Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Vol II – Episode 80: Saxons, Normans, and Towers, and Leek & Stilton Soup

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…

Note: We continue reprinting roughly every other chapter from Volume Two. In today’s episode, Joe Buckstop is on a diplomatic mission in Europe for a few days of meetings. His regular soup aide is still back home, and the English fellow delivering his soup comes at the discussion from a very different perspective…

Saxons, Normans, and Towers, and Leek & Stilton Soup

Dateline June 12. Begin Transcript:

“Good evening, Sire, I’m here to deliver your evening soup, sir, if you’re ready for it, sir.”

“Huh? Who are you?”

“Croaker Norge, at your service, Sire. Delivering your Leek and Stilton Soup, sir. I’m with the Foreign Office, sir.”

“The what?”

“The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, sir.”

“What on earth is that?”

“Mmmmm… It’s a department of the government, sir… headed up by the Foreign Secretary, sir.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Perhaps it might be simplest to think of it as our Secretary of State and State Department, Sire.”

“You don’t run our State Department! We do! I just appointed our Secretary of State a couple of months ago, in fact. What IS his name now… I can never remember… Let me check my notes… darned font is so small, I’m always blinking my eyes and I still can’t read it…. Oh, never mind. Anyway, I already have a Secretary of State. Don’t need another one.”

“I am sorry, sir, I must have been unclear. I am with our Foreign Office, which is LIKE your State Department, sir. Not exactly like it, but more similar than, say, other departments, Sire.”

“What’s your name?”

“Norge, sir. Croaker Norge.”

“That’s a weird name. You an immigrant?”

“My family has been in England for at least a thousand years, Sire. Before that, I cannot say.”

“So you don’t get around much, huh?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Well, just that this is such a small country, I’d figure you’d be busting at the seams to get out and travel, but if you’ve been here a thousand years, I guess not…”

“I didn’t actually say I didn’t travel, Sire, just that my ancestors have been here since before the Conquest, sir.”

“What conquest?”

“The Norman Conquest, Sire.”

“Who’s Norman? Hmmm… I don’t think I know any Normans. Let’s see. Norman Rockwell, Norman Fell, Norman Mailer… I feel like I was just thinking about this recently… Have you and I had this conversation before?”

“We just met, sir.”

“Well, yes, but have we talked about this Norman guy before?”

“I don’t… well… I don’t know what to say, sir. We only just met a minute ago, sir. We haven’t spoken before, so we couldn’t have had a conversation about the Norman Conquest before, sir.”

“Oh.”

“And there isn’t any person named Norman, sir. I was referring to the Norman Conquest of 1066, sir, that’s all.”

“Oh, I see. When was that?”

“Well, 1066, sir.”

“I don’t understand. Is that some kind of military time? No, I’ve never heard the minutes go beyond 60… when was this again?”

“1066, sir. The year, 1066. A thousand years ago, sir.”

“Come on, man! You couldn’t have been around a thousand years ago! You look barely thirty!”

“Good guess, Sire, but i didn’t say I was here for a thousand years, I said my ancestors have been here at least a thousand years, sir.”

“Oh.”

“I just used the Conquest as a frame of reference, sir, because everyone knows what you mean when you mention the Conquest, sir. that is, until now, sir.”

“What changed?”

“Oh, I just meant, this is the first time someone hasn’t known what I meant when I mentioned the Conquest, sir. Perhaps it doesn’t function so significantly in the history books Across the Pond, sir.”

“Now there you go again, talking about stuff I don’t know anything about. Where did this all happen, anyway?”

“The Norman Conquest, sir?”

“Well, that’s what you’ve been prattling on about, isn’t it?”

“I am sorry, Sire, if it upset you. Just a frame of reference, sir.”

“So where did this all happen?”

“What, sir?”

“This Norman Conquest thing. And you haven’t told me yet who Norman is.”

“It happened at the Battle of Hastings, sir.”

“Oh.”

“The Norman Conquest is so named because it’s the day when William the Bastard defeated King Harold, the last English king, at the Battle of Hastings, Sire.”

“Oh.”

“William the Bastard was known as King William, or William the Conqueror, thereafter, Sire.”

“But you still haven’t told me who Norman is.”

“There isn’t anyone named Norman, sir. William was from Normandy, sir. His troops were the Normans, sir. When they took over, he moved his lords over here and gave them positions of leadership, running the government, sir. Hence, the Norman Conquest, sir.”

“Oh. So when did the English take over again?”

“We never did, sir.”

“Huh? But it’s called England!”

“Yes sir. But the Anglo-Saxons never regained power. The French, the Dutch, the Germans… but the Anglo-Saxons were out of power from then on, sir. A couple ancestors of mine participated in one of the last great efforts, the Peasants’ Revolt, but that was squashed too, sir.”

“When was that?”

“Well, in 1381, of course, sir!”

“What, you act like it was famous or something.”

“It was the last time the White Tower was breached, sir. The only time in 900 years it’s been overwhelmed. It was a significant battle, sir!”

“Oh.”

“Taught the strangers a lesson, it did, Sire. Not to outsource your defenses.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it means… are you absolutely sure you’re not familiar with the Peasants’ Revolt, sir? Never heard of it, sir? I don’t want to bore you if you already know about it, sir.”

“Never heard of it in my life. Or if I did, I’m sure i wouldn’t have cared enough to pay attention.”

“Well, sir, all right, but let’s make sure I’ve done my job first, sir… I’ve been sent to deliver your soup, and it’s a local specialty, sir. Leek and Stilton Soup, sir. It’s served with bread, so there’s a plate of bread here, but they told us you insist on biscuits, so there’s also a tin of biscuits here, sir…”

“Crackers! I want my crackers!”

