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, gets the old man to spill the beans about his runningmate’s latest overseas trip.
Singapore Travel, Vice Presidents, and Soup Kambing
Dateline: August 23. Begin Transcript:
“Good evening, sir, are you in there?”
“I’m on vacation!”
“Yes, but you’re still here, sir.”
“No, I’m not! I’m on vacation!”
“Are you ready for your soup, sir?”
“Oh, is there soup?”
“Yes, sir, there is soup.”
“Oh, goody! What is it tonight?”
“Your cook made another Singaporan soup tonight, sir. It’s called Soup Kambing, sir. It’s a goat soup, sir.”
“Goat?”
“Yes sir. She said that it’s usually made with the meat still on the bone, but she said that’s nuts, sir, and made you a boneless version, sir.”
“I’m not homeless!”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“I’m not homeless! She can’t make me a homeless person! I live here! This is my house! I’ll never leave! Never!”
“Uhhh, nobody’s asking you to leave, sir.”
“They’re not?”
“No, sir.”
“But you said they were going to order me to be a homeless person!”
“No, sir, the cook made you a boneless version of the soup, sir. A boneless version. That’s all. A boneless version. Calm down, sir. Relax. Soup is on its way.”
“Oh. Oh boy. Oh man. Long day. Gotta relax….”
“Yes sir. Of course, sir. Here’s your soup, the Singaporan dish called Soup Kambing, sir. And crackers, and napkins, and three soft plastic soup spoons…”
“Mmm, that’s good soup. What’s in here?”
“Goat, sir. And garlic and ginger. And shallots, sir.”
“Well it’s delicious. She should cook for a living.”
“Who, sir?”
“The cook.”
“Uhh, she DOES cook for a living, sir. She’s a cook, sir.”
“Oh. Hey, yeah! That makes sense! Cool!”
“So this is two days in a row she made a Singaporan soup, sir. Guess your runningmate’s trip must be on her mind, huh?”
“What trip?”
“Your runningmate’s, sir.”
“Whose?”
“Come on, sir, we know we’re not supposed to say her name because it upsets you, but then you can’t act like it’s hard for you to tell who we’re talking about, sir. It’s not fair.”
“Oh.”
“So what’s the story, sir? Have you heard from her? How’s the big trip going so far, sir?”
“Oh, uh, well, she went to Singapore.”
“Yes sir?”
“Gonna be there a couple days.”
“Yes sir?”
“Then she’ll come back here.”
“Well, yes sir, we know that…”
“No, I was hoping there was a chance she might stay there.”
“To do what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There are a lot of jobs in southeast Asia, you know.”
“For someone like her, sir?”
“Well, she’s so useless here… there simply must be SOME country where she could make herself useful!”
“I heard that she had a joint press conference with Singapore’s prime minister today, sir.”
“Right.”
“And that no matter what she wanted to talk about, the conversation got pulled into a talk about Afghanistan, sir.”
“Right.”
“Surely she must have expected that, though, right, sir?”
“Nope. She thought she could get away from the issue of Afghanistan by traveling halfway across the world.”
“By traveling to a place much closer to Afghanistan, sir? Why would she have thought traveling to a point closer to Afghanistan than home would be a way of avoiding the issue of Afghanistan, sir?”
“Well, you know, she’s been active in politics in only two places: California and Washington DC.”
“Yes, sir?”
“And you know what those two places have in common?”
“You mean, besides chronic corruption, institutional governmental insolvency, and permanent crime waves, sir?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
“What, sir?”
“A perpetually friendly press.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“She’s never really faced hostile reporters before. This is her chance. Finally.”
“Why, sir, you look like you’re happy to see her take a beating in the press, sir!”
“I ran for president three times. They ripped me up for my speeches, for my life story, for my experiences, for my policies…”
“But only because you kept making everything up, sir.”
“Whatever. Be that as it may… they beat the heck out of me again and again. She’s ready for a little of that too. Take her down a peg.”
“So, are you saying, sir, that she was sent on this trip…”
“No, she wanted this trip. She wanted a chance to shine. We gave her that chance. Up to her what she does with it.”
