When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  “I don’t know about that one, David. It sounds a little sordid.”

  David didn’t like the sound of that. It smacked of impudence. He verbally retaliated. “Well, life is one sordid run of the gauntlet. That’s not it with you, though, is it? It’s Barbara, that Indian girl in the front office, isn’t it? I’ve seen the way you steal looks at her and I’ve seen the way her eyes light up when she sees you. Is something going on with the two of you?”

  “No, David. It’s just your imagination working overtime,” said Bob. But, to David’s trained ear, Bob sounded unconvincing.

  “Well, in any case, remember this about women if you remember nothing else. Just always be ready to give them the servicing they are all looking for and don’t try to understand them. Just think of yourself as a dog they grab onto for a good humping. You can never understand them, so don’t bother trying. You’ll just drive yourself nuts. Always have an escape plan when you’re with a woman. You can lose them in the crowd when you take them to a football game; or you have to leave dinner early because you have too much work to do; or you need to meet the guys at the gym; or you must go to the library. Better yet, take her to the library with you and when you’re there tell her to get lost. She can’t scream at you in a library. Just never stop thinking of how to get away from them. It’s important to understand that when dealing with women you are in a constant state of war.”

  After Bob drove off for the office that day, David sat pensively on a grassy rise at the edge of the barnyard. All was quiet. The sun approached midday and the animals and birds were resting. Dolly ambled over to David and lay down beside him. David reclined on his sheep and rested his head on her back. As he looked up at the clouds and scratched the animal’s head, he talked to her.

  “It’s time to think ahead, Dolly. We can’t let this Bob fellow have control of the game we play, can we? Do you have any bright ideas?’

  Dolly, of course, said nothing. The sheep didn’t even make her ‘Bah’ sound. That’s one of the things David liked about the animal. No back talk. No contradictions. No mistaken communications, ever.

  “This thing could take any of several paths, Dolly. With the deal we made with Bob, it’s unlikely that he’ll up and quit. He’s not the sort. He sticks to his goals. That’s going to be a long-term problem for us, sweetheart. Probably I gave away more than I should have. I could kick myself for being impulsive. So here you and I are, just sitting together in the barnyard.

  “There’s always a move, Dolly. You know that. You know I’ve been thinking about this. I won’t let you down. Don’t worry. I’m true to my roots. There’s one path I foresee this taking, and I can make our move now, so I guess I better start working on it. Who was that girl Marty said she whored around with here in Plaintown? Didn’t she say something about making a pornographic movie and going to orgies with her? It was Rita, wasn’t it? Yeah, I remember her name was Rita. Do you remember a different name?”

  Dolly lay there chewing a bit of grass.

  “I need to figure out who this Rita is and give her a call, Dolly. Tomorrow the Mrs. goes away on a trip to France for three whole weeks. Tomorrow night you can stay with me in the bedroom. Would you like that, sweetheart?”

  Dolly lay there chewing her grass.

  THE OTHER LESSONS

  China

  Bob arrived the next day for another executive coaching lesson on diverse topics.

  “China is something you need to know about because the Chinese are going to take over the entire world. I’ve never been to China, but I read a book about it once, and I watch the news on TV. Whenever something about China comes on, I turn up the volume so I can hear it. It’s a world player kind of country, so you’d think we need to know a lot about it, but we don’t. They’ve got about twenty billion people living over there in an area the size of Colorado. They think they are the center of the universe and they all wear stupid-looking gray jackets and carry a little red book around with them. Most of their women wear black skirts and walk around in rice paddies, unless they are wearing black pants. I don’t know why their women wear black pants sometimes and black skirts other times, but it’s probably not important.

  “I once had two salesmen who went there and told me all about it. They said Chinese women are all sex-crazed and beautiful. They got laid constantly. They said Chinese screwed better than American women and that they fuck non-stop over there. I gave those sales reports a lot of thought. They must be accurate; how else can you explain the over one billion people they have?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because they have a five thousand-year culture.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. They had Samurai warlords and warriors running around the place killing everybody and keeping the population down for thousands and thousands of years. They even rode on horses so they could kill people faster. Those women must have fucked their brains out to keep replacing the population killed by the Samurai.”

  “Weren’t the Samurai Japanese warriors?”

  “Maybe, but who cares? It doesn’t matter. They’ve been killing each other for ten thousand years. They even invented steel over there so they could make these terrific swords that cut heads off easier. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you need to worry about radical Salafists. The Chinese will eventually invade the Middle East and kill everybody in that country for the oil.”

  “But the Middle East isn’t a single country. It’s a place with a lot of countries.”

  “No, it isn’t! It’s a big sandbox with camels and Arabs driving around in Mercedes Benz cars between oil wells to gas up. Remember, it’s not that important who kills who in those places, anyway. What is important is to never underestimate your adversary, and the Chinese are your adversary.”

  “But we trade with them.”

