All square in the Oval Office
The president slapped his palm down on the Oval Office desk and whooped like Geronimo at Little Big Horn. The vice president sat up straighter in his chair across the desk from the president.
There was no fooling Mike Pence; he knew something big was happening. He hadn’t worked two gruelling years with Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump without picking up something from his moods and manners. His boss was staring past Mike’s left ear at news footage of the demonstrations in Hong Kong. Two million people crammed the streets — men, women, teens and babies — as if they were part of a monstrous human sardine contest.
Pence couldn’t hear what was happening because MAGA kept the news sound off; it interfered with sports coverage on the other TV channels. The president sprang from his chair, skipped around his big desk and confronted the television. He moved so close, staring into the overheated set, that his golden coif, the spearhead of his hair, started to sag and droop. The president flipped it back into place.
“So, they’ve backed down,” he bellowed. “They’re finally showing us the real pictures.” Mike bit his tongue. He knew when silence was golden.
“You got nothing to say about this, Mr Vice President?” MAGA put on his pouty face, a throwback to his 11-year-old self throwing a tantrum.
Pence had to do something or his afternoon was ruined. He took a punt. Maybe his boss had mixed up Hong Kong’s constitutional crisis with MAGA’s trade war on China. “Looks like they’re all on your side, Mr President.”
“Of course they were on my side! I’d just been elected their president, hadn’t I? They were loyal Republicans showing their pleasure and support, I was holding the hand of the best looking-woman for her age in the world, I was going to revolutionise modern America, save it from the socialists and black scum and the spics and wops storming our borders, I was going to build the wall and drain the swamp. Why wouldn’t they be happy as ruttin’ hogs in a mud hole?”
Clearly it still grated with MAGA that many of the elite refused to acknowledge the overwhelming acceptance of his victory by the people.
Some days Mike Pence wondered why he had taken the job. This was one of them. But deep down he knew why. They’d come to him on bended knee. We need someone to balance his excesses, they said. They’d looked at Mike’s home page and knew in their hearts that he was the one.
The page revealed that Mike was the son of a wholesome heterosexual couple, Edward and Nancy Pence; his grandfather, Richard, had come to America from the non-Muslim country of Ireland. As a former US congressman and state governor Mike had been proud to serve the white and Christian population of America for more than two decades.
Critically, he had signed up for the Billy Graham Rule, which was a pledge to avoid sexual temptation by not spending time alone with women other than his wife. This challenging promise was named after the famous holy roller, but recently has been called the Mike Pence Rule in tribute the vice president’s strong compliance.
The makers and breakers figured that Mike’s obvious abstemious piety would balance Donald’s promiscuity.
The only minor worry was an advertisement across the bottom of his home page “Paid for by the people for Mike Pence”. It stated: “This is a reminder to kill all your tiny dogs” and it instructed readers to “Sign up to receive email notifications regarding best ways to do so, including strangling, drowning and others.” Ah well, we all have our little foibles.
“Snap out of it, Mike,” MAGA shouted in his ear. The president was thumping out a tweet on his mobile phone.
“The people will always decide,” he read slowly as his nimble fingers danced across the keyboard. “You cannot fool the people.”
“Jackpot! You’re right on the money, chief,” his deputy enthused.
MAGA walked over to the TV again. Hong Kong’s big crush was still playing. It was big news. Donald bent in close to the screen, holding his coif for protection.
“Something funny about it, Mike,” he said. “They’ve photoshopped every face in this crowd, made them all look like Chinese. Millions of them. I don’t remember any Chinese at my inauguration.”
Mike Pence smiled. Just another workday at the Oval Office.
What if Trump is trumped?
Curmudgeon’s rambling rumination above raises the question of how America and the world would fare if Trump were to die, or be incapacitated, or be successfully impeached, or be officially recognised as insane and put away for the safety of himself and humanity? Would we be better or worse off under an uninspiring President Mike Pence?
Before we explore that question, let’s look at the past. Four US presidents have been assassinated, creating four occasions when the vice president automatically moves up a rung and into the White House. Lyndon Johnson’s takeover after JFK’s murder in Dallas in 1963 was the only occasion this has happened in any of our lifetimes.
It was only sheer chance that Johnson was the vice president. But he made the most of it. He dragged out that war that should never have been in Vietnam as a matter of personal pride: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw South-east Asia go the way China went.”
He was bellicose, but he was at least rational. That’s not the way of all vice presidents.
US vice presidents, when they run for office, are often unknowns outside America. They are people with tentacles deep into the nation’s political machinery; people backed up by money, who have pulling power, at least in a local or regional sense.
Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s offsider, had a colourful turn of phrase to match a colourful personality. He has recently been tagged “Trump before Trump”. Spiro avoided a lot of scrutiny early in his term because attention was focused on his crooked boss. When the spotlight fell on him, Agnew was judged a suitable running partner for Nixon. He was crooked as an old shillelagh and was forced to step down.
Here’s a slice of Agnew’s take on life.
Spiro had no time for the esoteric: “The intellectual is the man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.”
Or women: “Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer.”
Or critics: “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.”
And he didn’t bow out with great grace: “I apologise for lying to you. I promise I won’t deceive you except in matters of this sort.”
Of all the vice presidents, Dan Quayle set the gold standard for mangled language and muddled thinking.
He became famous for his linguistic slip-ups and in some ways was America’s answer to England’s Dr Spooner, although possessed of a totally different approach.
The Reverend Spooner, an Oxford don, unintentionally but habitually transposed the beginning of two or more words in the same sentence. He probably suffered dyslexia. We’ll come back to Spooner later. Or, as the man himself might have said, “we’ll come back to looner spater”.
First, let’s browse through just a few of Dan Quayle’s hundreds of wordy mishaps..
“When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in LA, my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.”
Hmm… deep, Dan, deep.
“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
A subject he turned to time and again …
“We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.”
“Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teaches our children.”
Because we need to be prepared for the future …
“[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.”
“The future will be better tomorrow.”
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and our water…”
“For NASA, space is still a high priority.”
“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”
“We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.”
And finally…
“The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make.”
So, how does quirky Quayle stack up against the Rev. William Archibald Spooner, Oxford don, English eccentric and a person beloved of cryptic crossword compilers?
To be honest, they are in different divisions of the Addled Aphorism Association. Spooner’s linguistic slips came out unconsciously. Announcing the next hymn in New College Chapel, Oxford, in 1879, he intoned: “Kinquering Congs their titles take...”
And he is said to have dismissed a student, one among those whom the outraged Spooner complained had “hissed their mystery classes”, with: “You deliberately tasted two worms and you can leave Oxford by the town drain.”
Quayle was equally aware of his problem and equally powerless to stop it. In the end he said: “I stand by all my misstatements.”
###&&&##And me too##
Nobody is completely free from lingo jingo, least of all your Curmudgeon.
When he was a wee slip of a thing, long before your average knockabout family had heard the word dyslexia, the young Curmudgeon used to say pot-tea when he spied a teapot, and mow-lawner when his dad was working in the back yard. His siblings found this to be amusing.
When he was older, in the last year of high school, he was sent to the staff room to speak to a new teacher, Mr Dunwoodie. At the door, he demanded to know if a Mr Wood Dunny was in the room.
In later life Curmudgeon has written the occasional comedy for the stage. The plays have provoked their fair share of laughs from the audience, but never such a boisterous reception as was received from the Narrandera High School teachers of 1953.
