In Celebration of Le Grand Orange

 Editor’s Note: As he is affectionately known in Canada, of course we know him as His Royal Highness, the Great Emperor Donnie, or more recently, the Great Orange Softshell TACO

Since we are celebrating Le Grand Orange on his birthday with a big military parade, I thought he should have some talking points to highlight some of the more memorable points in his career.  

He’s gone off the rails in so many different directions lately, that only the most rapid of the MAGA cult are happy with his shtick. When he was campaigning, he was talking about Hannibal Lecter, the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, windmills, or sharks, his ramblings were nonsensical.  

But now, it’s much worse.  He’s talking about real issues like tariffs, the economy, global warming or grocery prices, he just isn’t very bright, and he really doesn’t have much of a clue of how these things work.  While the late night talk show hosts have a field day with how ridiculous he sounds, and many of us get a kick out of his gibberish, he is the president, he’s making us all look like fools around the world.

I’ve come up with a solution, and for the good of our country, I’m going to offer up what I believe will keep him focused, on track, and hopefully not spewing crazy comments about topics he knows very little about.

I’ve developed some crisp talking points, they’re short, and even with his apparent dementia, he should be able to get through them without digressing, as long as we keep the teleprompter in front of him.  Plus, they are focused very much on him, which is by far what he likes talking about the most, so he should be able to stay on course.  I’ve developed four, I can come up with plenty more, but I homed in on some of the most important topics that he can address and at least make him sound somewhat presidential.

The first one is to highlight his great respect for those who served our country and the sacrifices that were made to protect our country:

“Back when I was in ‘Nam, I was flying in a helicopter with Bob Duvall and Marty Sheen, and I could tell they were scared, they were white as ghosts.  There were missiles flying all around us, I got it, I could understand why they were scared.  Me?  Hell, no, I’m not a loser, I knew the VC’s could never shoot us down.  I tried to lighten them up, so I said, ‘Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning?’  Bob looked at me, and said, ‘Donnie (Bob always called me Donnie), that’s a great line, can I use it?’  I said, of course, just give me credit for it.  He never did, but that’s OK, everyone knows it’s my line.  It was a great day, we destroyed the VC’s and made Vietnam a much safer place.”

The second focuses on catch phrases, key talking points that people can remember.  Think, “We’re going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it”:

“Back when Martin Luther King was going to give his big speech in Washington, I could tell he was really nervous.  It was a pretty big crowd, nowhere near the size of my crowds, but still, for him a big crowd.  I said ‘Doc, you got to grab them from the beginning.  Get them excited.’  He said, ‘Donnie (he always called me Donnie) what would you do?’  I said ‘You need to come up with a tag line, something that everyone will get excited about.  Doesn’t need to mean anything, doesn’t matter, just a line.’  Out of the blue, I thought, “I have a dream!”  Came to me just like that.  I told Doc, ‘Say I have a dream!  Immediately, people will start dreaming, some about a juicy Big Mac, some about having sex with Ivanka, doesn’t matter, they won’t hear another thing you say.’  They loved it, crowd went wild, nothing like one of my crowds, but it was a great day.”

 

The next one is really strategic, it’s about golf, and everyone knows, old white guys love to talk about golf, almost as much as playing it:

 

“Back when Tiger Woods was the captain of the Ryder Cup team, he came to me and said, ‘Donnie (Tiger always called me Donnie), I know we could win the Ryder Cup if we had you on the team, but there are so many whiny babies on the PGA tour, they would complain if I put an amateur on the team, even though you’re a better golfer than any of us.’  I said, ‘Tiger, I understand, it really wouldn’t be fair for me to do it, it would just create too much controversy.’  Did they win?  Hell, no, I knew they couldn’t win without me.  But, I gave Tiger some advice, and he used it.  I told him, if you lose, just say the match was rigged.  And keep on saying it over and over and over again.  Doesn’t matter if you have any evidence, the more you say something, the more people believe it.  And they did, everyone said that America got screwed in that Ryder Cup match.  It was a great day to be an American.”

