Political Satire: Having trouble surviving these times? You’re not alone. Join us in columnist John F. Di Leo’s exploration of an alternate universe, where we imagine the impossible:
Joe Buckstop, an aging, corrupt old fool, somehow becomes president in his basement, and every night, an aide has to bring him his soup and discuss the events of the day as he prepares to receive his nightly meds…
Dateline, April 9. Begin Transcript:
“Good evening, sir… You in there, sir?”
“Yeah! Over here! Come on in!”
“This is the weirdest thing. I just can’t get used to it.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, that you’re all alone, no aides, no security… I always figured, your job… you’d never be left alone. It’s so peculiar, sir.”
“Oh, it’s fine, as long as I have my soup… What’s the soup tonight?”
“She said it’s pizza soup, sir.”
“Pizza soup?”
“Yes sir.”
“But you’re the pizza guy, aren’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“A pizza guy delivering a pizza soup. That’s kind of funny.”
“Hilarious, sir. May I go now?”
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know…. It’s a tomato soup with pizza type things in it, sir. Sausage, pepperoni, onion, peppers. Just what you’d expect, sir.”
“Oh.”
“I have to get back on the road, sir. Deliveries to make, sir.”
“I thought you said they make this your last stop?”
“No sir. They have been making this the last stop of a trip, but a trip is just three or four houses, maybe five, sir. A pizza delivery guy goes through a lot of trips in a night, sir. We do several, then come back to the pizza place, then pick up several more orders to deliver, then come back again… again and again, all evening, sir.”
“Sounds inefficient, doesn’t it?”
“Do you place your order at the exact same minute as everyone else in town, sir?”
“Well, I suppose not, but…”
“And do you like ice cold pizza, from being the last delivery out of forty orders in a night, sir?”
“Well, I suppose not, but…”
“Well, then that’s why it works like it does, sir. Everybody orders at different times, they make the pizzas as the orders come in, and they send them out for delivery as the drivers show up, ready for orders. It’s actually very efficient, sir.”
“But you’re all in the car all the time, you’re all using up gasoline all evening…”
“And everybody gets a fresh pizza, made just for them, just the way they like it, while it’s still hot. Nobody is the fortieth delivery. It’s a lot more efficient than you’d think.”
“But who manages it then? Who manages to make it so efficient?”
“Nobody ‘manages it,’ sir. It just happens that way.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“The market manages it, sir. The free market. The invisible hand, sir.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the perfect answer, sir. It’s the right answer. It’s the American answer, sir.”
“I just can’t help feeling like something’s missing.”
“Well, sure, something’s missing. There’s no regulator. No government bureaucrat telling everybody when to call and when to cook and when to drive and who to deliver first.”
“That’s right!”
“And that’s why it works, sir. Because there isn’t any idiot like that telling everybody what to do. Orders come in, and we fill them. Done. Easy.”
“Something feels strange…”
“You people always think we need some nanny, watching over us all the time, taking the biggest cut of all while slowing us all down. You’re wrong. We don’t need it. Regulators don’t help, they hurt. Everything they touch.”
“Oh no. Some things HAVE to be regulated. It’s in the Constitution.”
“What? Since when do you care what’s in the Constitution, sir?”
“Well, we’ve been working on some gun measures this week, and that’s one area where it’s right in the Constitution! It’s Got to be regulated. Says so! Right there!”
“Are you talking about the Second Amendment, sir?”
“Yep! Right there in black and white!”
“You’re talking about the Whereas clause, aren’t you? A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state… you’re talking about that, sir?”
“Exactly!”
“Look, this is hard for me… I’m trying my best to be polite, sir, so believe me, meaning no disrespect or anything, sir, you don’t have the slightest idea what that clause means, sir.”
“Hey, Come on, Man!”
“Look there isn’t time to give you a history of the entire War of Independence here, sir, but if you think a well regulated militia means a bunch of Washington DC bureaucrats issuing forms and rules and tracking people’s purchases, then you and your whole team may as well be smoking opium.”
“Huh?”
“Look… I have to get back to my route, so I’m gonna be brief. What do you know about the Siege of Boston, sir?”
“The what?”
“Figures. Okay, you know how the War of Independence began, sir? At Boston? With the spring battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, sir?”
