The Weather in the White House

The West Wing has its own climate. The forecast is dark clouds with storm warnings, temblors and cyclonic activity. All fake, the Denier-in-Chief says. There is no collusion, no women, no Stormy. Yet Lena Horne is back on a forever stamp. Sing it again, Lena.  We know why there’s stormy weather in the Oval. Ain’t no sun up in that sky when money talks and is hushed no more. The door is revolving seismically. He wants a parade. Here’s your parade… lawyers and loyalists, generals, trusted soldiers, advisers, chiefs of staff, campaign chairman are marching. Last one out, turn off the lights. Victims are suing. Lackeys are squealing. Keeps raining all the time. Tantrums, leaking. Swamps, rising. Tornadoes spinning. He wants a wall. Give him a piece of wall. Walls crumble in a quake. Our Founding Fathers are rumbling in their grave.  Reporters have scoops. Every ten minutes news breaks the Richter scale. Heads roll. Soft porn is hard news.

Frank Capra, Preston Sturgis and Hugh Hefner walk into a bar. The result is a zany-mad-cap X-rated blockbuster. A Greek tragedy. Comic Opera. Dance Macabre. A Dervish. A Hora. This presidency is beyond genre; the narrative, unrated. Groucho meets Captain Queeg. I smell mutiny. Tony Soprano meets Atticus Finch. We’ve got ankle bracelets, shackles and gold toilet seats. Executive Privilege, 5^th Amendment, Ten Commandments and sworn testaments. Affidavits, obstruction, depositions, sanctions, redactions, deportations, dossiers, nepotism, recusals, and tampering. I can see spin-offs, prequels and sequels. This script’s got legs. Get me Clooney on line one, Hanks on two and Jennifer Lawrence on three.

The investigator is closing in, hot on the trail following bread-crumbs of cash from you-know-where to you-know-whom to the room where it happened. The Tower is surrounded by SWAT. Come out with your hands up. I saw this movie. It can only end badly for the Head of the Family.

Or will it be the porn that brings him down. Two channels are talking blackmail, slush-funds, Kushner, hashtags and abusers. The other is still about lost emails, Benghazi and Obama-bashing. Lena is singing as the curtain goes down, Can’t go on / All I have in life is gone / Stormy weather. She’s on the stamp. Donald’s on the stump. Stormy’s on the brink. Keeps rainin’ all the time.

Meanwhile on the other side of town, by the Tidal Basin where M.L. King, FDR and Jefferson are memorialized and where this Prez has probably never been… Japanese cherry trees will be coming into full bloom in a few days. They were originally a gift from Japan for T. Roosevelt’s negotiation of the Russo-Japanese War. The first batch of 2,000 sent in 1909 were found to be infested but the mayor of Tokyo persisted and a new shipment of 3,000 arrived three years later. After Hiroshima we sent saplings to Japan when their parent trees were ailing.

We need these pink blossoms more than ever as a reminder of saner times. We need them to restore beauty and calm back into our lives... so close and so far away from the circus across the divide. After the nuclear disaster at Fukushima a one thousand year-old cherry tree just thirty miles away from the site was found to be intact; the suggestion of how vigorous the force to persevere.