Just Another Ho-Hum Day

It didn’t start out well. I had put a shirt in the washing machine that turned out to say, Dry Clean Only….in Chinese. Then I drove to the mail box at a four-corner stop sign in which all the curbs are painted red. I pulled over to drop in my matching red Netflix only to see a police car waiting for me. What was this... entrapment at a pedestrian only mailbox? Or maybe I made a wrong turn and ended up in Ferguson, Missouri.

However the officer approached with a benign face and said he had instructions to drive me to the airport. I was needed at once for the White House conference to solve the Issis mess.

True I had a track record of untangling a potential crisis when eleven families had each offered spaghetti for a P.T.A. pot luck dinner. But that was fifty-one years ago. And then there was the time I negotiated a settlement at a board meeting of condo homeowner’s. The hot-button issue was whether visiting grandchildren had rights to the swimming pool.

I mulled over these accomplishments on the chartered jet flight to Washington. Of course this wasn’t the first time President Obama had summoned me to weigh in on some vexing issues. Hadn’t I prompted him to do some end-runs around the bozos in Congress and even halt the Cuban embargo? Soon to come is the normalization of relations with Raoul Castro. Mark my words.

I was whisked off to meet with the inner circle in a subterranean bunker three floors below the basketball court. My advice was to call Vlad and tell him to keep his shirt on, cool it in Ukraine and set up a conference call with his friend, Assad. Let them meet in Putinograd, formerly St. Petersburg. We promise a neutralized buffer-state in Kiev. In return (Ras)Putin gets Assad to join with arch-enemy neighbors: the rag-tag Iraqis, oil-slick Saudis, Old-Young-Turks, our new best friends... the Kurds, and maybe even the hated ones in Iran to squeeze Issis into oblivion. What they do next is up them. Let them re-draw the map according to their own passions.

If our senator hawks have the itch to put their boots on the ground tell them to FedEx them to Syria or better yet let them all go. Other than McCain none have worn a uniform since the Boy Scouts. I would also urge we get all our news people out of the region. We can watch Al Jazeera for coverage.

My second proposal was for American Evangelicals to convene a world-wide conference with their fundamentalist counter-parts in the Muslim world and Jerusalem. They all speak the same language starting with Abraham. They can compare gods. Maybe have a food fight in a house of mirrors so they might see what knuckleheads they all are. They might even learn what a metaphor is and how their holy texts were never intended to be taken literally.

By now it was getting late and I needed to get back and pull my pajamas from the drier. For my services I only asked that the next executive order mandates all mailboxes allow for thirty-second parking.