“Umm… yeah, I’ve heard of them…. what does that have to do with…”
“And are you familiar with how the colonists basically drove the British into the city of Boston, and the Redcoats basically stayed in Boston, surrounded, for a year, with the British in the city and the Colonial forces sitting outside the town, in a kind of a stalemate, sir? Are you familiar with at least that much history, sir? Basically from April 1775 to April 1776, sir?”
“Well, yes, I think I remember something about that…”
“Okay. Well, here’s what the Redcoats didn’t know. The Redcoats thought they were surrounded by an army. The Colonists out there LOOKED like an army. But they really weren’t.”
“They weren’t?”
“No sir, they weren’t. When General Washington arrived in June 1775, he was horrified to find that the ‘army’ he was taking command of was untrained, unpracticed, unfamiliar with weapons. Most of them were farmers who’d never held a gun, sir. They had no experience with guns, sir.”
“Well, now they were in an army, so they’d get… what’s it called… shoe camp, right?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Shoe camp? Sandal camp? It’s something like that, isn’t it? it last six weeks, right? My campaign staff saw a movie about it once, let’s see. Stripes, I think…”
“You should be the one wearing stripes, sir….”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, never mind. Look, we have boot camp now, sir…”
“That’s it!”
“Yes, but we didn’t have it then, and we couldn’t have had it then. That’s the point of the story, sir. What General Washington realized when he got to Cambridge…”
“Washington went to college in England? I never knew that.”
“What? No, he didn’t. Where did you get that idea, sir?”
“You just said he went to Cambridge!”
“Huh? Oh… no… Cambridge, sir…. not the college… Cambridge, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, sir. It’s where the General took over command of the army, such as it was, sir.”
“Oh.”
“Look, when Washington got there, he was horrified because his alleged troops didn’t know how to be troops… and he COULDN’T train them on the spot, sir, because there wasn’t time, and there wasn’t material, sir. We didn’t have ammo to spare, sir. We didn’t have gunpowder to spare, sir. We didn’t have enough muskets, sir.”
“Come on, man! That’s crazy! We have the biggest military on earth!”
“TODAY, sir. Yes, TODAY we have the biggest and best military on earth, but back then, we had untrained, unarmed, unshod recruits who didn’t know a rifle bore from a walking stick, sir.”
“They didn’t?”
“That’s what I said, sir. General Washington could’ve routed the redcoats from Boston as soon as he arrived if his troops were equipped and experienced, but they weren’t. They were untrained and we didn’t even have the materials with which to train them. That’s why that stalemate lasted a whole year, sir. The redcoats assumed they were surrounded by an army of equivalent strength, and the Colonials had to keep up a charade for a whole year that they really were! It was the diciest con in the history of warfare, sir.”
“Wow.”
“Wow is right, sir. So the lesson that our Founding Fathers took away from the early years of the war, sir, was that when you call up people for a fight, they’ve got to ALREADY be ready. They’ve got to ALREADY be trained, sir, experienced with all the weapons they might need in battle, sir. The Founding Fathers realized that we can’t count on having the time or the equipment to teach people from scratch, when we might get invaded without notice, sir.”
“Well, but will that ever happen in real life?”
“We were hit at Pearl Harbor without notice, sir. A college full of American students in Grenada prompted a short war without notice, sir. Even our civil war in 1860, which you could say sort of had a little notice, sure didn’t have much. A country can go from peacetime to wartime in an hour, sir, in as long as it takes to receive word of an attack or to issue a declaration. You don’t have time to round up and teach a million men how to operate a rifle, sir!”
“Oh.”
“So what the Founders did… and frankly, I’m talking more about one Founder than anybody else, sir, General Washington… was they realized that for this country to be safe and free, we need everybody in the country to be comfortable with arms in case of war. We need everyone to ALREADY be so used to shooting that if we need them to shoot for our defense, they won’t have to be taught; they’ll take to it like a duck to water, sir.”
“Gee. I never thought of it that way. But it doesn’t matter anymore… now we have an army already, always ready so we don’t need to just sign up newcomers. It’s an antiquated idea now.”
“Sir, with all respect, you took an oath to that document, sir. As it’s written, without any adjustment, without any fingers crossed behind your back. The Constitution says ‘a well regulated militia being necessary to the survival of a free state,’ because that’s a timeless statement, sir, it’s not limited to 1775 Massachusetts. It’s forever.”
“But they got those regulations, and we still have those regulations now. I’m not opposing the regulations; I’m all for them. Washington hired Captain Stubing to do training, and they did, and still have all that today…”
“Captain Stubing, sir?”
