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 learns where he was just a few hours earlier, as he had forgotten.
Gangsters, Colleges, and Chicago Deep Dish Minestrone Soup
Dateline: July 7. Begin Transcript:
“Hey Boss! You’re back, right? You’re downstairs?”
“Where else would I be? Who’s asking?”
“Okay, boss, I’ll be down in a minute with your soup. Just making sure you were here, so it’s worth the hobbling…”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, sir. Don’t worry about it… oh, boy, that’s tiring. You need an elevator in here, boss.”
“No, the Doctor tells me the stairs are good for me.”
“Well, they’re not good for me, boss.”
“What’s the soup tonight?”
“Well, I heard you went to Chicago today, so I made you Chicago Deep Dish Minestrone Soup.”
“Hmm… Would that be EYE-Talian?”
“Depends. Would you be a ZEE-nophobe?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, never mind. Yes, it’s Italian, sir. It’s a copy of a soup at one of Chicago’s most famous deep dish pizzerias.”
“Oh. They’re famous for pizza there?”
“Are they famous for pizza in Chicago? You’re kidding, right?”
“No… should I have pizza the next time I go to Chicago? Do they have good pizza there?”
“Boss, that’s like asking if a forest is known for having a lot of trees. OF COURSE Chicago is known for pizza. Thin crust, deep dish, stuffed, they do it all, perfectly. Used to be such a great town.”
“Used to be? What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, boss, before it went to hell.”
“Now doesn’t that sound like a little bit of an exaggeration?”
“A hundred people were shot over last weekend, boss. A fifth of them fatally.”
“Well, it’s a big city.”
“And getting smaller by the day, at this rate.”
“Oh. Well, it’s all those guns.”
“Do these guns pull their own triggers, themselves, boss?”
“Do they what?”
“Well, Boss, come on, it’s not like there isn’t a killer involved. People shoot guns to kill people. It’s the people, not the guns.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You know that Chicago is a gun free zone, right?”
“Well, it takes time for that sort of thing to work. “
“Boss, Chicago has been a gun free city for over half a century. It’s been a gun free zone since before you were in politics. You realize how long ago that is???”
“Uh, wow, I didn’t know that.”
“Do you know what Chicago does every day, boss?’
“Do they eat soup?”
“Go ahead, go ahead, eat your soup.”
“Are there crackers?”
“Of course there are crackers. There are always crackers for you.”
“Oh, goody…”
“So, do you know what Chicago does every day?”
“They make soup?”
“Well, yes, there’s a lot of soup there… but my point is, Chicago does two things every day: it refuses to prosecute criminals, and it imports crooked foreign gangs.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes, sir, for all intents and purposes… on purpose. They boast to the world that they’re a sanctuary city, so they won’t arrest any illegal immigrant. So if one can find his way there, he’s free once he arrives. How do you like that?”
“Well, I think it’s nice that these folks can find their families.”
“They’re not finding their families, boss! They’re finding the local branch of their gangs. They’re finding a new market for the drugs they sell or the sex they peddle.”
“Well, but we’re talking about hard working migrants here, people doing the hard farm labor jobs that Americans just won’t do!”
“Oh, don’t be silly, boss. There aren’t any migrant labor jobs in Chicago. There’s nothing there that local Americans can’t or won’t do. These illegals go there for crime and welfare, for the most part.”
“Now who’s the racist?”
“Boss, I’m not talking about legal immigrants… good people of every ethnicity who come in the right way, following the process, working with our embassies to do it legally. We’re talking here about illegals, a different situation entirely. And you know it, boss.”
“What?”
“And you know it, boss.”
“Oh. What do I know?”
“Oh, eat your soup.”
“Mmm. Thanks. This is good soup!”
“So what else did you do in Chicago today, boss, besides landing and having the mayor try to talk you into things?”
“How did you know the mayor tried to talk me into things?”
“What else do Chicago mayors ever do, boss?”
“Oh. Good point.”
“So what else did you do today, boss? The news reports said you were in Illinois for a few hours. That’s long enough to see more than one place. And nobody in their right mind would want to spend more than five minutes talking to Mayor Lightfoot….”
“Oh, well, yes. They drove me somewhere.”
“Where, sir?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Come on, they must’ve told you where you were.”
