III.
The battle of the sexes, which had been ongoing since the beginning of time, was little more than a shoving match compared to the current carnage done to men by bold, empowered women. Terrified by the formerly “fairer sex,” men no longer joked about feminist “penis envy,” but instead prayed for relief from female oppression. The gods themselves were forced to take sides, as this fight took over the government.
Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, the mood of America had turned so ugly that Trump’s unspeakable rhetoric was winning him votes! Also, the Squad had a deeply divisive effect on the country and were scaring the citizens. The only person who could save America from the evil orange man was Nancy Pelosi; she was tasked with reigning in the Squad while there was still time.
Nancy had wanted their meeting to fly under the radar, but the Squad didn’t play that way, and the corridors of the State House were lined with reporters and camera flashes. They had leaked their “showdown” with Pelosi.
“Any tidbits?” inquired a friendly journalist.
“We’re going to push Pelosi into retirement!” laughed these power-drunk females.
Inside her spacious taxpayer-funded office, Nancy seated her young enemies.
“Look, we all want the same thing: we want to see Trump impeached and imprisoned,” Nancy pleaded in vain with them.
She tried bribery. “See those four crates by the wall? They keep sending me these gorgeous imported porcelain coffee mugs. I didn’t order them. You girls would be doing me a favor if you took them.”
A heavy silence filled the room.
“Do you like Broadway?”
This at least got a positive reaction from the Squad.
“We love Broadway! Hee-haw, hee-haw.”
“I have some tickets to Hamilton!”
“Been there, done that. Ooga-booga.”
“Sssss-sssss.”
“Heee-hih-hih-hih aarrrrrrrrgh! You can’t bribe us, Nancy!”
“Yeah, cause we can get all the Broadway tickets we want! Hee-haw, hee-haw.”
Nancy played her ace.
“How about an all-expenses paid trip to Israel? Just the five of us girls. We can swim in the Dead Sea. There’s this little place that does plastic surgery for Mossad; they’re tops! I can get us all in…”
The younger, faster females got out of their chairs and into Nancy’s face and backed her up. Her padded ass was against her desk, and she feared for her safety.
“What’s that special project you been working on, Nancy? Hee-haw, hee-haw!” demanded Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she stood over little old Nancy, whose dentures rattled.
“We want in! Sssss-ssss-sss,” hissed Somali congressperson Ilhan Omar.
“You can’t do nuffin’ without us no more, ooga-booga!” added Ayanna Pressley in a threatening tone.
“Tell us what the secret is. Heee-hih-hih-hih aarrrrrrrrgh!” Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian politician, ground her fat Arab teeth. The Squad closed in. Nancy pushed her way out of the circle and retreated behind her desk.
“We’re gonna find out anyway, so you should spill the beans!”
Nancy Pelosi was cornered. She considered, she sighed and looked upward while placing her desiccated knuckles on the desk and playing with her teeth. The Squad’s angry gaze burned her, and Nancy turned away from them.
Nancy willed blood to her brain, took a deep breath, and began.
“A woman is immunized against all dangers; one may call her a scoundrel, parasite, swindler, it all runs off her like water off a raincoat. But call her a ‘cunt’ and you will be astonished at how she recoils, how injured she is, how she suddenly shrinks back: ‘I’ve been found out.’”
Nancy turned to face the Squad. They had heard her. Gone was the hostility, the cynicism, and the animosity from their brutish faces. In its place was sympathy and sadness; they all shared the burden of being female. A group hug followed; they cried and cried.
“I can’t remember the first time I was called a ‘cunt.’ I must have been a little girl,” the senior citizen explained.
“Dey been callin’ you ‘cunt’ for a long time. Ooga-booga.”
“Sssss-sssssss, my heart goes out to you Nancy. I too have been called ‘cunt.’ Ssssss-sssss.”
“Wow, Nancy, I never thought of you as human before. Hee-haw, hee-haw!”
“Hih hih heee-hih-hih-hih aarrrrrrrrgh! I never realized that white women also suffer from white male oppression!” snarled the laughing Arab.
“White men are worse than Hitler,” the older woman confided slowly with outward conviction, while inwardly, she secretly congratulated herself for bonding with the Squad. Now was the time for taking them into the fold and leading them back to the shadows, where they could do no harm.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the first to snap out of this girly group gathering.
“Hey! You were gonna tell us your secret plan to get Trump! Hee-haw, hee-haw!”
“Do not stall for time, Nancy. Ssss-ssss. We have all been called cunts!” mocked the string-bean Somali.
“Don’t you see?” lisped the old lady from inside her facelifts. “We’re going to make saying ‘cunt’ a felony!” Nancy studied the younger females’ faces, as one by one they grasped her idea and understood its complexity.
“I’ve had my team burning the midnight oil on this one! We’ve got a bill written up and we’re ready to spring it on Congress. Once it goes into effect, my spies working in the White House will provoke Trump, he will lose his temper and call them ‘cunts,’ and off to prison he goes!”
“But what about ‘pussy?’ Trump says dat all the time. Hee-haw, hee-haw! Why don’t we make saying ‘pussy’ illegal? Ha, how about dat? Hee-haw, hee-haw!”
