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’s soup aide returns from a rally to serve the old man a bowl of Cuban soup.
Social Media, Collusion, Marxism, and Sopa de Res
Dateline: July 16. Begin Transcript:
“Good evening, sir! Another work week over and done with!”
“It is not. There’s no such thing anymore.”
“Excuse me, sir? It’s Friday night!”
“It’s Friday night to you, maybe… It’s Friday night to millions of others… But for me, it’s just work, work, work. All day, all night, seven days a week. I’m so sick of it.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve lost me…”
“Well, other people get to hear that 5:00 whistle blow, and they can hit the bar, or go home, or go golfing, and take the weekend off. I can’t. I’m always on.”
“Excuse me, sir? You sit in your basement and play MarioKart, take naps, and sleep… Except for a couple times a day when you have a webinar conference meeting or they trot you out for a press conference, where you take no questions, and even your brief remarks are prepared for you, sir!”
“Come on, man! You have no idea. I have one meeting, I make one comment, and the next thing you know it’s all over the news. It’s all over the papers. YouTube videos of me saying something, taken completely out of context. It’s horrible.”
“Is it really, sir? How far out of context did they take it this time, sir?”
“Well, I just said that Facebook was killing people, and before you know it, all over the papers, they’re saying I’m accusing Facebook of being murderers. That’s not fair, man!”
“But… You did say that Facebook was killing people?”
“Well, yeah, but I wasn’t saying they were murderers. Come on, man!”
“Not sure I see the distinction, sir.”
“I was saying, because they let people say stuff that’s wrong, it’s killing people. So Facebook is killing people. It’s true, man!”
“Well, sir, in the first place, it’s not true… But secondly, sir… How does Facebook have the right to stop people from saying things, if they are just a communication engine, sir?”
“What do you mean, man? It’s their site!”
“Well, yes sir, but they are functioning like the US mail, or like a telephone company, sir. People communicate with their friends by sending letters, or by talking on the phone, or by going on a zoom call or teams call or WebEx call, like you do… and now they ALSO communicate by messages and posts on social media, sir. Would you say that WebEx should be able to shut down your call, if they don’t like what you were saying, sir? Should the US mail be able to refuse to deliver your letter if they disagree with you, sir? Should the telephone company cut off your call with your friends, because they disagree with you on something you said in the call, sir?”
“Well, no, of course not. But that’s different.”
“How, sir? They are all just different ways that people communicate with each other nowadays, sir. People use the mail less, people use phone calls less, and people use social media and online conference calls much more, sir. Right?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s different. “
“I don’t see how, sir. Either the phone company, the Postal Service, and the conference call websites should be allowed to interrupt or destroy your ability to communicate, sir, or none of them should. The government has to apply the same rules to all of personal communication media, shouldn’t it?”
“Well, umm… but there’s a difference between utilities and companies that aren’t utilities!”
“Well, sir, whether you think of them as utilities, or not… Once you started coordinating censorship with the social media platforms, you made them de facto utilities, under the control of the federal government. You can no longer claim that they are immune to First Amendment concerns, sir.”
“Where did you hear that? We aren’t coordinating censorship!”
“Your press secretary said so yesterday… And then she doubled down on it, without question. The cat’s out of the bag, sir… There’s really no question anymore. The government and private industry are colluding. There’s a word for that, you know sir.”
“Look, did you come down here for a reason, or was it just to upset me?”
“Oh, yes, sir… I came down to bring you your soup, sir.”
“My soup? But that kid brings me soup every day… That irritating guy. I don’t remember his name.”
“Porter, sir? Porter Norfolk, sir?”
“Yeah, him! Where is he?”
“That’s me, sir. I am Porter Norfolk, sir.”
“Huh?”
“I usually wear a baseball cap, sir. I’m not wearing it tonight. Maybe that’s why you didn’t recognize me, sir.”
“Oh. I guess. That must be it. Why aren’t you wearing your baseball cap?”
“Well, sir, I came here straight from a protest, and I was wearing a different hat than usual. So I left it in the car.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you want me to see your baseball cap?”
“So anyway, sir, here’s your soup. I brought it down, and set it down on the desk, and then we got to talking, and I never got to it. But it was really hot, anyway. Better to have cooled for a minute or two, sir.”
“Oh, soup! Yes. Let’s have it. What is it?”
“Sopa de Res, sir. Cuban beef soup, sir.”
“Oh! Yummy! Love beef soup. Cuban, Huh?”