 

The last is the most important, it speaks to his love of God and his close and deep relationship with God:

“I was lying in bed the one night, all alone, and I was starting to doze off, when I heard a voice, ‘Donnie, it’s me, God.’  Well of course I knew it was God, He always calls me Donnie.  He said, ‘This country is going to Hell in a handbasket, and we need to do something.  I tried sending a couple hurricanes to destroy a bunch of liberals, but they diverted them, and it only hit a bunch of good, Christian Nationalists.  I’m thinking about sending down some she-bears to rip some people apart.’  I said, ‘God, I know what you mean, but I think I have a better solution.  How about I put together a Bible.  But not just any Bible, a Bible that has my name on it.  I’ll call it the “God Bless the USA Bible”.  With your words, and my name on it, we can get people reading the Bible again.  The best part is I’ll have it made in China, so I’ll make a small fortune on it!’  God loved the idea, He said, ‘Donnie, you are amazing.  Don’t you ever worry, if anyone ever tries to assassinate you, I’ll always be there to redirect those bullets.  You’ll always be just like a son to me.”

OK, I may have taken a few liberties with the truth, but really, nowhere near the liberties that he takes.  Plus, it’s really quite entertaining, and no one gets hurt.  No more discussions on real issues that he knows nothing about, and no more hate-filled racist rants.  Very simple stories, easy for him to repeat over and over, and the cult will love them and eat them up.  

As noted, if this works, I can come up with many more of these, I just want to make him sound presidential rather than like a babbling lunatic, since he is the president, so it would be good for him to sound at least semi-intelligent.  If that’s possible of course.

And if this offended you, I’ll paraphrase His Royal Highness, the Great Emperor Donnie, “You can’t take a joke”.  Well of course we can, you’re the president!

There But for the Grace of God....

All the young dudes

Bam!

“You need to go faster!”

Bam! He smashed into my bumper again.

“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch!”

I pulled my car to the side of the road, jumped out and screamed, “I’m going to kick your ass!”

Just then I saw the knife flash in my face as he backed me up against my car. Then I saw two more guys, both with knives, all of them bigger than us, and the one in front of me, ugly as ugly could be. He didn’t have much to lose.

I started talking quickly, “Can you please put the knife down, please put the knife away.” He started pushing me backward, I had nowhere to go, I was between my car and him and the knife. We were on an old backroad, nothing around, no one coming anytime soon.  I talked faster and faster, “Can you please put the knife away” over and over and over.

As noted, they were all bigger, the one looked like Grizzly Adams (I know, too old for most of you), he was huge. My friend Kevin started mouthing off, and I yelled, “Kevin, shut the hell up!”, just as Grizzly pushed him in the ditch.

I eventually talked the guy in front of me to put his knife away, he offered to fight me straight up, but I politely declined, I would have most likely gotten my ass kicked, and I was still shaken, envisioning that knife in my face.

They eventually got back into their car and drove away. Somehow, crisis averted.

That’s probably my most vivid “crisis” memory from my teenage years or early 20’s, I think the rest weren’t quite as intense, or my brain was under too much influence to remember some of the parts or even all of the parts. Lord knows, I wasn’t the best citizen back then. Somehow, miraculously, I survived without getting killed or arrested. But sadly, not all of us did.

I recently completed teaching a course at Marion Correctional Institution, I taught a class on “Personal Financial Planning” to eight of the inmates there. I taught this class as a part of a program through Marion Technical College, who provides a great number of courses for the inmates. While I thoroughly enjoyed the teaching and interacting with all the people involved, I don’t plan on returning at least in the near term.

There are several reasons for this, and I’ll raise them in the order that they came to me as I debated returning or not. The first:

The red tape to get access to the facility

First of all, I get it. We are talking about a medium-security prison, and all precautions are necessary to ensure the safety of everyone. The facility is about 40 minutes away from where I live, and over an hour from my main teaching location, Ohio Dominican University. So, it’s not a short commute for me to pop in for whatever is needed.

There was a great deal of red tape to go through to get access to the facility. It all started in the Fall, I had to go through a background check, training, get a badge to get into the prison, various processes and procedures to just be able to get in. I went through various starts and stops, I’d drive up, and for whatever reason, the person I needed to see wasn’t there, I had to turn around and go home. Even once I was supposed to start teaching in January, I didn’t have access on my own, I had to be escorted in and out. The whole process of getting to and into the facility was painful, I had to always plan extra time to account for whatever might go wrong.