“If we outlaw the ‘P-word,’ we will lose millions of cat-people votes; they still insist on calling cats ‘pussy!’”
“Hold on there a second! Don’t you know nuffin’ bout’ slavery!?! You whites always thinkin’ ‘bout yo-self! Ooga-booga. If dey one word in da whole wide world dat evil, it be ‘nigger!’ Ooga-booga.”
“If we criminalize the word ‘nigger,’ millions of young black men will have nothing to say.” Nancy held out her palm to silence the Squad. “We’ve done a lot of research into this, believe me!”
“Heee-hih-hih-hih aarrrrrrrrgh! I wash everyday, but still they call me ‘dirty Arab!’”
“’Dirty Arab’ is a phrase. We need to start by outlawing individual words before we move onto criminalizing phrases and sentences,” she stated with authority.
“And if they can’t say it, they can’t think it. Hee-haw, hee-haw!”
Nancy was duly impressed by herself; she had not survived decades of politics by accident. Now she went for the close. “I’m going to need your help to get this one past the Republicans!”
There was more tittering and girl bonding as the Squad pledged allegiance to Nancy. Another group hug, a few tears, and the young females grabbed their complimentary boxes of porcelain coffee mugs and left Nancy’s office.
The old lady sat down hard in her seat; triumphant but exhausted was how she felt. But then, Nancy listened through the door with her Mossad-grade Israeli hearing aides; what she heard turned her blue with anger. She almost spat out her teeth! The Squad, which she had just schooled, mentored, and won over, was already plotting against Nancy in the very hallway outside her office!
The younger females laughed conspiratorially. “Yeah, they called her ‘cunt!’ Hee-haw, hee-haw!”
“Now they call her ‘old cunt!’ Ha ha ha, sssss-ssss.”
“Heee-hih-hih-hih aarrrrrrrrgh! We don’t need Nancy Pelosi; we will take her idea and say it is ours! Heee-hih-hih-hih!”
Slumped in her seat, Nancy fumed and considered her next move.
IV.
Meanwhile, atop Mount McKinley, Jupiter also fumed. He was unhappy with his wife’s behavior and had been lately looking into things. Juno slipped in carrying Chinese takeout, acting very ho-hum and nonchalant.
“Do you no longer cook dinner, wife of mine?”
“I’ve been very busy; you know how it is.” She extracted white cartons of the greasy food from the bag and arranged them on the table. “They forgot the paper plates.”
“Why are you wearing that horrible pink knit cap?” Jupiter pointed at Juno’s head.
Juno’s head jerked up and she shot her husband a cold look; she started to say something bold, then changed her mind.
“All the girls are wearing them.”
“You mean like the Squad?” The king of the gods arched his eyebrow.
Juno felt caught, but she did her best to not show it. How much did her husband know?
“Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: do you know of her?” continued Jupiter.
“Vaguely. You know I don’t like politics.” Juno fiddled with plastic knives and forks.
“They say she looks like a donkey. What do you have to say about that?”
“I don’t see it. It’s only white men who say that because she is a proud Latina.”
“This proud Latina says white people should get out of North America. What do you think about that!?!”
“I think she’s right!”
“But you’re white!”
“She said white men should leave North America, not white women!”
Juno looked up at her husband for a quick moment and saw that his mouth was agape in shock.
“Anyway, you can stay; you’re a god and can do as you please. It’s just all white men, you know, mortal men must leave; you know, because of their racism.”
“You do know that whites were the first humans in North America. You do remember the Solutreans, don’t you?”
“They’re ancient history.”
“Prehistory to be precise, but you know that God has given North America to the white man, just as he has given Israel to the Jews!”
Just then, Jupiter’s honor guard appeared with their swords and sandals.
“Take Juno and lock her in a cage!”
Juno screamed obscenities as she was hauled away, not for the first time. Jupiter pulled the pink knit cap off her head and cast it into the darkness.
V.
Down in Washington, D.C., Nancy Pelosi felt for the first time a need to confide in President Trump. Despite her constant attacks on him, his door was always open to her, and this bothered her to no end, that she could not push his buttons and get his goat. But today was different: she felt as if she were being pulled to the White House by some otherworldly force; she did not feel in control.
“What a surprise to see you, Nancy!” Donald Trump welcomed the old hag into the Oval Office.
She tried to match the president’s casual hospitality, but only managed to reduce her smirk by half. The president, ever the gentleman, said nothing about how taut and frozen-looking her face had become from all the plastic surgeries and Botox treatments. Trump knew that her tear ducts were sealed up tight, and that the old gal could no longer cry on cue, and that her days as an elected official were numbered because of this. But he said nothing and did not gloat.
“Thank you for seeing me, Donald. I have something urgent we need to talk about.”
“I’m all ears.”
“You know I’ve been working closely with the Squad…”
“How could I not? You’ve all been very vocal.”
“Well, I…”
“I don’t think now is the right time to outlaw cauliflower, Nancy; you should wait for the demographics to change.”
