When the going gets silly …
… the silly get nuts
Jeffrey Denny
Denali is not just a mountain in Alaska.
The Panama Canal is more than a palindrome about a man and a plan.
Greenland is switching names with Iceland because Greenland is mostly icy and Iceland is mostly green most of the year.
Trump won’t play golf in Mexico, it’ll strictly be golf in America.
The Green New Deal is out. The Black Gold Deal is in. Trump supporters ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and gold-dripping rappers Kanye, Nelly and Waka Flocka are pleased.
The Department of the Interior will become the Department of the Exterior because it protects everything outside, but Americans demand that an end be put to that.
The word “DON’T” is being etched in front of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore….”
America stinks to high heaven. Our nation is neither proud, prosperous nor free. It’s ashamed, poor and enslaved. Like white American victims of DEI who get their Real News and Real Honest Opinion from Fox. “Woke” will go back to the Founders’ original intent to mean the past participle of wake.
These are just a few things I heard President Donald J. Trump declare during his second Inaugural Address. In which, unlike his divisive predecessor Abraham Lincoln, he set forth his plans to heal our divided nation.
“My legacy will be as a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump deadpanned. “That’s what I want to be — a peacemaker and a unifier.”
But I had Trump’s speech on background so maybe I misheard a thing or two.
According to generative AI, “people escape reality through a variety of activities, known as escapism.”
AI is still working on tautology. But notes that many escapees daydream, read, listen to music such as Tom Petty’s “Refugee,” meditate, medicate, Medicare, Medicaid, chant, rip tendons ripping Pickleballs, pick meaningless fights with spouses to keep the marriage sparkly, utterly fail at hobbies like cooking, painting, gardening or opioids, or destroy what little time they have on Earth on TikTok.
My escape is to get silly.
Like how it was a young Trump that Robin Gibb was singing about: “I started a joke, which started the whole world crying/But I didn’t see that the joke was on me oh no.”
That got my head to thinkin’: Are snowplows Carpathians? In BCE 500, when people sat on whatever served as commodes, did they scroll scrolls? Doomscroll the Dead Sea Scrolls? Did Jesus believe in Jesus like Millennials and Gen Z believe in themselves?
Did MLK, Jr., smirk from heaven when Trump said, “We will strive to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.” Did MLK, Jr. mutter, “I have a nightmare”?
Did God Almighty They/Them/Theirs smirk when Trump said sit down Jesus and declared himself America’s Christian Lord and Savior by saying, “I was saved by God to make America great again”?
When Trump declared there were only two genders, did that unify and make peace between old English majors and Trumpy LGBTQ haters because there’s no more nongrammatical nongender they/them/theirs to cringe over?
Did God start a joke that left the whole world laughing at Trump and crying about following false gods?
And why, for Christ’s sake, didn’t God favor Notre Dame over Ohio State? Does that prove there’s no God? When Fighting Irish fans say “Jesus H. Christ,” what does the H. stand for? Hiram? When the Irish say, “For fuck’s sake,” is that taking the Lord’s name in vain?
Denali is not just a GMC truck.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
