by Wayne Scheer
No one ever saw a debate like this.
They tell me seven billion people
will watch me,
maybe more.
So I have to prepare bigly.
First, I’ll mispronounce her name.
Ka-MAL-a,
Then I’ll call her
Kamrade.
She’ll try to laugh
And I’ll remind people how only low IQ people
laugh like that.
I never laugh.
I smirk, sometimes I sneer. Mostly, I grimace.
That’s manly.
She opens her mouth when she laughs.
That’s a girlie thing.
My father once hit me in the mouth for laughing.
I hate people who are happy.
I have more money. Money makes a person happy.
My father taught me that, too.
Ka-MAL-a doesn’t have as much money as I have,
so her laugh is a lie.
It has to be.
My father said.
And stop feeding me all those facts and statistises.
No one wants to hear that.
My rating will drop with my followers if I spout facts.
They want red meat, not kale salad.
Do you know how much red meat has gone up
since Komrade Ka-MAL-a and Obama have been in power?
Neither do I.
But people tell me it tripled, quadrupled.
People have to feed their children sawdust
because they can’t afford
prime rib for their babies. I hear that all the time.
I teethed on filet mignon and lobster,
(this was pre McDonald’s)
but children today suck on little plastic thingies.
It’s all Obama’s fault. And Hillary’s.
Lock them up! Lock them up?
What’s that? I’m going to debate Kamala Harris, not Obama or Hillary.
Since when?
Oh, that’s right, Ka-MAL-a.
I get them mixed up. Ka-MAL-a. O-BAM-a. Frederick Douglass.
Ka-Mal-a? Isn’t she the one who sat in the front of the bus
when she isn’t even black?
What? Why should keep that to myself?
You don’t know anything about ratings.
It’s time to let me be me.
I’m President of the World and a black belt in Karate.
I trained as a Navy Seal, you know.
They say I was the best recruit they ever saw.
I would have gone to Vietnam and stopped that war in one day,
but my father had bone spurs...
Wayne Scheer lives with his wife in Atlanta. After twenty-five years of teaching writing and literature in college, he is trying to follow his own advice and write. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his stories have appeared in such varied publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Sex and Laughter, The Pedestal, Flash Me Magazine, Cezanne’s Carrot, The Binnacle and The Better Drink.