Hurricane-Dorian & The Sharpie Miracle
The Belief That Changing The Map Will Change Reality
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
It’s amazing how people can deceive themselves into confusing the representation of a thing with the thing itself.
A voodoo priest stabs a doll in the magical hope that the blow will impale the person whom the doll is designed to depict.
In Chapter 12 of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22, the map at Army Air Corps headquarters used a red ribbon to denote the “Bomb Line” between Allied and Enemy Territory. The next mission was a bombing run on Bologna which sat in Enemy Territory beyond the Bomb Line.
Believing that moving the Bomb Line on the map would have a similar effect on the Bomb Line in reality, Yossarian snuck up to the map and moved the ribbon to a point above Bologna.
As if by magic, the next morning the mission was cancelled.
Following in this tradition, the current occupant of the White House has just pulled off his own form of a “Yossarian Maneuver.”
During a live broadcast on Sunday, September 1, 2019 President Donald Trump, to many of us AKA “Mr. Crazy,” told America that the State of Alabama was in danger of suffering material damage from Hurricane Dorian.
The U.S. Weather Service quickly released a correction assuring the public that Alabama was in no danger whatsoever from Dorian.
Upset that this Weather-Service notice made him look like a fool, on Wednesday, September 4th the President held a second, live White House broadcast in which he displayed the original map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected route, but modified with a curved, black, hand-drawn, Sharpie line extending the hurricane’s path through both Florida and Georgia and up into, you guessed it, Alabama.
The Big T later tweeted: “As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama.”
Now, we know that Mr. Crazy is not a big reader, or perhaps any type of a reader at all. Sure, his eyes may occasionally stray from the glossy photos of the over-sized breasts in the latest issue of Bodacious Boobs to take a furtive glance or two at the jailhouse interview with R. Kelly, but I doubt that he’s ever heard of Catch-22, leastwise read twelve whole chapters of it, or twelve whole chapters of any book.
So, it stands to reason that the Sharpie Miracle with the Hurricane-Dorian weather map was not an act of situational plagiarism, but rather was an independent Voodoo Moment in which the Megalomaniac-In-Chief sought to retroactively move the course of the storm by changing the map’s projection of its path.
When asked who added the Sharpie line to the original map, a wide-eyed Mr. T muttered, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” presumably repeating the denial in the dubious belief that a lie repeated three times is three times more believable.
If only it were true that by smashing a statue of a devil we could destroy the actual demon, then the universe of cuckolded lovers would happily spend their days furiously jabbing at the photographed crotches of their faithless exes and, at one time or another, each of us would pause upon suffering a random pain and wonder whom we had wronged and how long our punishment would endure.
But, thankfully, most of us know that the representation of a thing and the thing itself are not magically connected, and that changing one will have no effect whatsoever on the other, except for the President of the United States, in which case reality is suspended in the service of megalomania.
One has to wonder what cruel and perverted events might transpire in the nether reaches of the White House if Mr. Crazy ever discovers a Voodoo Doll dressed like Nancy Pelosi and gets his hands on a box of big pins.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