“Biscuits are crackers, sir. This tin here, sir.”

“Oh.”

“And spoons and napkins. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, Sire.”

“All right then. Let’s see how this is…”

“So now, sir, back to the Peasants’ Revolt, sir. It was an uprising by the commoners, sir. To use today’s language, sir, you might say it was populist, sir. The government had reneged on the promises of the Magna Carta and the people rose up, and part of what they chose to do was to conquer the White Tower itself, sir.”

“You keep mentioning that. What’s the White Tower? That can’t be important; I’ve never heard of it either.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, but you must have, sir.”

“Nope.”

“You’ve been there, sir.”

“You lying dog faced pony soldier! I’ve never been to anyplace called the White Tower!”

“You might know it as the Tower of London, Sire.”

“I’ve never… wait… the Tower of London? You’re talking about the Tower of London?”

“Yes sir. Every tourist goes there, sir. I’m sure you’ve been there, sir.”

“Well, sure I’ve been in the Tower of London.”

“And yet, here you are, scot free, sir.”

“Why did you call it that other name?”

“When the first Williams built it, Sire, they called it the White Tower.

That’s what my family has always called it, sir.”

“Oh.”

“Well, at first, the Normans staffed it themselves. They assigned guards from among the Norman families, the noblemen themselves. But eventually, over the generations, they got sloppy, and started hiring commoners to take their place, so, by the 1300s, most of the guards weren’t Normans at all, but Anglo Saxons. We took advantage of that, in the Peasants Revolt, because when we stormed the Tower, they let us in.”

“The guards let in the attackers?”

“Well, certainly, sir. The guards’ sympathies were with the commoners; they didn’t have any loyalty to the Normans, sir.”

“So what happened then?”

“Well, the revolt was defeated, sir. The Normans kept power. but we made them learn a lesson, anyway. No lesson is ever learned forever, but they learned the dangers of hiring mercenaries then, and they remembered the lesson for quite a while, anyway.”

“Oh.”

“You Americans could do to learn these lessons as well, sir.”

“Huh? What does that have to do with us? None of your story has anything to do with America!”

“I beg your pardon, Sire, but it has everything to do with America, sir.”

“How’s that?”

“Think of all your cities that went up in flames last year, Sire. Dozens of American cities, taken over by communist mobs, all summer; some of them still burning, sir.”

“What about them? What does that have to do with your boring old story?”

“The people of those cities thought they were safe because they had governments in place – city councils, mayors, state government, sir – which were tasked to protect their downtowns, am I right, sir? They commanded bobbies… I mean, police and, what else do you call them, sir, troopers. Police and troopers and sheriffs and so forth, sir.”

“I still don’t see…”

“But did your police and troopers stop the attacks, sir? Or were the attackers allowed to burn the cities down, closing streets, ransacking shops, looting and destroying whole malls, sir? There weren’t stopped, were they, sir?”

“Well, I’m not really up on that, you know, I spent most of last year in my basement…”

“Yes, sir, so we’ve heard. So, sir, well, it turns out that when the attackers attacked, the city and state governments told your police to stand down, sir, didn’t they, sir?”

“Huh? Well, I don’t know, maybe in some cases…”

“Your voters had elected city governments, not realizing that the people they elected were on the side of the attackers, sir. So when the communists attacked your cities – Seattle and Portland and Minneapolis and St Louis and so forth, sir, and on and on and on – they found that the attackers had friends on the inside. Instead of giving orders to stop them, your mayors and aldermen gave them free rein over their downtowns, to terrible result, didn’t they, sir?”

“Oh, I’m sure it will get better…”

“Well, sir, certainly it will, but from whose perspective, sir? That’s the thing. When you appoint people to be in charge of your safety, you have to make sure they’re on your side, sir.”

“I’m not sure I follow…”

“Sire, the lesson the Normans learned was that it’s not enough to have someone hold an office. The fact that the office exists doesn’t do anything for you. It’s about staffing, sir. You have to put trustworthy allies in the offices.”

“Oh.”

“Too many people think they can just elect anybody at all to any office, and one person’s as good as another. It’s times like these – the Peasants’ Revolt in England, and the riots of 2020 in America – when the reminders surface again: It MATTERS who you elect to public office, from the highest post right down to the most seemingly minor post, sir.”

“Wait, are you saying that the people of our cities vote wrong, young man?”

“Not my place to say, Sire. I’m still on the clock, as an employee of the Foreign Office, you know, sir.”

“That’s right! And don’t you forget it!”

“I was just answering your questions about English history, sir, and tying it in to current events in order to help make it clearer, sir. That’s all, sir.”

“Well. All right then. What’s your name again?”

“Croaker Norge, sir. I’m not important, sir, just a lowly clerk in the Foreign Office, sir. Just here to bring you your soup and inquire after your health, sir, that’s all I’m here for. Hope I haven’t

overstepped my bounds, sir.”

“Huh? No, it’s fine, fine. not a bad soup.. kind of sharp… good crackers though…”

“Very happy to hear it, sir. Shall I be on my way, then, sir?”

“Huh?”

“That is, sir, will you be needing anything else, sir?”

“No, no, that’s fine…”

“Good night then, sir. Enjoy your soup, sir. And best wishes in tomorrow’s meetings, sir.”

“Mmm… Crackers. Mmmm…”

Copyright 2021-2024 John F Di Leo

Excerpted with permission from Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Two, 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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