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 are sharing approximately every other story from Evening Soup with Basement Joe, and are now sampling Volume Three’s ninety chapters. In today’s episode from the late summer of his first year in office, President Buckstop’s soup aide, Russell Rhoades, tries to understand the nature of this new president’s seemingly contradictory published schedule.
Extensive Vacations and Singapore Laksa and Spicy Seafood Noodle Soup
Dateline: August 22. Begin Transcript:
“Good evening, sir!”
“Leave me alone! I’m on vacation!”
“Really, sir? I’m sorry, I’ll just take back this soup and leave, then…”
“Come on, man! Don’t leave so fast! I didn’t know you had soup!”
“Well, sir, since bringing down your soup in advance of your vitamin shot is pretty much my entire job, I think it’s safe to assume that whenever you see me, I’m going to have soup, sir. That’s the only reason I’m in your employ, sir.”
“Well then! What’s the soup today?”
“Here, sir, I’ll just put the tray down, and then I’ll have to read it to you. It’s a long title and I didn’t want to get it mixed up, sir.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Let’s see… it’s called Singapore Laksa and Spicy Seafood Noodle Soup. It’s made with prawns and onions and mussels and wine, sir.”
“Wow! Goody!”
“So here it is, sir.. let’s see here, now, sir… your soup, your stack of napkins, three soft plastic children’s soup spoons…”
“Are there crackers?”
“And yes, sir, a big bowl of crackers, sir.”
“Yummy!”
“I must admit, sir, I’m a bit confused.”
“You think YOU’RE confused. Trying putting yourself in my shoes.”
“Yes sir. Well, what I meant was, the TV reporters and the online news are always saying you’re in Washington or Camp David or other places, and yet, here you are, in the basement of your house in Delaware, every night when I come down with your soup. Why is that, sir?”
“Well, you know, they like to think I’m all over the place. Makes them all feel better. But I’m really happiest here in my basement.”
“So you mean, the schedules your team releases to the press and the public aren’t necessarily correct, sir?”
“Gee, this is good soup. What did you say these big things were again?”
“That’s a prawn, sir.”
“Weird. Tastes just like shrimp.”
“Yes sir.”
“Looks just like shrimp, too.”
“Yes sir.”
“If you didn’t tell me it was something else, I’d think it WAS a shrimp.”
“Well, sir, that’s basically what a prawn is, sir. Just a bigger version of a shrimp, sir.”
“It is?”
“Well, sure, sir. Neither word has a distinct meaning, sir. They’re used for a bunch of different types of crustaceans, sir, and we usually use the word ‘shrimp’ for the smaller ones and ‘prawn’ for bigger ones, but since there’s no real definition, there’s no cutoff between the two, sir.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You never do sir.”
“Huh?”
“What I’m saying is, shrimp and prawn are basically synonyms, sir. It’s really not worth worrying about it.”
“But i always thought they were opposites.”
“No, sir, technically, they’re synonyms, outside of common usage in some areas, sir.”
“What are synonyms, now? Are they a kind of seafood too?”
“No, sir. It’s a grammatical term for two nouns that mean similar things, sir. Like pail and bucket, or like hot dog and frankfurter, or like car and auto, sir.”
“Oh. I see.”
“So shrimp and prawn are roughly synonyms, also, sir. Like Democrat and socialist, sir.”
“Huh?”
“Or like executive order and treason, these days, sir.”
“Pardon? I didn’t quite hear that.”
“Or like cabinet member and traitor, sir.”
“Why do you guys always mumble? I can never understand you soup servers!”
“I’m sorry, sir. Anyway, let’s see, I was wondering about your vacations, sir.”
“Huh? What about vacations?”
“Well, sir, my folks were just talking about their fall vacation plans today. They were planning on taking a week off and going up north to visit some Revolutionary war sites once it gets cool. You know, Lexington and Concord, Philadelphia, New York City, Cambridge… and they were talking about how they need a few weeks’ notice to get the time off from work, sir.”
“Yeah?”
“Making sure they aren’t going to be out of the office when important meetings are held, sir. Things like that.”
