by R L Saunders
Table of Contents
Rise & Fall of President Frump: Three Political Satires (Parody & Satire)
The Rise and Fall of President Frump - R. L. Saunders
The Integrity Implosions
The Chardonnay Conspiracy
Stories from R. L. Saunders
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The Rise and Fall of President Frump
Three Short Stories by R. L. Saunders
Copyright © 2018 Midwest Journal Press. All Rights Reserved.
The Rise and Fall of President Frump - R. L. Saunders
"ABOUT TIME YOU SHOWED up."
"Hey, I'm right on time!"
"Yea, but I needed to talk to someone hours ago."
"Oh, that research assignment..."
"Right. Why did I have to be assigned researching the Frump Presidency?"
"Wasn't it about the trend of older female candidates being elected?"
"Yea, frumpy ones. Not young, not necessarily married, preferably divorced after their hubby ran off with a younger woman, not particularly photogenic - Frumps."
"Is that your result after all your research? Older women make frumpy politicians?"
"Of course not. It's just a marketing angle I was working on. That's the key point all these women had in common. The ones who could claim they were victims of a womanizer got better poll results, especially after they could show that they ‘persisted and resisted’ and made their own way afterwards."
"Well, it seems a bit narrow..."
"Sorry, but the facts came out that way. Suddenly, we had only women running for office, and no younger ones. No one wanted to work for the good-looking ones, as it was an invitation to have harassment charges thrown at you."
"You can't be serious! That's a little over the top, isn't it?"
"That's what the research showed. OK, maybe the marketing needs to be massaged a bit. You have to admit that being a male became political dynamite in those early 2000 elections, particularly after 2020 or so."
"Because of all the harassment claims and publicity?"
"Exactly. Male celebrities and politicians were getting slammed all over the place. Meanwhile, media was under-reporting court cases about female teachers bedding their underage male students."
"Are you serious?"
"Sure, just check the Drudge archives. That and Blaze were showing those while everyone else was chasing the skirt chasers."
"How did that fit your research into female Presidents after 2020?"
"Polls were all over the place, and so were news reporting. Corporate news channels were reporting according to whoever was in charge of the newsrooms. And you started seeing a shift once the various complaints got rid of most of the male reporters and their complicit execs. Regardless of whether it was earned. Lots of conspiracy complaints were starting up as well. Railroaded, they were saying. So all these male reporters started freelancing. No one would hire them. Their solution was to start self-publishing expose pieces as books and on various social media like blogs. Some took to writing fiction. The funniest story was one who got rich writing romance novels about women being groped and harassed at work - the same thing that cost him his job."
"I heard about that one. Made millions off claims that were never proved."
"Yeah, never went to court, and no charges were filed. The guy's life was basically ruined over some unsubstantiated interview with a person who never showed her face on camera. Said she was trying to avoid reprisals and stalking. The guy was up against the company's public stock offering. Horrible timing. So instead of trying to get even, he did one better and sold millions of copies of his fiction series about a girl who went from the mail room to the board room, getting groped all the way to the top. Said he got the plots out of old Horatio Alger stories."
"Making silk out of a sow's ear."
"Hey, I gotta write that down. A bit crass always helps get the ratings up."
"That's not what I meant..."
"I know, I know. You would never say that out loud as people would say you were 'insensitive.'"
"...and that would wind me up needing 'sensitivity training' and go on my record when I just 'misspoke.'"
"The point of the research was that the elections in those years soon mirrored the media, what was left of it. Meetings had to be with several of each sex in the room, more to have witnesses than to get anything done."
"I remember a story about someone reviving the Victorian idea of 'chaperones'..."
"And the funny part is that these were usually older, frumpy women."
"Your frump concept showing up. Aren't you being a little insensitive again?"
"It's just a great way to get someone's attention: 'Meet the New President Frump.' Has a nice ring to it, since that election was so well known through history."
"Oh, now I see your point. That president had his own problem with untoward remarks. Tweets I think they used to call them."
"And thanks to some security contractor putting them onto Amazon web servers, we have billions of these things as research fodder for that era."
"That early electronic age was a boon to us researchers. Way before the Privacy Transparency Act was instituted. Now no one keeps records of anything."
"Yea, the Europeans started it, and the Americans soon caught on that this was a way to cover their, uh, tracks. Google and Facebook started championing this as a way to get out from under lawsuits about allowing discriminating and harassing ads on their sites. A post only lasted 6 hours unless someone paid to have it extended."
"And anyone could sue to have a copy taken down as an invasion of privacy and possible slander. Like the DMCA, no one had to prove anything, only claim they were offended."
"That's right. The research brought it back to the point of elections. The first woman to break through and get elected was a Midwestern businessperson who had remarried a pastor and was squeaky clean (other than being victimized by her ex, who was a gun-toting anti-abortion activist.)"
"Wait, she was a Republican, though."