  “Don’t let that little detail fool you. It’s just a Chinese plot to screw us. Way back in 1841, when the Brits landed in Hong Kong, the Chinese were incredibly naïve. They let the Brits set up trading all over China, which at the time was a split-up place with different strongmen in charge of different areas. This was before the Reds took it over. The Brits got the Chinese women hooked on opium. The Brits were getting silver from the Chinese women in exchange for opium, and then, when the women were totally stoned, the Brits screwed their brains out. That’s how Hong Kong Chinese learned English. The Brits showed them how to make heroin and how to smoke the opium pipe. In return, the Brits got laid a lot and they got China’s silver.

  “The Communists ruined a good thing. They’re dickheads who got the people working instead of getting wasted on opium. Now the Chinese want their silver back from the West so they can use it as money again, like back in the warlord days. They’ll get rid of paper dollars just like they got rid of opium. Chinese think everything that went wrong in China is the West’s fault. They want to settle old scores and make us pay for what our ancestors did to their ancestors.

  “They carry grudges for thousands of years over there. They even take special care when they bury their ancestors’ bones. When they build something, they dig up bones and rebury them. They’re completely nuts over old bones. Once they get their silver back, they’ll put the price up to hundreds of dollars an ounce here in the U.S. They’ll invade the United States. They’ll kill all the men, screw our women, and enslave our children. Then they’ll move about ten billion Chinese over here to live in the U.S. Ten or twenty years from now, there will be ten billion Chinese in Africa, ten billion Chinese in the U.S., maybe ten billion in South America, and another twenty billion still in China.

  “I’m trying to tell you to learn Chinese; otherwise, you’ll be screwed. You don’t have to thank me for all this wisdom I’m giving you. It’s part of your grooming to run UGGA. If I didn’t enlighten you, you’d never learn anything.”

  Russia

  “You can’t possibly expect to be the chief executive without completely understanding Russia. Russia is a country that’s three hundred times larger than the United Sta
tes. I guess they need a lot of land to make all the vodka they drink and develop a few decent chess players. The reason Russia is such a problem for the normal world is their peoples’ brains are frozen by all the snow which makes their entire culture focus on ice hockey.

  “Their nitwit leader is so obsessed by his tiny man complex he rides around naked on horses to pretend he’s a big man. He walks down a long hallway in the Kremlin with cameras angled up so he appears bigger. It’s like the Wizard of Oz scene in the Emerald City.

  “The Russian people don’t eat right. They have no sunshine so they can’t grow vegetables. They have vitamin B deficiencies throughout the entire country. Russians try to compensate for the lack of vegetables by buying vitamin-fortified cereal, but that just leads to bigger problems. Their cows are always freezing to death or getting eaten by abominable snowmen, or yetis, so they don’t have enough milk for their cereal. They compensate by putting oil on their cereal instead of milk because they have so much oil it comes out of their water taps.

  “Solving Russia’s problems will solve all the world’s problems. The first thing that needs to happen is the name of Russia needs to be changed from Russia to Not Russia. Then all of Not Russia needs to be divided up into smaller pieces of one square mile each. The little pieces of Not Russia need to be given out to Americans, so each American owns a few square miles of Not Russia.

  “Then American construction companies must get interest free loans to buy bulldozers from Caterpillar, because CAT could use the business. These construction companies must bull doze all the Not Russia buildings that have onions on top of them, including the Kremlin building and the surrounding Not Russia government buildings. That would be good because those buildings with onions on them don’t look like big square boxes like we have here in America. All the Not Russia government workers must be fired and sent to China. This would be ideal. They are model, top ranked, world class government workers. Since they have Not Russia so completely screwed up, they could leave and screw up another country.

  “Once all the stupid looking buildings are leveled, normal, good-looking buildings, like McDonalds’ golden arches and Colonel Sanders smiling on a bucket of fried chicken on top of the building, could replace all the goofy Not Russia buildings. Each American who owns a chunk of the new Not Russia would be given a fast food franchise license. This would allow Americans to hire their own personal private contractor armies to operate within Not Russia to ensure that the Not Russian people quickly adapt to America’s common sense approach to living the American Dream. With Americans running the place things would happen quickly. Strip clubs, bars, football stadiums, drag car racing, and stock car racing tracks, everything wonderful American would get quickly built. Not Russia would get jump started into the American way.

  “As a final step to straightening out Not Russia, all the furniture and jewels of the Winter Palace and all the other palaces and Dachas need to be auctioned off. Those nice things don’t belong over there anyway. The Russians don’t wear jewels and they don’t like nice furniture at all. Their furniture would look great in American whorehouses and those jewels would look better refashioned into pendants that hang the jewels on necklaces. The jewels would hang on the plunge line and rest on top of the cleavage, right between the tits of hot American women.

  “The remaining cleanup of the Not Russia mess would take all their military toys on barges to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Submarines, ballistic missiles, tanks, ships, all Not Russia toys, would be placed in mid-ocean. Then a group of U.S. Navy destroyers would come and blast the crap out of that Russian garbage and sink it to the bottom of the ocean. That would also give our Navy necessary gunnery practice for the next time we go back to Vietnam. We need to blast the living shit out that place like we should have the first time we were over there. Now that you have a complete understanding of Russia, you can consider yourself wise in geopolitics, which is required to be a top executive.”