“So?”
“Well, sir, you’ve been changing your mind over the past couple weeks, back and forth, and as far as I can tell, you can declare a vacation pretty much anytime you want, is that right?”
“Well, uh, it’s really up to the Doctor, but, yeah…”
“The doctor, sir? What doctor? You mean the Surgeon General?”
“Oh, no, I mean my wife. She’s a Doctor!”
“She holds a doctorate in education, sir.”
“Yup!”
“Her field is writing lesson plans and passing out gold stars when kids can spell their names, sir.”
“A great specialty to have in politics nowadays!”
“Well, maybe so, sir, but it’s not medical knowledge. Why do you call her Doctor, sir?”
“I call her whatever she wants to be called. Heck, she can call herself Edith Bolling Galt, for all I care.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“I dunno. She likes the name, for some reason. But she only has me call her that when we’re in private. So don’t tell anybody!”
“Don’t worry, sir, I don’t understand it well enough to retell it, sir.”
“This is good soup. I like the mussels. They remind me of my staff.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Mussels hang on tight, but when the time comes to clear them off the side of your ship, they can all get knocked off for good, and they’ll never get back on!”
“Umm, sir, that’s a very interesting analogy. Do you have boating experience, sir?”
“Oh, sure! I was born and raised by the harbor in Scranton. Boats all over the place. Boats everywhere. Learned about port and starboard, and about ballast and hulls, and about sailing and fishing… Yup, Scranton was a great place… terrific place to grow up.”
“Sir, are you sure about that?”
“What?”
“About the harbors and boating in Scranton, sir?”
“Oh yes. It was great. Great place to grow up. Learned all about boating there. And yachting. And, umm, and uhh…. hovercrafts and hydrofoils, and umm… yeah. Quite a place.”
“Sir, the Lackawanna River flows through Scranton, sir.”
“Right on!”
“Umm, sir, it’s badly polluted, shallow, and rarely navigable, sir.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you must be mistaken, sir. You couldn’t have learned about yachting and hovercrafting on the Lackawanna, sir.”
“Oh. You sure?”
“Yes sir, I’m sure.”
“Oh. Well, I know I definitely did some hovering when I was in Scranton. Maybe it was during swimming practice?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“I always did wonder how people do hovercrafting anyway. How do you do crafts when you’re hovering over a river anyway? Is there some kind of anti-gravity thing going on? And besides, I wouldn’t know which crafts to choose. Hmm… maybe I could take up glassblowing or pottery.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Glassblowing would be neat. You spin it and spin it and spin it and blow hot air in the tube…”
“Well, sir, there’s a hobby for which you’d be a natural, sir.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Well, you’ve been spinning things for the press for fifty years, and you’ve always been full of hot air, sir.”
“You’re mumbling again. Speak up, boy!”
“Oh, yes, sir. Well, sir, I was just wondering how you keep changing whether you’re on vacation or not, hour by hour, sir. One day you’d say you were about to leave on vacation, the next day you’d say you changed your mind, sir.”
“Oh, well, you want the truth?”
“If you have any to spare, sir.”
“Well, okay. I’m really always on vacation. I pretty much sit in this office all the time, week after week. We tell the press I’m moving around, because the public might really want me to do stuff, you know? But I’m really just down here, hosting meetings and playing videogames and umm… and napping. Oh, and eating my soup!”
“So, you’re saying, no matter what your public schedule says, you’re pretty much always here, sir?”
“Well, sure! It’s a nice house with a nice basement. Why should I leave?”
“I see your point, sir.”
“Tomorrow, I think I might be on vacation again, but I might just stay down here anyway because it’s easier than doing anything else.
“Yes sir.”
“And I’m planning on staying here all day, and eating all my meals right here. So even if my schedule says “Out to Lunch,” I’m really not.”
“Well, now, sir, there I’d beg to differ, sir. When your schedule says you’re out to lunch, that’s the most accurate statement your schedule will ever have.”
Copyright 2021-2024 John F Di Leo
Excerpted from “Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Three: How Is This Not Over Yet?”, 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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