"Right. And that's what took her over the top. She ran against extremism in all forms. People needed to have a choice, she said. They deserved to have rights. The Democrats had imploded by then, and couldn't raise finances to save their souls. The voter rolls had been cleaned up of illegal voters, in spite of their protests that they didn't exist. Everyone was hunting for people who were harassers or anti-minority. And she had a background of prosecuting civil rights violations. She was a victim herself. And came from a mixed race background where one of her parents had a sex change. Just perfect for everyone to empathize with."
"But she wasn't frumpy. She used to be a model before she got into law."
"And claimed that what she had endured as a model inspired her to become a lawyer. Great story. Couldn't prove a whit of it. But she actually made herself look older than she was in order to get elected. Changed the makeup depending on who she was talking to. Just like the old Dem's who would change their dialect depending on what part of the country they were in."
"She had real showmanship. Like you said, right person at the right time."
"And the perfect tool-set. Because she took over a failing media company and turned it around with family programming. Cut all the connections and contracts with the corporate site. Ordered her news people onto simply reading the most popular headlines off the Internet. Put the emphasis of the reporting onto sports, cute pets, and inspiring stories of 'under-privileged' people making success out of their lives. Got a contract to run Hallmark Channel movies on prime-time. Everyone wanted to advertise there as it was safe."
"How did her "ex" work
into her campaign?"
"Because she had been a victim and had overcome her adversity. Every once in a while, the other channels would receive a clip of him in his trailer park, cleaning his gun, dressed in a holey t-shirt, being foul-mouthed. Her media company also bought up construction firms, and they got big tax write-offs for building housing for the 'underprivileged'. Then she'd promote how they gave partial scholarships for under-employed people to get training at the local community college (while she was on the boards of several) so they could get a decent job. Even give them low cost loans for starting businesses and absorbed their assets if they failed."
"Sounds like a saint."
"Except for the media that tried to report otherwise. Those stories got squashed by her clique of female lawyers. And she retained control of her media empire after publicly resigning to run for office. It was through a bunch of stock-owning non-profit foundations she and her pastor husband set up."
"Wasn't there a huge flap during her campaign?"
"But it was perfect for her. They started calling her 'Teflon Annie' after that. Almost all of her staff were female, and diverse. One of the few male interns lodged a complaint about harassment that several other male and female former campaign staff chimed in on. It looked very bad since they caught Annie in an open mic talking about how well he was endowed. She fired that guys' boss on the spot, outed her as lesbian, so the harassment charge was assumed probably fake. Then she also added that the campaign staff complainer was in being placed in charge of 'endowments' for Teflon Annie's college fund investments. A beautiful piece of campaign quick-step."
"Didn't the press investigate and come up with something?"
"No, if there was, it was half-hearted. Most of the media were nearly all female new rooms by that time as well as the execs. So they were rooting for her even though she was a Republican. Of course, there was no one to say that they were biased, since they were all biased the same way. Oh, there were a lot of romance fiction books that came out about it, but that was common at that time. Especially, since the heroines of those stories could grope males right back and then get them fired for harassment. Lovers on the side, cuckolded spouses, everything."
"Perfect climate to get elected in."
"Right. And all that lasted for a few years until fiction started becoming found out as true. Romance stories started being used to spill government secrets. Codes were hidden in them where people could find access to various data. All the guys who got fired for allegations that were in sensitive jobs were leaking tons of data about their female bosses, often with video."
"WikiLeaks was having a great time, I suppose?"
"They turned it into a game. All they did was to provide the code keys and then people would have to buy a copy of the book to find the racy videos. Wikipedia used it as a fundraiser."
"Wait, weren't we supposed to be free of all this harassment stuff by that time?"
"Look things go around and they come around. 'To every season...' and all that. Power and money don't corrupt, they just show up the traits people already have. Sure, after Teflon Annie's two terms, she was replaced by another female president from DAFT* party (*Democratic-Antifa-Feminist-Transgender) and that was another troubled term. Teflon Annie ran for Senate and then got appointed to the Supreme Court. But no sex or skin-color or minority status means diddly when we are all minorities. If you are doing something against the law, or moral common sense, it will eventually come out."
"But didn't Teflon Annie pave the way?"
"Sure, but all that happened is she suddenly resigned everything and retired to a remote ranch in Montana away from all the press. Raising buffalo, from what I understand, with a lot of money from government contracts to preserve the wild prairies or some such. Insanely rich, but stays out of the media completely. What really did her in was the rise of the decentralized Internet and the Hypocrisy bomb scandals." (see Alternative Fact History Series I)
"Did she get indisposed?"
"For a whole week. They took her to a remote hospital where no one was allowed to speak and all the electronic media was jammed. When the decentralized Internet took out Google and all the social media, as well as any NSA or Kremlin or Chinese snooping, then governments had to drop a lot of pretenses. The Instant Referendums started happening and quickly there was no real reason for much government anymore. Because no one could keep secrets from anyone. It became too easy to anonymously share stuff to everyone. But that's all old history. This project was just to figure out how the Frumps got into power and fell out of it."