“Well sure, they told me. But that doesn’t mean I remember it!”
“Well, let’s see. Check the cellphone here… It says you went to Crystal Lake, boss.”
“No, I didn’t go boating.”
“I know, boss, but…”
“And I didn’t go swimming.”
“I know, boss, but…”
“And I sure didn’t go diving.”
“Yes boss, I know you didn’t…”
“Did you know I used to be a lifeguard? Back when I was a boy. I grew up in Scranton. Lifeguard in Scranton. Nice town. Small town. Back in the good old days. Bet you didn’t know that, huh? Yup, Scranton. Lifeguarding in Scranton…”
“No, sir, you didn’t do that.”
“Huh? Course I did! I’m from Scranton!”
“Boss, you moved out of Scranton when you were ten.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, boss, you did. You were a lifeguard here in Delaware, not in Pennsylvania.”
“Oh.”
“And anyway, I didn’t say you were in the water in Crystal Lake… it’s a town, a suburb of Chicago, sir. It says that’s where you went for your speeches, sir.”
“OH, well, that makes sense, then.”
“Glad to hear it, sir. So it says you went to McHenry County Community College, boss.”
“Oh, no, that’s not right.”
“It’s not?”
“No, of course not. I went to the University of Delaware!”
“Ah, yes, sir… well… we meant, today, sir. Where did you go today?”
“Oh, today? I went to that community college you were talking about.”
“Yeah. Right. Well, anyway, while you were there, the question is, what did you do?”
“Oh, I made a speech!”
“I figured that… what about?”
“College! College, and how important it is! College, and how we need to pay for it!”
“Ah, I see, boss. So you mean, college and how NOT to pay for it, huh?”
“No! I said community college should be free so that kids don’t go into debt up to their ears! It should be free!”
“It already is, boss.”
“Huh? No, it’s not!”
“Boss, we have tax credits… the American Opportunity Credit and things like that… that are about the price of tuition at most community colleges. For most people, these credits already make community college free for a couple of years, boss.”
“They do?”
“Yes, boss, they do. Don’t you people ever get real folks to join you for these policy planning discussions? Is it always just a bunch of technocrats, boss?”
“Well, you know for expert decisions, you need to have distinguished professionals in the meeting. Can’t just have average folks walking in and sitting down and suddenly becoming our equals during policy discussions.”
“Why not, boss? They might make sense?”
“Huh? Wait, no. No way! We need to make college affordable!”
“As I said, boss, it already is. Most of the kids at that school today, if they’re on a normal full time schedule, are already getting their education for free, through tax credits on their parents’ tax filings.”
“But, why don’t I know about this?”
“When’s the last time you filed your taxes, boss?”
“I file them every year!”
“No, sir, I mean, when’s the last time you were actually involved in doing them? If you do your own taxes, you know about all these government grants and tax credits.”
“Oh.”
“But you haven’t done your family’s accounts, probably, in what, thirty years, boss?”
“Huh? Oh, well, I guess, maybe…”
“You’ve been having Hunter pay your bills for you, with all that money you guys cooked up overseas, right?”
“No, I’ve never cooked anything overseas.”
“No, I didn’t mean that literally, boss, just that you probably don’t know what all your taxes and credits and deductions are, because your son’s been paying your bills for you.”
“Oh. Well. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know, really… is it hard?”
“Well, sir, it’s not so much that it’s hard, just that, it’s informative. You might know what the people of the country are going through right now.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want that.”
“Why not, sir? People are really suffering right now. If you understood some of that, then perhaps you might been able to understand things like these grants and scholarships, sir.”
“But this is obvious, isn’t it? We need to pay the tuition bills, period.”
“And my point is, in most cases, you already are. Don’t go making it all worse by putting in even more rules and creating even more opportunities for contradictions.”
“Oh, um, I don’t understand.”
“I know, sir. Don’t worry about it. Just remember, if you think you need to create a new federal program, it’s probably already there, and you just need to look around to find it first.”
“I wonder.”
“Oh, an introspective moment, boss? Cool! What are you thinking of?”
“I was thinking of having some ice cream tomorrow. Wonder what kind of ice cream I should have?”
“Oh, boss. Maybe you should’ve stayed in Chicago.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Because Chicago is so messed up already, you can’t possibly make it any worse.”
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.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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