Waking Up Republican – the American Nightmare

Waking up Republican – the American Nightmare

by John DeBellis

It started out like every other morning; I spent most of it sleeping. Then, it all changed. I woke up, and for the first time I noticed how disgusting my room was— clothes, mostly t-shirts and jeans, lying everywhere. Not one suit, tie, or even a white shirt. As I started to rise from the bed, I tried to cover my eyes. Luckily, I followed my middle finger and noticed a few garments hanging neatly in my closet, all separated evenly, two inches apart: a blue jacket, matching pants, a starched white shirt, and a red tie. When I examined them closely, I felt a surge of pride grow inside me.

I noticed that on the jacket’s lapel was a small flag pin (I swear I could hear Rush Limbaugh making a racist remark with Ann Coulter harmonizing in the background). Tears marched from my eyes, but I quickly made them retreat. I am an American male; we don’t cry—it just uses fluid that could be made into testosterone.

I jumped out of bed (on the right side, of course) and instead of running off to the shower, I did what I never had done before (without being ordered to)—I made the bed! Yes, the bed, but I didn’t only make it; I changed the sheets (not just switching bottom with the top), disappointed that I couldn’t find any that had thread counts over 200.

At first I was disoriented, but somehow felt stronger, more self-assured, like I couldn’t possibly be wrong about anything. I took a shower, not caring how much water I used, whether my soap was made from chemicals that would seep into the ocean and kill everything but the legs of an oil rig, and dried off using a towel made by slave labor in China. It was then that I knew I had to do it. I wanted to do it! It was the right thing to do! I shaved off my mustache and beard. I had never felt more like a real clean-cut, conservative American male. At first I was disappointed in my shaved head, but then realized that in a day or two a circle of salt and pepper hair would grow around the perimeters and I’d look like someone who had the stuff to break a union, render the FDA impotent, bankrupt a financial institution, and still give myself a million dollar bonus.

Back in my bedroom, I eased into the suit and tied a perfect Windsor knot. I went into the kitchen, made a cup of instant coffee, scrambled a pair of white eggs from caged chickens, fried bacon cut from hormone-enhanced pigs, and toasted two slices of artificial ingredient-enriched white bread. When I was finished, I left the dishes in the sink to be cleaned up by an illegal alien I would hire later that day and, of course, pay only in cash (which I’d get back when a border patrol friend would return her, unless she had breast implants, to a refugee camp built on a toxic landfill). I pompously walked up to the corner and bought a New York Post. I read it cover to cover, sucking up and believing every word as if it were Christian Fundamentalist gospel (which—except for the news-worthy girls in bikinis and strip club ads—it is).

As I marched up the street looking for something to obstruct, I felt the word, “No,” forming on my mouth. I passed bums and no longer felt sorry for them; now I just felt that they were lazy and should be gathered up and starved to death. I kicked a few, accusing them of buying booze with food stamps. A car backfired, and I smelled the gas fumes which triggered a brilliant thought, “We could take all the starving bums, give them guns, and put them in ANWR (Alaska), and let them kill all the wildlife for food. Once they’d wiped out the animals and burned the trees for firewood, we could airdrop booze, which they would eventually kill each other over. Then, with the natural habitat destroyed, we’d be able to drill right through the bums’ unproductive bodies for oil.”

I walked another block and passed a woman in a wheel chair and had a disturbing thought, “If we had universal health care maybe she wouldn’t have become crippled, and she, and maybe thousands of others, wouldn’t need a wheelchair. That would put hundreds of wheel chair builders out of work, and then they would consume our tax money by collecting unemployment insurance, which would close up small businesses everywhere.” Quickly, I began to hate handicapped people for their potentially negative impact on our economy. I proudly mocked their movements—my transformation into an American Republican god was almost complete.

I crossed the street, turned right, and walked by three foreclosure signs and thought, “Now, that will finally discourage those people from thinking they deserve to live the American dream.” I wasn’t being insensitive of their plight. I felt that we should help them buy houses, but only if they’ll live next to nuclear power plants and let us use their backyards for radioactive dumps.

I walked for several blocks, and I thought I might be late. So, I flagged down a cab and stepped inside. The driver—who was from one of those countries (probably an opiate-producing terrorist community) and wore old bed linen on his head (the thread count not even close to 100)–asked me in some form of English that could only come off a tongue used for eating food that should be fed to goats, “Where are you was going?”
“To work,” I said.
“Where is that?” he asked, each wooden syllable colliding.
I started to tell him, but what came out even surprised me, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t not know?” He spanked out, his words sounding like they were critically broken in any language.
Then, I started to stutter, “I-I-I don’t have a job.”
“You want the unemployment office.” he asked, as if his vocals chords were strings on Ravi Shankar’s sitar.
As he spoke, I reached into my pocket, pulled out my wallet, and rummaged through nothing. “I don’t have any money.”

The cab driver looked at me and fired words that weren’t even distantly related to English, but I understood. By the time I leaped from the cab, it was already in motion.
I was flat broke; I’d spent my last fifty cents on The New York Post. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have any money and left the Post in the cab. I felt sick and nauseated. I stumbled a few blocks to the hospital emergency room. Before I could tell the nurse my symptoms, she asked if I had insurance. I checked my vacant wallet, and, like a true Republican, I mumbled incoherently about tax cuts and passed out.

I woke up, ready to plead my case to the nurses and doctors, tell them that I’m an American, I pay my taxes, and that everyone has the right to health care. “What about the Hippocratic oath?” I screamed, slamming my fist down. That’s when I felt the 85 thread count sheets, and for a minute I thought I had turned gay and was in bed with the cab driver. Before I thought too seriously about moving to San Francisco and getting married to another man, I looked around and saw my messy room: wrinkled jeans, the empty suit-less closet, yesterday’s New York Times on the floor. My heart slowed, I relaxed, inhaled, and filled my lungs with the reassuring sweaty smell of my one-size-fits-all-causes T-shirts, relieved that I was still a Democrat who believed that because of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that someday we, the American people, might have universal health care.

Then, I remembered that Donald Trump was the President of the United States, and this nightmare was one I couldn’t wake from. But before I dove into the safety of depression, I realized that I wasn’t alone. There were millions more like me, and with each other’s help, we can rise and turn this nightmare into the real American Dream: healthcare, jobs, a living minimum wage, repaired infrastructure, fully funded Planned Parenthood, solar energy, open borders, and tolerance for different cultures and people. In other words, Make America Kind Again! Drain the country of President Donald Putin Trump and toss him into a deep swamp—which, of course, would be a very real American wet dream!