Verses From The Biden Book Of Nursery Rhymes–Fairy Tales Of Governance

The President had taken to rambling, and his wife, Jill, was becoming concerned.  She felt that such meandering would be taken the wrong way – not the jovial digressions of a profoundly good man who had always been more at home with metaphor and simile than facts and figures.  Life for whom life had always been an emotional carousel ride with fifes and drums, a happy, exultant merry-go-round of childlike innocence and glee.  That was where his optimism came from – the spirit of childhood, building sand castles on Dewey Beach, baseball on the green, altar boy at high Mass at St. Aloysius, and bowed heads and grace before Mom’s pot roast and potatoes – not the cant and prescribed notions of his political party. 

There was a confluence in his mind – a Trivedi of the three holy rivers of God, as he was fond of saying.  There was something pure and simple about the compassionate, beautiful, and inspirational ideas of progressivism, and he was wont to talk about their remarkable purity and goodness.  So, if his addresses at times wandered off message – that is off the damnably precise, objective, and politically correct script written by his handlers – he was becoming the true Joe, the Joe Biden that she had married and seen through the ups and downs of political life.

Yet, the President’s fugues, as heartfelt and emotionally true as they might be, were becoming taken as signs of mental fragility.  He was not acting presidential, his critics said, not all budgets, policy, history, and adjudication.  He needed to stay on script, focus on the details, inspire the search for truth in world rocking off its moorings through competence, focus, and intensity.  His lightly woven anecdotes about Delaware and his kindly second grade teacher, the time Sister Mary Joseph rapped his knuckles, cute Marjorie Robbins who took him into the woods and kissed him, were becoming embarrassments but neither Jill nor his aides could decide what to do.  No matter how they tried – bold, large font teleprompter script, simple, repetitive statements, clear, uninflected, beginner’s English – nothing worked.  The President more often than not made no sense except to himself.

Jill had counselled him not to run again in 2024.  By that time, she knew, there would be no ‘on message’, only the vagaries of a good soul gone around some mysterious bend in the road.  Yet her husband was adamant.  He looked around him during Pride month, at all the rainbow flags, the parade of diversity coming and going up the steps of White House, the impassioned speeches for inclusivity, gender harmony, and racial justice.  In the midst of a speech in the Rose Garden, surrounded by an adoring transgender crowd, he thought how lucky he was to be President at such an important time in history.  He remembered little Billy Baines who sashayed around Mrs. Taylor’s third grade in his mother’s scarves and earrings, or butch Henrietta Farmer, or Mr. Phillips the organist who Joe found crying in the vestry, a sad little old womanish man in clerical finery.

“No more of that”, said the President, but come as it did between quotes of Martin Luther King and Steven A. Douglas, it was lost on the crowd, but the President never stopped to explain, only went on and off the teleprompter about gender dysphoria, sexual identity, personal growth, and human destiny.  The devoted crowd of other-gendered folk paid no attention to his slips of the tongue, long fugues back to Delaware, or troubling non sequiturs about racial purity.  They loved their president, and only the catcalling conservative press had him on the carpet the next day for his ‘racial purity’ remark, spun and recast by his advisors as a reference to the native African purity of soul, the reason why the black man was not just primus inter pares but at the very top of the human pyramid, due restitution, reparation, etc. etc.

Of course Donald Trump had a field day with all the President’s missteps, foundering in the weeds and shoals, and downright unintelligible nonsense.  ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, shouted Trump at a rally of thousands.  Biden the bare-assed President fooled by his flacks into thinking he was the most elegant, well dressed, intelligent man in the room.  Biden, a brick shy of a load, an impossible mental defective spouting retarded nostrums. “Have you no decency?”, replied the Reverend Bailey C. Mauser, pastor of the Westmoreland Congregational Church and public evangelist, reprising the famous words of Special Counsel Joseph Welch after listening to hours of bilious, hateful screeds from the Senator. But of course decency was a relative term, applied when it suited political adversaries. The Biden Administration was the indecent party, the former president said.  Indecent ideas, indecent policies, hysterical madness, the very nexus of indecency, or words to that effect.

President Biden was unaffected by all the criticism.  He knew what he knew and knew it well.  He had evolved from the small-time Delaware politician into a man of weight.  Inclusivity and diversity are the Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments, he told an audience of supporters, and while when pressed he could only manage ‘consideration, tolerance, and compassion’ for he was befuddled and betwixt and between his old fashioned, Catholic precepts of ‘marriage is a sexual union between a man and a woman’ and new secular notions of the gender spectrum, sexual fungibility, and transversal sexual identity.

So he stayed clear from the details because he had no firm grasp on them.  He only had images of little, flowery Billy Baines, crying Mr. Phillips, and tough girl Henrietta Farmer, was not quite sure how they fit into his foggy vision of national compatibility, so was told by his claques to stay clear of them.

There is nothing wrong with losing your grasp on reality.  Who said the here and now, the nuts and bolts of grouting, tiling, and financial security were the be-all and end-all of existence?  Far from it the President knew.  As he approached his likely final decade of life on earth, unreality was the meme to follow.  There had to be something more in store then simply closing up shop.  His fanciful fugues, quotes from A Child’s Garden of Verse and recitations of the Kyrie Eleison made ultimate sense for a man of his age.

Not so the American public who overwhelmingly concluded it was time for him to break out the chaise lounge and spend his dotage on his beloved Dewey Beach.

Donald Trump, master of polemics, ad hominem slights, and untrammeled political incorrectness kept up the drumbeat.  Not only were progressive policies cockamamie retreads from a discredited past, but they became even more distorted and meaningless when expressed by a man way beyond his means.

“Pay no attention to him, Joe”, said Jill one night after the latest in Trump’s scurrilous attacks on her husbands acuity and political instincts.  “He is beyond the pale”; but everyone but Joe knew otherwise.  He should have been cashiered long ago thanks to his garden basket of pro forma liberal treats – the supremacy of the black man, the new age of transgenderism, open borders, give-away programs and high taxes to pay for them, naïve, pusillanimous foreign policy, and revisionist history – but only now when this feeble, stumbling, old man squints and says, “God save the queen”, are even his most ardent supporters giving pause.

Donald Trump – virile, macho, confident, defiant, and strong – is the exact foil to the bumbling Biden; the perfect conservative counterpoint to Biden’s dallying, pandering policies, the timely challenge to progressivism gone woke and absurd.  It is more than likely that he will retake the presidency in 2024.