“But going there at this point in time, sir, just a week after the Afghanistan disaster, sir…”
“Pretty lousy timing for her, isn’t it? Heh heh.”
“Well, sir, it’s not like this could’ve been predicted, sir. And the trip’s been planned for some time, right?”
“Actually, the trip was postponed a couple of times. She was going to go during a regional ASEAN conference, and it got postponed. So now it’s not much more than a sightseeing tour.”
“Does she like sightseeing, sir?”
“Not now that it turns out that she’s the sight everybody’s seeing!”
“It doesn’t seem to be going to well for her, sir.”
“Going fine for me though! Except for my little present.”
“Present, sir?”
“Yup. You know how sometimes people have trouble with the pressure in airplanes, so they chew gum?”
“Yes sir.”
“I had my staff pack a lot of good chewing gum for her. They put gum in all her luggage so she’d have plenty if she needed it.”
“But she was going to Singapore, sir!”
“Uh huh.”
“Isn’t chewing gum illegal in Singapore, sir?”
“Well, is it now. Fancy that.”
“Sir, are you saying your team planted gum in her luggage because you were all hoping she’d get arrested for possession of chewing gum in Singapore, sir?”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh, that’s a relief, sir.”
“Actually, I was hoping she’d be busted using the stuff. That’s a lot more than possession.”
“Sir!”
“Do you know what the penalty is in Singapore for chewing gum?”
“Umm… I’m not sure, sir…”
“Flogging. They flog ya for it in Singapore. That’d take her down a peg, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, sir, I suppose so, but… you don’t think they’d actually flog an American politician, sir, do you?
“Well, why not? What American wouldn’t flog one of our politicians, given the chance?”
“Well, I suppose, if you put it that way, sir…”
“That’s one of the reasons I stay in my basement, you know. Safe down here. No interaction with the public at all.”
“But sir, I thought you went to rallies and town halls and things like that all the time, sir.”
“Only because you have to, to win in America, darn it. But luckily, my supporters don’t like to go out either, so I don’t have to worry about there being a lot of people at my events.”
“Speaking of that, sir, did you notice that President Trump had one of his rallies the other night, sir. In Alabama, sir.”
“Come on, man! I don’t want to think about that!”
“Over 80,000 turned out, sir. Quite a successful rally, sir.”
“It was a darned super spreader event, that’s what it was!”
“But your old colleague, Barry, had a big weekend long birthday party just a couple weeks ago, sir. Why do you call President Trump’s rally a ‘super spreader event’ – and it was all outside – but you don’t call Barry’s three day birthday party, which took place entirely inside some huge tents, a super spreader event too, sir?”
“Huh?”
“The birthday party, sir. I’m asking about the double standards, sir. Why do you call out the Trump supporters but not the Obama supporters, sir?”
“I’m sorry, I lost you. What were you saying? This is good soup. Really, really good soup. You should tell the cook.”
“Sometimes, sir, it’s hard not to think that maybe you understand more than you let on, and you’re not really quite as badly off as it seems, sir.”
“Huh? Sorry, what were you saying?”
“Just that it sometimes seems like you can turn on and off your ability to take questions, depending on whether you like the question, sir.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I like questions. There were a lot of game shows when I was growing up, you know, that were all about questions. Grew up loving questions.”
“Uhh, sir, umm…”
“You know, I grew up in Scranton in the early days of television. Don’t know if you knew that. I’m from Scranton.”
“Yes sir.”
“And there were a lot of game shows in those days, and they all asked a lot of questions. So I’d watch our little TV screen and hear the questions and I learned all sorts of things…”
“Oh brother…”
“Sometimes contestants could compete with trivia like on Jeopardy, and sometimes they’d compete with tricks or talents. This trip reminds me of one of the shows in those days where it was a singing competition and whoever was the best singer would win a prize.”
“Yes, sir?”
“And sometimes somebody would be a really great singer and win the prize, but sometimes somebody would be really terrible…”
“And they’d sing a poor, sir?”
“Right. Just like our runningmate. I hope she’s enjoying her trip.”
“So do we all, sir.”
“She said before she left that she hoped her trip wouldn’t have any drama, so to help out, I hid her Dramamine before she left.”
“Oh my.”
“Was that wrong?”
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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