The course setup

Marion Technical College sets up the course in their learning system, which typically leaves it to me to purely teach the course. OK, I’m making this sound easier than it is, but I taught a course in the Fall at MTC on campus, and it went quite well, the course was set up incredibly well. As I said, all I had to do was teach.

The issue in this case was that they were transitioning the Learning Management System from Canvas to Brightspace, and the transition wasn’t complete. This was the last time this course was being offered at the prison, and the course just wasn’t set up very well. I don’t blame anyone for this; it was just the circumstances led to a very difficult teaching experience for me. In this case I wasn’t purely teaching the course, I had to fix a great deal of issues each week

Plus, and I did know this up front, you’re not allowed to bring any paper or anything else into the facility. Apparently in the past, drugs could be smuggled in by spraying something on the paper for inmates to be able to inhale from the paper. This makes no sense to me, but that was the situation, and so I had to plan ahead, send files to the administrative personnel ahead of time and hope to have copies for my class each week, which was hit or miss.

It's not them, it’s me

As I made the decision not to return after the Spring semester, I blamed the red tape, I blamed the poor course setup, and as noted, in each case, I understood why it was the way it was, I just didn’t have the time or energy to deal with it while having a full-time teaching job already. It just wasn’t feasible, for once, I had to say no to something, which is a whole other story for me.

But then, reality slapped me in the face. I was at graduation at Ohio Dominican, and I was talking to Shawn Zerby, he’s the father of one of my students, Liz Zerby. He and I were discussing my time teaching at Marion Correctional Institution, and I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he asked me if it bothered me teaching at the prison. It finally dawned on me, yes it did, it did greatly, but maybe not the way he meant or the way many people would think.

As the semester went along, I got to know each of the students, at least to a certain extent. It was a bit of a menagerie of people, but the one thing they had in common was they had been institutionalized for many years. You’d get into situations where you were talking about things in modern-day life, and they really hadn’t experienced them, they had been in for so long. Driving, cell phones, shopping, normal day-to-day experiences we take for granted, they had no real clue about. I never knew what any of them did to be incarcerated, I didn’t want to know, and I really didn’t know for sure when any of them were getting out, or if they ever will be.

But I would get snippets along the way. I believe most or all of them had been in prison for 20 years or more. The one young man talked about turning 40, and having spent half of his life there. There were several stories like that, but the one that got me the most was what I heard on my last night. One gentleman talked about his senior year in high school, it was his last week, he was going to graduate high school with honors that Friday, but he never made it, he was arrested and had been in prison ever since. He had just passed his 26th year in prison. He always carried mala beads with him to stay calm, to “not lose his shit” as he would say.

There but for the grace of God, go I

You know, I know I don’t have the answers, and I guess none of do. I just struggle with this is the life someone gets for making whatever mistake it was when their brain wasn’t fully functioning yet. Making the wrong decision or choice at 18-20, and your freedom, your life is over. It was devastating for me to imagine that, and I felt so much sadness and empathy for those gentlemen, but again, I have absolutely no idea what they did to get into that situation. I just feel so lucky and blessed that I somehow didn’t make the same mistake. I did some really stupid things as a teenager, but I survived, I made it through.

A couple weeks ago, Laurel and I were in Gallery 22, a volunteer-run gift shop. They always have some form of eclectic art, and it’s a great experience to see what they have. It was a “perfect” signature moment for my prison experience. The one display is shown below, it’s an art project that shows various stories of women who are in prison, and what they miss the most about being incarcerated. As I read each of the stories, I started crying. The simple little things we take for granted in life, they missed the most, “having a dog”, “late night drives with the music blaring”, “being able to call home whenever I want”. Some of the same things I would miss, and am so thankful that I have.

Will I go back? I’m pretty confident I will. I believe people who do this really serve a greater purpose, and I applaud them for doing it day after day, semester after semester. I just didn’t have the time, or more importantly, the strength, to do it right now. I need to focus less on the sadness I experience for them, and more on what I can hopefully do to help them if and when they ever get out. I kind of feel like I owe it to them.