A Plaintive Afterword
On the State of the Union
At last, we’ve arrived at the author’s afterword.
This novella is an essay on political insanity—gone way the fuck over into dread promises of chaos proliferating—in the form of a fantasy novella.
It borrows ongoing characters from my three previous novels about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.
But it’s a tale unto itself.
It’s much shorter than the others, and it concerns a dreadful new period in our nation’s history. I refer, of course, to the election to the presidency of a petulant man-child who’s not merely incompetent but dangerous to the future not simply of the nation but of the world itself.
In my previous Santa novels, I reveal the true nature of the three fantastic immortals that enter our childhood homes at various times during the year. I toy with Greek mythology, and the first book, Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, is a highly erotic book, a transgressive book, a book that casts new light upon these creatures.
Most decidedly not for children!
Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes sees Santa first saving one boy from impending suicide, then expunging homophobia entirely from the human race.
Santa Claus Saves the World shows us a Saint Nicholas at work in the heavenly psyche factory. With the help of Hephaestus, who handles all newborn and retiring human psyches, he reengineers our basic under-psyche to eliminate weaknesses in the original design.
At the end of that novel, in order to maintain the integrity of the new design, Santa Claus—once Pan, King of the Satyrs—takes on the highly desirable task of fucking Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, in the proximity of every human psyche, one at a time.
That comes to seven billion tumbles in the hay. Indeed, Santa and Aphrodite fuck over a million times every week to guarantee that each newborn’s psyche gets off to a proper start.
At that novel’s triumphant conclusion, everyone believes that this fix—despite the obstacles thrown at it along the way by a villainous Tooth Fairy and her helpers—is working just fine and that Santa has solved every human problem except death, though of course death may or may not be a problem at all.
Now we come to this slim volume, God and Santa Claus Trump Trump with its subtitle A Christmas Tale of Generosity, Love, and Redemption. Clearly, the fixes to the psyche from my third Santa novel have somehow failed. Otherwise, it would have been unthinkable for a fucked-up, whacked-out carnival barker like Donald Trump to win the presidency of what had always been one of the finest countries in the world.
So in a critical sense, this book is a continuation of the fantasy tale that threads through the initial three novels of my Santa Claus Chronicles.
On the other hand, I reserve the auctorial right to pretend that this novella never existed and to write a fourth full-sized novel that picks up where the third one ends. Just as I’d dearly love to pretend that the insanity of Trump’s indecent ascendancy to a seat of pretended power never existed.
The players in this odd little story are fantastical, immortal, imaginative creations.
Yet none is more fanciful, more an imaginative creation, than Donald Trump himself.
I have never met the man. I have never seen any of his television appearances. I know him only from last year’s bizarre campaign that began to unravel our culture. That, because of who this man-child is, gave deplorable men and women what they felt was permission to proudly display their worst traits—their bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance—and the list, alas, goes on.
And now we have this abominable, abhorrent, aberrant anomaly, known as Trump, about to do all he can to destroy our freedoms and turn the sometime glory of our democratic republic into a dictatorship.
Let’s be clear about one thing. Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to this nation. As I finish writing this book, he is just weeks away from taking over from Barack Obama. In the month-plus since let-us-cringe-and-call it his election, Trump has already shown that he is incompetent, petulant, and given to dangerous threats against not only the press but the free speech of common citizens as well.
I would love to put the word “election” in very heavy quotes, even though, according to the custom of our nation’s history, the Electoral College decides who the president will be. That being said, as of this writing, Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote by close to two point nine million votes, a gap without precedent.
Even if she hadn’t done so, many of us are loath to call Trump the president of anything, let alone of our nation. And will refuse to do so. How he acted during the primaries, the way he spewed his petulance into his crowds, and the way in which so many of his followers have felt emboldened to assault, either in word or deed—it’s anybody’s guess how horrendous those deeds will become—people who look or are different from the vaunted white male.
Let me make it clear.
Unlike our bought-and-sold corporate media, we must not normalize this man’s behavior.
Call him Pretender Trump. Or call him Predator Trump. Or call him That Son of a Bitch Squatting in the People’s House.
Never president.
We must stand up to every instance of bigotry and hatred we witness in the public arena.
If we do that en masse, early enough in the steep tumble of the emboldened into fascist thuggery, we can put an early stop to it. Let them know we will not tolerate such behavior ever.
I’m not going to tell you how to react to incidents of this sort. People appear to have reacted in two ways. The first, and perhaps the safest, is to ignore the attacker, approach the person attacked, stand with them, talk to them, assure them you’re a friend, possibly even stand between them and the attacker. The second—more risky, but quite wonderful when done well—is to confront the attacker directly. I have read amazing accounts of this sort of response.
If that’s the tack you take, I urge the use of this phrase: “You are better than that.”
In any event, be cautious, be safe, and when you can, be bold and firm with those acting out in unacceptable ways.
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