So, anyway, this being the last one hundred days of the campaign to end all campaigns. I will be reprising the occasional seasonal essay. Think of it as my Retribution Tour. Because, as the good Dr. Thompson said, “Revenge is one of the few things in politics that never gets lost in the mail or written off for a dime on the dollar like losers’ campaign debts or pledges to help the Poor.”
“Welch Is Currently Being Held In Custody” (2016)
The old man awoke at daybreak, awoke in a foggy haze, a hazy fog, whatever. Didn’t know the time but confident sunrise not the proper hour for multiple-choice questions. Needed a couple of moments, hell, before true-or-false.
The young redhead always gets up a couple hours earlier. She lies awake most of the night anyway, turning and tossing, so she likes to watch a couple hours of “House” re-runs before heading to the hospital. Just to get her mind right. She must have opened the door and forgotten to lower the volume to the television.
The sonorous tones of Reginald Poundtree seemed almost shouted: “Welch is currently being held in custody.”
Oh, my God, what have I done now, the old man wondered. His foggy hazy mind raced. More importantly, how did I get caught?
“Comet Ping Pong, a popular family restaurant, near Connecticut and Nebraska avenues NW in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Washington, D.C.,” Poundtree continued, “was swept up in the onslaught of fake news and conspiracy theories prevalent during the presidential campaign. The restaurant, its owner, staff and nearby businesses have been attacked on social media and received death threats.”
The old man had never heard of Pizzagate. He was not normally a consumer of fake news. Not since that blonde on Fox said, ‘Everybody knows Santa Claus is white.”
He’d recently had his own brouhaha where people cannot seem to discern the difference between fact and what they want to believe. The old man had accidentally contributed to the problem with his most popular poem, Why I Am Supporting Donald Trump By Charlie Sheen. https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=6542
Readership had skyrocketed the day after the election. He still didn’t know why. Facts aren’t always entertaining or supportive of your messed-up thinking. But Washington, D.C., was about the last place you’d find him. I am completely in the clear, he thought.
In the days before the election, fake news stories claimed Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the pizzeria’s backrooms. Retired General Michael Flynn, whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, spread stories about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving pedophilia. None of them were true. Of course.
Some idiot with an unfortunate surname and multiple firearms decided to self-investigate rumors of underground tunnels where a cabal of Clintonites are allegedly hiding and torturing children.
If you believe such tales, perhaps you should not have a gun. Or a vote.
Have to take a wicked piss, was the old man’s next thought.
Photo At Top by Cassie Topaz Malone (2022)