SAN DIEGO — Twelve score (Jared searched on Google to tell me how many years a score was) and fourteen years ago, the founding fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation sanctioning slavery, and dedicated to the proposition that all white men with property were created equal. They did a decent job drafting the constitution, but not as great as I could have done. None of them ever had their own highly rated TV show! I would have omitted Articles I and III.
Now we are engaged in a great pandemic, testing whether the nation can survive while its citizens hunker down in their apartments and homes like cowering losers. We are met in a great battle between fine people wielding weapons and demanding their inalienable rights to eat at restaurants, gamble at casinos, play golf in foursomes, stay at hotels, and travel on cruise ships against traitorous Democrats, scummy journalists, smart aleck scientists, and unappreciative governors who would sacrifice the greatest economy the world has ever seen just to spare a few lives. Yes, we have buried many of our countrymen, but thankfully most Americans haven’t noticed because they can’t attend the funerals. It is altogether fitting and proper that the country defer to my political instincts. Let me remind you that I won the election by a landslide in 2016.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot calculate the statistics of those who have perished without blaming the coronavirus on China which trained bats to infect tourists coming to the United States and thereby hurt my chances of reelection. Did you know bleach kills bats better than a wooden stake in the heart? I hold the brave people who have managed not to succumb to the disease in high esteem. The elderly, people of color, the poor, and prisoners just aren’t healthy and that’s why they get sick.
I hope the world will note and remember what I have said here today in front of Abraham Lincoln’s statue. People say he was the greatest president, but I’d rank him behind me and Andrew Jackson. It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work of making America great again after I have made Covid-19 disappear. It is incumbent (I like that word a lot) upon us to start buying stocks at their current cheap prices and then watch them skyrocket in value just in time for the presidential election. Then the dead shall not have died in vain, and this nation, under God, will reelect me by the greatest percentage the world has ever seen.
*
Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com. San Diego Jewish World points out to new readers that this column is satire, and nothing herein should be taken literally.