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November
28
2023

An Alt Christmas Carol
James Howard Kunstler

“You can start being normal and stop being unhinged anytime you want. Try it. I dare you.” — Aimee Terese on X

The White House, Christmas Eve, 2023. Imagine the painfully lugubrious scene….

“Joe Biden” rattles around in the upstairs “residence” like a BB in a packing crate. Nobody is around besides a few secret service agents, so still at their posts they might as well be statuary. The Big Guy is all alone. His spouse, Dr. Jill, had enough of pretend caretaking quite a while ago, and flew off to Oprah’s place in Santa Barbara for counseling and commiseration. Hunter is Gawd-knows-where doing Gawd-knows-what.

“JB” shuffles out of the residence kitchen, where he just demolished a half gallon of Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream® ice cream, against his doctor’s orders. His gall bladder writhes in revolt, sending a distress signal up the vagus nerve to the shriveled hypothalamus in his brain. A jumbled fugue of emotions — rage, fear, sexual arousal — quickens his step as he navigates by dead reckoning to the executive bedroom where he hurries to bed and falls into leaden slumber — only to be awakened by a cacophony of ringing bells. His eyelids roll open like shades in the windows of a skid row hotel room. Plangent moaning resounds as a mist emerges through the bedroom door and resolves into a mysterious figure garbed in the raiment of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Joe Biden” shrinks under the luxury Boll & Branch signature duvet— acquired when the agriculture minister of Ukraine slipped him an envelope stuffed with 100 hyrvnia notes. The spirit wails something that resembles the old Confederate anthem Eatin’ Goober Peas.

“Who are you spirit?” the quaking president asks.

“Why, I am your old pard from the Senate,” the ghost of Robert Byrd declares, removing the pointed hood to reveal his leonine head of hair and scowling face. “Why have you thrown our scared borders wide open, suh? I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

“Y-y-you don’t uh-uh-understand,” “JB” says, his childhood stutter returning. “They are muh-muh-migrants from oppression and vuh-vuh-very fine people.”

“Fine people, my ass,” the former Senator from West Virginia cries and clears the dust of the sepulcher from his throat. “I will send three spirits to you this night as a review of what has been and what shall become, so beware….” And with that the spirit returns to mist and slips back out through the keyhole. . . .

“Joe Biden” is shocked from slumber again as an attractive blond female ghost floats through the bedroom window.

“Don’t I know you?” he asks.

“Cad! That is the very line you used to pick me up on spring break in Nassau, 1966,” says “JB’s” first wife, Nelia Hunter. “Shall I show you the meretricious spectacle you made of our family after that truck driver on limestone Road ended my life and your little daughter’s too!”

“No-o-o-o-o,” the president moans, but is magically transported to the Wilmington Hospital room where his banged-up boys, Beau and Hunter are recovering from their injuries. A TV crew is present as “JB” emotes for the camera, a cruel victim of fate, he blubbers, who will yet conquer his grief and go on to forty years of electoral victories and the sedulous gathering of tribute from “donors” far and wide to soften the blow of his loss. The room dims….

He wakes up startled to a thundration of rap music. An African American giant sits on a gilded throne with a 40 oz bottle of Colt 45 in one huge hand and a little glass pipe smoldering at his lips. “JB” isn’t sure who this is.

“Is that you, Corn Pop?” he asks.

“Corn Pop, my ass. Don’t you remember me, George Floyd?”

“Oh, that boy who—”

“Boy…!” the ghost fumes. “Get yo’ cracker ass out da bed, right now, and put your limp little privileged paw in my hand!”

Suddenly they are transported on a cold wind to the concrete apron of the colossal obelisk behind the White House.

“Didn’t you tell congressman Clyburn you was gonna rename this thing the George Floyd monument?

“Wuh-whu-well it was a suh-suh-suggestion, not a promise—”

“Suggestion, my ass,” the ghost snorts and cuffs “JB” upside his head. “I’m the baby-daddy of this country now. You best see that it get done!”

“Joe Biden” awakens yet again as more cold wind bearing the fetid odor of swamp blows through the still-opened window. He is yet muttering “yu-yuh-yuh-yessir, yessir,” when a shrouded, hooded figure materializes in the gloom.

“You are… Cuh-Cuh-Christmas Future,” “Joe Biden” says.

“You’re catching on,” says the ghost, holding out his fleshless, bony hand. “Come!”

They are transported to the hearing room of a House committee. Hunter Biden sits at the witness table, tears streaking his face, apparently in mid testimony.

“. . . and then my dad says to Mr. Zlochevsky, ‘one-million? C’mon man, I’ve got a beach house to renovate’. . . and Mister Z says, ‘okay I give you one-point-five-mil’. . . and my dad cracks up laughing. . . . ‘that won’t even cover the area rugs I ordered from Iran’ he says. . . .”

Suddenly the room vaporizes and “Joe Biden” stands next to the inaugural dias on the US Capitol’s west-facing front. Tucker Carlson has just stepped away after being sworn in as vice president and the massive, gold-headed, once-and-future president lumbers up to the Chief Justice, placing his hand on a Bible.

“Oh, n-n-n-no-o-o-o-o. . .” “JB” wails and wakes up in the presidential bed, panting and sweating.

“Are you all right sir? A marine standing at his bedside says.

“I had a terrible dream. Trump got back in.”

“That was no dream, sir. You’ve been in a coma since just before Christmas last year when you stroked out on ice cream. It’s Wednesday, November 6, 2024. Welcome back to reality, sir.”

“Reality?” “Joe Biden” says. “We make our own reality.”

“Not anymore, sir,” the lance corporal says.

“Tell me, son, please! Did I manage to pardon my family? And myself?

“Uh, well, sir, you were in a coma. Anyway, your attorneys wish to see you now. . . .”

 

 

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

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