“Yes sir. A traditional soup from way back in the days when Cubans could actually afford beef, sir.”
“Oh… Cuba isn’t that bad anymore. It’s a paradise now. A socialist paradise. Everybody says so.”
“Only because everybody who doesn’t say so is in prison or dead, sir.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“I had a couple of friends when I was growing up, sir. Their grandfather had escaped from Cuba during the revolution, sir. He made sure his family knew how he got here, so they would know their real heritage, in case liars and fools in the media and pop-culture tried to whitewash the history.”
“Come on, man! It can’t be that bad! The Europeans and Canadians travel to Cuba all the time! They say it’s great!”
“They are only allowed to go to the restaurants and hotels on the beach, sir. The ones that are run by the government, specifically for tourists. You don’t think it’s like that in the interior of the island, do you, sir? You must know better than that, sir.”
“Hey! Don’t you dare assume what I know better than, and what I don’t!”
“Yes, sir. Sorry sir. Well, anyway, sir… This is a good soup from pre-Castro Cuba, sir. Enjoy.”
“Are there crackers, I hope?”
“Always, sir. Soup, crackers, napkins, spoons.”
“Oops! Almost dropped that spoon. Hey spoon, you’re not getting away from me…”
“That was convincing, sir… You sounded almost like one of the Castros’ guards, shouting at a refugee in the water, just before shooting him dead.”
“So hey, tell me, where were you today before you got here. What made you rush in here without a hat!”
“Oh, sir, I was just at a protest for a few hours. My friends have been running it since Sunday, and I figured I should join them for a few hours when I could. Wear a hat, hold a sign, wave a flag, you know, sir.”
“Oh, yes. That takes me back. I remember when I was a young man in Scranton. I grew up in Scranton. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“Yes, sir. I had heard.”
“Well, when I was growing up in Scranton, I went to lots of protests. It was the thing then. In those days, we protested everything. The minimum wage, labor unionization constraints, women’s rights, the Vietnam war… I went to tons of protests up there in Scranton. Those were the days.”
“Umm, sir… that’s not possible. You moved away from Scranton when you were 10. You could not have been attending protests there in your teens and 20s, if you moved away when you were 10.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes sir. The entire world knows how old you were when you moved away from Scranton.”
“Oh.”
“Do you really believe these things, sir? Does it comes so naturally to you to make up stories, to try to ingratiate yourself with your audience, that you forget that it was made up? I really would like to know!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway, what was this protest about?”
“Oh, tell me about your soup. How does it taste… Is it too thick… Is the beef tender enough?”
“Oh, it’s good. It’s delicious. You say it’s Cuban, Huh?”
“Yes sir. It is Cuban. Just like all the poor refugees trying to escape that hellish island right now. Just like all the poor protesters, marching in the streets of Havana, getting clubbed, killed, or spirited away by the secret police…”
“Oh, come on… It’s not that bad.”
“Of course it is, sir. You must know it is. You get intelligence reports, sir.”
“Have you ever read an intelligence report, young man? Nobody can read those things. I fall asleep on page 4.”
“I see, sir. Well, that explains a lot… anyway, sir… There are lots of refugees… Boats, rafts, inner tubes… Lots of people trying to escape that hellish place, after all these years. And rightly applying for asylum in the United States, sir.”
“Well now, we don’t know that.”
“What do you mean, we don’t know that, sir? Of course we know it. The people of Cuba deserve asylum. They are political refugees, by definition, sir.”
“Well now, it’s not that clear. They have to be examined. We can’t just go around calling everybody a refugee, you know.”
“Sir, you let people call themselves refugees from Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador… anybody who comes up the southern border over the Mexico line gets to apply for refugee status. You have been allowing it for six months.”
“Well, that’s different…”
“It is not, sir!”
“Come on, man!”
“What do you think refugee status is, sir? Political asylum exists specifically for people fleeing Socialist hellholes, like the old USSR, the old Nazi Germany, today’s North Korea, or today’s Cuba!”
“Come on, man!”
“Well, sir… Political refugee status exists for the people of Cuba. We have been paying for radio broadcasts to that poor country for decades. We have been encouraging the people of Cuba to overthrow their communist oppressors or come to America where it would be safe. You cannot renege on that commitment!”
“Don’t tell me what I can renege on and what I can’t! I will renege on whatever the hell I want. By the way… What the heck does renege mean?”
“Oh… Just eat your soup.”
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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