"So you figure you're done now?"
"All but the side-checking and line-editing. We'll have it posted this week."
"Any idea what they want you to do next?"
"I think I'd like to take up studying something safe and quiet. Like hot-dog skiing or Demolition Derbies. Politics is too violent a sport for me."
The Integrity Implosions
OF COURSE, IT DIDN't start with football games.
Or baseball games.
And definitely not the Beltway.
It had to do with solving terrorism and then spread virally from there.
The same people who brought you the Will-Be-Was drive were working to solve the problem of people being sucked into the weird idea that you could get to heaven by killing people. Terrorism had become the height of hypocrisy.
In the one of the many sub-basements of the Moral Alchemy Revival at Lower Alabama and Georgia Oceanfronts (MAR-A-LAGO), a group was formed called the Metaphysical Anti-Terror Directive (M.A.D. - they also produced a parody magazine and branched into writing advertising during the 60's - you may have heard of these...)
Anyway, these guys were tasked with finding peaceful ways to diffuse the crisis in the Middle East. Once they hit on a solution, they got some government grants with few strings other than getting results.
But then it got out of hand because it went viral. And the end result was messy.
They found that people who are hypocritical tend to implode their lives. Politicians, celebrities, and millionaire sports figures seem very prone to ultimately screwing their lives over. Because they lose their moral compass and life catches up with them. Certain newscasters you may know have also suffered this. Rather shocking at first.
But we are getting ahead of our story.
It all started out as research to help solve the terrorist problem.
It certainly wasn't the experimenter's fault that it went viral.
Anyway, the Will-Be-Was drive was again the solution. More of a universal solvent that had no real container except itself.
Slippery thing, truth. And that is what the drive was built on. Truth being whatever turned out to be the most workable.
The general idea of it held that there had to be Good before it could be turned into Bad. Good tends to be more workable, more constructive. Bad tends to be unworkable and destructive. Something had to be constructed before it could be converted into something destructive. Islam had been a great civilizing influence before it was radicalized into a great decivilizing influence.
Terrorism has been constant throughout the ages. The Southern General Lee surrendered the Confederacy just to avoid soldiers marauding up and down the coast, using the example of the Northern General Sherman, but on smaller scales. It had already happened in Kansas with the Jayhawkers to some degree. Evil can be made out of any good. War tends to destroy both sides that engage in it. (And why money flees the countries that get involved in it. Russia's conflicts have kept its people poor, but the poster child is North Korea...)
The Will-Be-Was actually patterned itself on finding the past and original good that existed and contrasted and compared with any destructive present. That created a flow of energy which then allowed all sorts of applications. Anti-gravitation was one, as well as simple things like endless electricity for a given project. One of the most useful was the apparency of invisibility. The drive worked in extreme cases best. Well-run day cares and nurseries
were the poor sources of conflict. Bible schools made the drive almost quit.
The Middle East was an endless flow of power for the drive, as you had the ancient Mesopotamian garden sites (birthplace of humanity) being ravaged, as well as many religious sites being decimated. Just point to a certain positive time in history and then compare it with the present degraded scene. Instant unlimited energy.
I could tell you about the Will-Be-Was drive for days, but the point of this was to get to explaining how your football players and their broadcasters started disappearing, leaving a real stink in their wake.
But we were talking about terrorists.
OK, so one of these experimenters was testing out a stealth platform, which was running on pin-pointed energy flows. No one could really see this thing flying in the air, except for the cluster of little dust-devils under it. The technician was adjusting his dials and seeing what speed he could get out of it, Then some local walked right under it and disappeared. The guy just didn't walk out on the other side.
So they stopped the platform in mid-flight and just had it stand there. Nothing existed where the guy should be. Soon, someone noticed the guy was missing and came out that direction to find him. He also disappeared when he went though the field. All that was left was his Koran and a cartridge belt. These were at the bottom of a hole, about as deep as the guy was tall.
This was alarming to the technicians on board, obviously. They had never seen that happen before. Their platform had been flown over flocks of sheep and schools of fish with no problem. Even over the traffic in southern Texas when you could find some. Semi-trailer trucks carrying pot-loads of cattle had driven right under it. with no problems.
Why, then did these two people just disappear?
Since they were near a terrorist stronghold, it was an obvious testing ground. The government grant they had as contractors gave them a bit of legal immunity. Certainly, there was no compunction in a war zone about human experimentation.
The technicians adjusted their flight path and passed over the city, back and forth, on a grid. While there were some disappearances, not everyone was effected. After the platform arrived at the home base, some communications operators came up and asked them what had happened out there, to see if their radios had been knocked out or something.
