The State of the Union

 The tall Englishwoman appears to be in need of guidance. I am, as always, available to dispense words of wisdom and solace to my fellow countrymen, of which I believe she is one in spite of her purple hair and aggravating accent, but unaccountably she does not seek it. She appears to spend an inordinate amount of time either fingering a small shiny object which she holds in her hands, tapping furiously on a flat typewriter positioned in front of a small kinema screen or staring out of the window in what appears to be existential despair. It seems that she is excised by some sort of constitutional crisis in our great Nation, following the election to my Presidency of a large and vulgar man with an orange face last November. 

The orange man is wide and loud, and has the strangest little hands, with which he plays an imaginary concertina. He is what my father would call a blowhard, a huckster, a snake oil salesman, and sadly it appears that just enough of my people voted for him that he trumpets (ah! That is his name, I recall. Trumpet. Or maybe Strumpet?) that he has a mandate and that all that he does is adored, although he appears to actually do very little other than trumpet, loudly and erratically. The doing seems to be being done by a team of inappropriate young tyros led by a puffy-faced and charmless Afrikaner who has apparently made a fortune creating dirigibles and some sort of ethereal postcard delivery system. This man, whose name I believe is Ellen Mask, has not been elected to any position, but has been appointed Wrecking Ball in Chief by the Strumpster. (Or is it Dumpster?)

It is possible that the purple-haired Englishwoman is correct in her concerns. I find it sad that this great country of mine, born out of the thirst of man for Freedom and Liberty and moolah, which has been steered through the most turbulent of waters, the likes of which no other nation has known, by men such as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and of course my humble self, is now captained by a Tangerine Trumpet and an Inelegant Ellen. I fear that this great Beacon of Light is careering towards the Maelstrom of Malevolence.

Here we go

How a man of my standing finds himself in this predicament, only the Good Lord knows. What is my predicament, the reader may ask?  It is thus. I stepped into the open arms of Our Lord and Savior on the morning of January 6th, 1919, and our Lord and Savior, in His infinite wisdom, plonked me down in a wood in Massachusetts and told me to stay there until I had learned some humility. Staying there I have been, for over a century now, assigned variously to those who in-dwell these parts - some Basque woodcutters, a lawyer hiding from the Italian mob, a very sweet couple of men whose love was forbidden,  a mysterious individual with messy hair who smoked some sort of herb and proclaimed the world to be 'groovy', a rather fetching young woman with a temper and unnerving aim with a shotgun, and most recently, a tall Englishwoman who appears to ride a motorcycle and whose hair is an improbable shade of purple. I have come to consider them my colleagues.

The odd thing is, whilst I appear to live alongside these interesting specimens, sharing their every moment, their fears, dreams, hopes and disappointments, they are blissfully, incomprehensibly oblivious to my presence. It is as if, to them, I do not exist. All I can imagine that is that Our Lord and Savior, in His infinite wisdom, decided that few decades of invisibility and proximity to the ordinary man (and woman) would bring me to that point of self-abnegation whereby He would clasp me to his bosom, and then He somehow forgot me. It has been quite a century, and He has has had other matters to attend to. He may be Infallible, but He is also very busy, and I am a patient President.