“Frankly, I’m worried about the state of our democracy, Mr. President.”
“It seems okay to me, Nancy.”
“Change is good, Mr. President, unless it happens too quickly.”
“And you feel the Squad is getting ahead of themselves?”
“They are leading the country away from democracy.”
“How are we going to stop that, Nancy?”
Compelled by divine agency, Nancy spilled the beans.
VI.
A special televised emergency session of Congress was convened. President Trump made his way to the podium amid some clapping and many boos. Behind him sat Nancy Pelosi, at her appointed seat as congressional leader. All noticed her visible lack of hostility towards the president, and this worried most of them. In the audience sat the Squad, who were ready to checkmate the President with their surprise anti-hate legislation. They and their assistants glowered with animal animosity for Trump and America.
The president began.
“We Americans are experiencing a moral crisis, and not for the first time. And what I’m talking about is not an outside thing, but something that happens here every day. Something very, very bad, something that sows division among our many wonderful and diverse citizens.
“’Sticks and stones may break my bones’; we all know this one.” The president scanned his audience with distracted, fatherly benevolence. “The last part goes ‘but words will never hurt me.’ Now that was once true, but we now know that words do hurt. They hurt more than sticks, and sometimes even more than stones.”
The presidents orange hair gleamed under the lights. “There are some very bad words out there.” He held up one finger. “Now you know me. I have pretty thick skin, plus I’m a guy, I’m a man. Insults run off me like rain off an umbrella.
“But women, that’s a different matter; God made them the way that he did, and for whatever reason, they are easily hurt by words, and we don’t want that. There’s no place for that in America. Let me be very clear.
“I have women in my family; we all do. There are some very bad words out there, terrible words that hurt our women.” Trump nodded his head up and down in agreement with what he was saying.
“Now, I’m going to tell you one of these words. I’m going to say it. It’s a word that I have never used personally, but it is very, very bad. It has no good usage at all! I’m going to say it for demonstration purposes only. Get ready; you may want to cover your ears if you’re emotional. The word is ‘cunt!’”
A hand-grenade could not have hurt more than that terrible word! The audience of hardened reporters drew a collective gasp of air as they looked to their neighbors for comfort. Some screamed, while others covered their ears. Not surprisingly, many female journalists had tears in their eyes. But before the press could rally to its senses and shout down the president, he continued.
“We’re going to outlaw that horrible word! We will make it a felony to say the ‘c-word.’”
Journalists and normal people alike couldn’t believe what they were hearing. This man, President Trump, who had been pure evil, and really crazy as well, was finally doing something that was good and made sense! There was spontaneous applause. The mood lightened in an unprecedented way for an interaction between Trump and the free world. Everyone was happy, except the Squad, who began exchanging frantic looks. A reporter from FOX inquired:
“Mr. President, you’re saying that it will be a felony to say the word ‘cunt.’ Will it also be a crime to say ‘C-word?’”
“Now, I’m a fan of FOX, so I’ll let that pass; you saying ‘cunt.’ I’ll give you a presidential pardon this one time. But if it happens again; wellm you fill in the blanks. As for saying ‘C-word’ itself: will that be illegal, will it be a felony or a misdemeanor?” Trump shrugged. “I don’t know. My team is working on that right now, and they’re great people!”
Animal noises rang out from the seats of congress. The Squad was out of their seats and rushing the podium.
“Hee-haw! Hee-haw! You stole our idea!”
“Motherfucker! Heee-hih-hih-hih aarrrrrrrrgh! MOTHERFUCKER!”
Up in the sky, high above the capital, Jupiter looked down and spoke this spell.
Donkey, Snake, Gorilla, and Hyena
You ain’t humans, not even beaners
Though as elected officials you do just swell
I will now send you straight back to Hell
No more pantsuits and bling
No more trips to the spa
Back back into animals
Be humans no more!
Straight down from the dome in the ceiling came an invisible lightning bolt which struck the Squad! Off came their pantsuits and bling, on came hairy animal legs. Off, off came their terrible humanesque faces as they turned back into beasts!
“Hee-haw!”
An angry donkey bucked, breaking tables and chairs. Politicians screamed in terror and piled out towards the exits. Jupiter saw and laughed and slapped his knee as they were attacked by a laughing hyena, who could no longer spot the Republicans from the Democrats. A venomous African asp fatally bit a young staffer before slithering into a crack with an “Ssssss-Sssss!” An irate gorilla climbed the hallowed walls of the State House. “Ooga-booga! Ooga!” it bellowed as it threw stuff down on the gallery. The folks at home watched on TV, and underneath it all, Atlas smirked…
***
For all installments of “Atlas Smirked,” click here.
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Delmo Latchkey was born into old wealth and has enjoyed a privileged existence. He learned to ride ponies before he learned to read, but learned to read before graduating ponies for horses. Someday Delmo might learn to pilot an automobile, but his chauffeur does the driving for now. Delmo has done mega-charity work and would like to give away his family’s money someday. Mr. Latchkey is smarter than most and has traveled the world and written under various pseudonyms. He currently resides at Trump Towers.