“Yeah. That guy that went to Valley Forge.”
“That was Baron Von Steuben, sir. I think you’re thinking of the Love Boat, sir.”
“Oh.”
“And that’s not what they meant by a well-regulated militia, sir. The militia isn’t the army at all, it’s all free adult citizens, sir. That’s what the militia has always referred to, sir. It’s not a formal organization like the army; it’s the citizenry, sir. All of us. We’re expected to be ready in case of war, so that we can take arms instantly when the need arises, WITHOUT needing some Prussian fop to show up and bark instructions at us in French for Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette to translate into English!”
“What???”
“The 2nd amendment is about defense, sir. It’s about defense from any enemy – whether savages or Brits or Spaniards or bandits or wild mountain lions in their day, or Central American drug gangs or ChiCom troops or escaped convicts or rattlesnakes and alligators today, sir.”
“Huh?”
“The beauty of the 2nd Amendment, sir, is that by using our weapons in our normal daily lives – whether to hunt deer for dinner or to practice marksmanship as a hobby or to do security for a business or to just keep them at hand for home defense… when the time comes when we need guns to defend our community, all that training, all that practice will come in handy, and we’ll be ready.”
“But what about the regulations?”
“There aren’t any regulations, sir!”
“But it says so!”
“No it doesn’t, sir! You’re imagining it!”
“Am not!”
“Sir, the word ‘regulated’ doesn’t mean what you think it does. They didn’t have a Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms back then, sir. They didn’t have ‘regulations’ they way you think of them.”
‘Then why did they put it in the sentence, smarty pants?”
“They DIDN’T, sir. They put ‘well-regulated’ in the sentence. It’s not a government department, it’s an adjective. It means ‘practiced, experienced, adept, talented,’ sir.”
“Huh?”
“Look, when our Founders used the term, they weren’t imagining some far off future when fat fools in the federal bureaucracy were creating hundreds of stupid wasteful departments right and left. They never dreamed of such an idiotic, unconstitutional future, sir. They just said, we need all Americans to be proficient in the use of arms, that’s all.”
“It is?”
“Yes sir. They knew it wasn’t enough to say that you have a right to do something, because you might not choose to take advantage of that right. Look at the First Amendment, sir. It doesn’t say you HAVE to go to church, or you HAVE to go to public meetings, or you HAVE to write books and newspapers. It says you have a right to, but it doesn’t say you have to. It’s up to you. You’re free to do these things, but you don’t have to do them.”
“Huh. I never…”
“Yeah, I know. Anyway, the 2nd Amendment stands alone because it wasn’t really meant to be as optional. The 2nd Amendment says a well-regulated militia is NECESSARY for our very survival, sir. So to use modern lingo, sir, what they were saying is, in order for our country to function as intended, it’s imperative that all law-abiding citizens be encouraged to be expert in the use of weapons, in case their community needs them. That’s what the 2nd Amendment really means, sir. It’s almost a command.”
‘Wow.”
“It doesn’t QUITE go that far, because the Founders were libertarian, so they weren’t going to force people to do anything, but they wanted to stress as strongly as they possibly could that to be a good citizen, you should own firearms, and practice with them, and become expert in their use, so that when you were needed to defend your home or your neighborhood or your state or your country, you would be ready and able to do so immediately.”
“Wow.”
“Now, I’ve really got to get back to my route, sir. I guess I should be glad to have had the opportunity to explain all this to you….”
“Wait, don’t go, you haven’t given me a chance to convince you of my side of it…”
“Sir, you couldn’t do that if you had all the time in the world.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m right, sir.”
“And I’m left? You think it’s as simple as that? Look, there’s always common ground, son, it’s not just about right and left…”
“No, sir, I wasn’t talking about right and left, sir. I was talking about right and wrong. I’m right and you’re wrong, sir, because I stand with the Founding Fathers. Nothing you or I do or say can change the meaning of the Constitution because it was set in stone 240 years ago, sir, and it is timeless, sir.”
“I, uh…”
“I’ve got a job to do, sir, so I’m going to get going now…”
“Look, I don’t have to stand for this. I could fire you!”
“No, sir, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Thank God, I don’t work for you. Good night, sir.”
Copyright 2021 John F Di Leo
Excerpted with permission from “Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume One,” from Free State West Publishing, available in paperback or eBook exclusively on Amazon.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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