aggressive North Korea, because the US did not want war with China, which supported North Korea. I think this was one of the biggest mistakes the US made at that time. Now North Korea has metastasized into a nuclear madman.
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As off John Kennedy, the US has been slipping. We stood sort of on the wayside, still thinking the US was invincible, its people utter strong, its military overpowering, its science unmatched. But with the Bay of Pigs, we began to see the first fissures in the almighty US. All right, Kennedy stared down Kroutchev to remove his nuclear stockpile in communist Cuba, but the Pigs thing was not forgotten. Nonetheless, everybody remembers where they were when they heard when Kennedy was assassinated: I had just started my first job in Holland and when I visited a friend he came down the stairs to tell me the horrible news.
Then Johnson followed with his expensive Great Society and his losing battle of Vietnam, mainly because the US lost popular support due to a growing leftist anti-war movement, headed by Jane Fonda alias Hanoi Jane. Johnson knew he would not be reelected.
The era of Nixon finished in disgrace, again pushed to a large extent by that growing leftist movement. By then I had landed in the US for a job with the World Bank in Washington D.C. I remember talking to a foreign service friend at our regular dinners in town – we were both still bachelors – arguing about the pros and cons of Nixon’s Administration. We were both conservative guys, but I couldn’t support the destruction of justice. To me, that was one of the greatest assets of the US: law and order. I was mightily impressed with the Saturday Night Massacre when the Attorney General and his Deputy resigned when Nixon fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Somehow, the principles of justice were upheld, but it left a bitter aftertaste. Now we look at an even greater destruction of justice: Hillary’s private e-mail server in service of her pay-for-play at the State Department, thousands of e-mails destroyed that would prove her criminal intent. A White House, Department of Justice and the FBI all in sync to deny it, all led by the Democrat Party. Who was worse, Nixon or Hillary? And they want her to be President?
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As a foreigner in the US with World War II still in the back of my mind, I wanted it to remain strong and principled. But something happened along the way. There was a tendency towards socialism that I had found one of the most dangerous fissures in European society. When Carter followed Ford with his fireside chats, I began to wonder. When I had to pay 14% interest on a mortgage, I wondered even more. Was this still my admired USA? Then Reagan came and proved the best President in a long time, bringing sanity back to economic management and military strength.
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Unfortunately, things changed for the worse again when the Clintons appeared on TV.
My wife and I, both “resident aliens” and guests of the US, looked at that couple’s eyes. You know a lot about people when you look in their eyes. Those watery, slippery untrustworthy eyes of Bill and that false smile with those hard eyes of his wife, Hillary. Frankly, if that weird Perot had not messed up the reelection of the older Bush, that Bonny and Clyde couple would never have made it to the White House. But history wanted otherwise. You all know what happened then. The impeachment was no surprise to us. The stories about assaulted women being threatened by Hillary weren’ t either. The media played along in many ways. While Nixon resigned, Bill did not: the Senate prevented that, despite the Kenn Starr report. All Democrats voted “not guilty.” They always do when their own kin is endangered. Republicans throw their own kin under the bus as soon as somebody gets smeared by the left and its media.
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The US became more and more divided. The media became more and more partisan. We did not understand that. We used to watch CBS with Walter Cronkite. Then Dan Rather came on, and we felt an immediate bias to the left. When he faltered with his blank screen, we turned to ABC. We liked David Brinkley and Peter Jennings. But then Peter Jennings started his leftist tunes. We switched to Tom Brokaw at NBC, but he also seemed absorbed by the leftist body snatchers. What was happening to the Great USA? What did these so-called “liberals” want? Why undermine what was once a great nation? We could not figure it.
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Abroad on missions, I had no other access to US news but CNN. Soon, those guys were no better. Everything had a leftist tweet. They called it the Clinton News Network. I watched TV 5 in France instead.
Then George Bush came after the chad election with Al Gore who had invented the Internet. 9/11, the dot.com drama, the Iraq invasion and then Katrina. I had never seen so much biased media reporting in my life in one presidency. What the hell was happening? We watched Fox News, at least you got some fair and balanced information, although it always seems that the guys or gals “on the left” are paid to be on the left, and the ones on the right just the same. It’s a boring game. When Juan Williams comes on, I mute. We’re no longer watching Miss Megan Kelly’s show. We find her pedantic, condescending, and arrogant. Her first primary debate with Bret Beyer was a disgrace.
And then we got the Obama phenomenon. Again, my wife and I sat in front of the TV, watching this Senator guy talking everybody under the table. He said to Reid he had this “little gift.” The pied piper, we said. We have nothing against “black.” We are a mixed-race couple, me a Caucasian European, she of East-Indian descent. But he had been a collaborator with Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, both socialist statist and communist uprooters, sat in the pew with that freaking Reverend Jeremiah Wright with his chickens are coming home to roost, and wanted to fundamentally change America. Even our kids voted for the guy. What for? Because McCain was a fuddy-duddy. Now they regret that vote. You vote for a platform, and its incoming administration, not for a celebrity smile.
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We found Obama dangerous and could not understand these Obama girls and all these other people falling for him. Eight years of no economic progress, utmost partisan corruption in government, a broken national health system, the Fast and Fury weapons smuggle leading to the death of an immigration officer, a suicidal immigration policy, and a dismal racial divide. A reckless failed foreign policy that weakened the US tremendously and has put the world at risk. And so forth. You call that a “legacy?”
Nowadays, we are just shaking our heads. So many people seem to support Hurricane Hillary after all her obvious misdeeds for which anyone else would have been bigly incarcerated. Outsider Trump is vilified because of lewd remarks he made a decade ago when in the entertainment world and not even a “politician,” while he enunciates exactly the policies that the US needs to get back on its feet. But the only thing that the stupid media wants to talk about is sex (sex sells) while the ship is burning, and the major issues of immigration, security, economic revival and racial harmony are not even raised. Even his party jumps ship. What has happened to this once great USA?
It is no longer the land of the brave but has become the land of the knaves. Millionaire football players don’t want to stand for the National Anthem anymore. Bleu lives don’t matter. Catholics need to get rid of their medieval religious structure. Hey, what about those radical Islamists and their horrific horrible medieval killings?
Hurricane Hillary would destroy whatever is left of this great USA if you let her make landfall. You won’t recognize it anymore once she has passed. It’s too bad we don’t have a vote. Not that it would matter much. The ignoramuses of this country prefer to live in national decline and misery, as long as they get their goodies. Meanwhile, Bonny and Clyde would rent out the Lincoln Bedroom again. In competition with the Trump hotel around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump builds things. Obama-Clinton do not build anything. Only profit from public service and taxpayer money and get rich with it. And that’s the view of a foreigner guest of the maligned USA.
You know for whom we would vote. We hope you would vote for the US revival ticket. Don’t think it’s in the bag for Hurricane Hillary, as the media want you to believe. There is that silent majority that never gets polled. They have been awakened.
Cheers,
John
Enchanting The Swan: http://amzn.to/1LPFw5o. Grad students and musicians Paul and Fiona fall in love when they perform The Swan and agree to marry, but paternal evil blocks their love. Will they play the Swan again?
Some Women I Have Known: http://amzn.to/1QIL94B. Piano John confuses playing sheet music with playing between the sheets. Will his anchors in life, Lady D and Audrey Hepburn, save him from self-destruction?
A Naughty Romance: http://amzn.to/2epkuTj. A piano affair leads to a surprising twist.