Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Vol III – Episode 132: Pork, Free Lunch, and Carnitas Stew

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 first year of his regime, his soup aide serves him some pork soup, and attempts to discuss how the sausage is made.

Pork, Free Lunch, and Carnitas Stew

Dateline: September 15. Begin Transcript:

“Good evening, sir. I have some Mexican soup for you, sir.”

“Mexican? Neat. What is it?”

“It’s called Carnitas Stew, sir.”

“Neato!”

“No, sir, not Neato. Carnitas, sir. Carnitas. Pork, sir.”

“Huh?”

“Carnitas refers to a preparation of pork, sir. So this is pork, beans, peppers, and corn, sir.”

“Corn? Does that go?”

“I didn’t write the recipe, sir. But your cook is terrific, so I’m sure it’s delicious, sir.”

“Mmm… Are there crackers?”

“Has she ever failed to send down crackers, sir?”

“I don’t know. Has she?”

“That wasn’t a riddle, sir.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Oh, it’s going to be one of those evenings, is it… well, sir, here’s your soup… and your crackers, and a stack of napkins, and your usual three children’s soupspoons, sir. Enjoy, sir.”

“How do you know they’re children’s spoons?”

“Well, sir, the fact that they’re obviously made of soft plastic was the first tipoff…. But I think what really locks it in is the colorful animated characters, sir.”

“Oh. Right. Well, let’s see how it is. Hmm….”

“Can’t go wrong with pork, sir. Always delicious.”

“You know, I don’t remember paying much attention to pork when I was young. Grew up in Scranton, you know. Or did you know that? Hmm. Good place to grow up, Scranton… ate a lot of chicken, a lot of beef, a lot of vegetables. Don’t remember a lot of pork. Found I really liked it when I went to Washington though. Won the seat in 1972, never really moved to Washington; I kept my house in Delaware and commuted, you know… but when you’re in Washington for lunch four or five days a week, you develop a taste for pork.”

“From what I hear, sir, two weeks in Washington can even give a vegetarian a taste for pork, sir.”

“Huh? Oh, right. Yes indeed. Good stuff, nowadays.”

“How do you think that happens, sir?”

“What?”

“The fondness for pork, sir.”

“Oh, I don’t know. First the other Senators start taking you to lunch, then the party bosses, then the union presidents… before you know it, your donors from back home come to visit, and they treat for lunch too… then there’s the lobbyists… It’s amazing any of us manage to stay thin, with all those free meals.”

“I see, sir. And then it just takes over your mind, then, sir?”

“What does?”

“Well, the pork, sir. You get so used to ordering pork at the restaurant, eventually you start demanding pork outside of the restaurants too, sir. In your office, on the Senate floor, in committee hearing rooms… and I can just imagine the pressure when you sometimes go off-site to discuss things, sir.”

“Oh, well, I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir, I just assumed. What were you thinking about, sir?”

“Oh, well, I don’t think….”

“What, sir?”

“What?”

“Well, now, this could get old pretty quick…”

“I already AM old. Don’t put me out to pasture yet, young man!”

“Yes sir. Of course, sir. But I was wondering, sir… Most of the time, sir, do you just order pork, sir, or does your lunch partner offer it, sir?”

“Huh? Oh, well, I don’t know. They usually just write a check to my campaign committee and hand it to me, that’s all, sir. Best to get that sort of thing out of the way first, you know?

“I see, sir. Just out of curiosity, sir, have you fellas ever had a conversation about those donations with your campaign tax consultant, sir?”

“Oh, no, they don’t want to know about that sort of thing. It’s too complicated.”

“Oh, is that why, sir… Hmm…. I was also wondering, sir, about the paper, sir.”

“Paper? What paper?”

“Well, sir, I noticed that a lot of your bills start out as simple ideas, then before you know it, when they’re ready to vote on things, they’ve swelled up to three or four thousand pages, sir. How do you read all that, sir?”

“Read all what?”

“The bills, sir. The bills that your team keeps voting on in the Congress, sir.”

“Oh. What about them?”

“Well, sir, we can’t help but notice that the average bill is a huge increase in paperwork, and in money, sir. They spend more with every bill, getting them bigger and bigger, so it takes more pages to print all that… The rest of us have to assume that fewer and fewer congressmen are reading these bills before they vote on them, sir.”

“Oh no, we read them. I’ve read the title and cover page on every bill I ever voted on.”

“Did you read the whole bill?”

“The whole bill? Well, no, of course not. We’re busy you know.”

“Yes. Eating lunch with your donors and other friends, sir.”

“But we know what they’re about. We read the summaries.”

“So you basically vote on bills without knowing everything they’re about, sir?”

“Well, only if something’s left off the summary.”

“Sir, when thousands of pages cover billions of dollars of spending, there’s no way on earth everything in the bill could have been included in the summary. It’s just impossible, sir.”

“Oh. Well, maybe the first chapter?”

“Chapter, sir?”

“You know, the intro or the first chapter of the book. The one that sums up the plot.”

“Pork must really reproduce nicely in the absence of oxygen, sir.”

“Huh?”

“Yes, well, sir, I’m getting tired a bit sooner than usual. Something about all this pork and everything. A $3.5 billion bill that’s really estimated to cost $5.5 trillion or more by the end of the project. It’s a doozy, sir.”

“Hey kid… question for ya… is there any soup?”

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.  President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes III, 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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