  Politicians

  “Politicians are Jell-O in suits with no principles or ethics. This is important to know because when you need to get something done or if you need to get a regulator off your back, you need to figure out the right politician to bribe. The politician will sell his mother for a buck and let you screw his daughter for two bucks, but they play a vital role in society because civilization is messy. If you don’t have a guy in your pocket who can slime around in sewers, you can get into trouble. Never hesitate to ask your local politician what it costs to get something done. When you ask, make sure you’re stuffing a thousand bucks in his pocket. That way you’ll get his attention.

  “None of them know how to get anything done. They’d never survive in business. They’re not smart enough. You need to work out what you want done with your lawyers ahead of time. You outline what needs to be done, have your lawyer make you a roadmap, then take the roadmap to the politician and pay him off. That’s the way to do things. Don’t mess around going to zoning hearings or crap like that. Don’t bother with school board meetings. All that stuff is a waste of time that never gets results. What gets results is paying off the right people ahead of the meeting.

  “Judges are trickier to bribe, but it’s doable. Keep in mind that they are politicians in disguise. They want to get bought off on their rulings, but they want to pretend that they’re above it all. They’re neurotic nitwits with big egos. They wear black robes to feel safe inside their neurosis.

  “To bribe a judge without getting clumsy about it, first find out what charity they or their wife are affiliated with. You arrange a big donation to the charity and have the charity agree in advance that it will pay a huge consulting fee to the judge or the judge’s spouse. Then you’ll get your judge to rule in your favor. Notice I said your judge. Once the judge agrees to terms on the bribe, you own them.”

  Government

  “Government is an institutional insane asylum for powerful people who have the most money to hire the lobbyists and bribe the bureaucrats so the little people pay taxes and get screwed. Government is like a child-eating monster. It stumbles along and steps on everything in its path. It sways a little to the left or the right, but it always moves forward. It always gets bigger and does less for the people and more for itself. Its bureaucrats have individual fiefdoms that grow larger by doing less. The only objective of government is to get bigger for the sake of getting bigger.

  “If you want to have a frustrating day, call the government. You will be put into a voice messaging system that tells you all the wonderful things your government is doing for you, then you will be directed to a line that tells you there’s an hour wait before you talk to a real live human being. When the human being picks up the phone, you will be accidentally disconnected and will need to start all over again. What the country needs is a leader who fires ninety percent of the people who work in government.

  “A government is only as effective as the person in charge of running it. Most governments have ineffective leadership and nothing ever gets accomplished, or what does get accomplished is a mishmash of projects and programs that can’t possibly work or the private sector would have done it already. When I think about leadership in government, my own personal idol is Adolph Hitler. That guy really knew how to get things done.

  “But, David, you’re a Jew. How can you idolize Adolph Hitler?”

  “Easily. I’m on the subject of leadership in government. Hitler got things done and he didn’t let anybody get in his way. He was totally committed to moving his country forward at all times. When he needed to lie, he lied. When he needed to murder, he murdered. When he needed to make a whole population forsake their morality and go forth and murder other peoples by the millions, he did that also. When he needed to find a scapegoat to advance his agenda and blame for his country’s past losses and failures, he found one in the Jews, and he got the whole country behind him to commit the murder of millions of Jews.

  “The man was a magnificent example of outstanding leadership. Under his leade
rship, Germany advanced from a terrible depression to become the world’s powerhouse. He never lost sight of his goal and never thought for one moment that any deed was too horrible to undertake in order to achieve the goal. He even killed his niece, his lover, because she displeased him. Later he killed Eva Braun, his mistress, before he faked his death and slipped away to Argentina. That’s leadership, being able to murder like that to first protect his image and later to silence Eva’s knowledge of his escape plans and his legacy. That’s true leadership, knowing how to use everybody.

  “I wish I could be more like him. I think I could be if I could figure out a way to get control of the country, but I haven’t done that yet. And conditions in America aren’t ripe for a leader like Hitler. Plus, now there’s that dratted social media and the National Rifle Association. Those freedom-loving bastards will fight back. Ideal conditions for a totalitarian America won’t happen in my time, but they could later in your lifetime, or in your children’s or grandchildren’s time. I have to be content to lead a company forward. Whenever I get bogged down with some problem, I think to myself, ‘How would Hitler solve this problem?’

  “So you would murder people who got in your way?”

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t like to. I’d like to kill half the people who work in the office, but that’s a huge step to take without control of the police or the government like Hitler had. In the corporate world and in government, people get murdered all the time. It’s happening now and getting swept under the rug. People who trade currencies, interest rate derivatives, and precious metals illegally for big multinational banks somehow mysteriously fall out of windows, or their cars roll down embankments and crash, or they drown in their bathtubs, or they hang themselves, or miraculously find a way to shoot themselves twenty times with a nail gun without stopping from the pain of the first shot. This stuff happens. Planes with important people aboard, people who know secrets that must be kept, crash and those key people die. You can’t take testimony from a body part splattered over the ground after a plane wreck, or from a guy who blows his own brains out while feeding squirrels one morning sitting on a park bench in Washington, D.C. either.”