Tinyman for President

By

• Q. Synopsis

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The center was not holding. The Republic was sinking. Plague and wildfires swept the land ruled by a madman. The oppressed fought police in the streets. Mayhem held sway. Glaciers collapsed into the sea. Children stayed up late. 

In the course of human events, America was being called upon to vote against an incumbent maniac president and his cabinet of fumbling loyalists and to go all in with a candidate whose only qualification need be that they were not a maniac. The voters were waking up to the aroma of this. Because this maniac was something new, and the longer you mistook him for a human with reason and empathy the more fascinating he became. Trump was a true crime novel.

Somehow, finding a person to oppose this decrepit incumbent was proving difficult. In the quest for a candidate, “electability” had become a complex code word that means “I don’t like him, but probably others will, maybe for the exact reasons I don’t, so let’s go with him (usually a him) I don’t really give a fuck I just want the old one gone.” In another dimension existed that rare candidate one actually wanted, in whom all the failed hopes for the pragmatic candidate collided to form one awe-inspiring historic leader who would be completely and utterly perfect but unelectable.

Well, Tinyman may have been one such figure.

Not a maniac, but endowed with superpowers with which a true maniac could cause severe mayhem, though usually too intimidated to use them, Tinyman was not tiny. In socks and sandals, he stood about 5'8 3/4", 98 pounds. Though he was obliged to fight crime, he had a nonconfrontational disposition and social anxiety, insecurity, hypersomnia, and his supersenses were prone to hallucinations. Unlike his many glamorous superhero colleagues, he shunned in every way any light that might be spot or lime but this only made him more famous. Also unlike his many glamorous supercolleagues, his entertainment properties were slim, and amounted to a three-issue comic book run, long out of print.  

As detailed in his profile in Maxim, Tinyman is a superhero distinguished not by his size—which is only average, not tiny—but by the narrow scope of his ambition and his desire to not be a superhero at all. Oh, sure, his superpowers include the ability to fly, X-ray vision, super-breath, and others but he uses these as seldom as possible to avoid attracting attention. And, truth be told, he isn’t very good at flying, especially landing, and sometimes mixes up his heat vision and his X-ray vision causing him to accidentally set people’s underwear on fire. 

About 40, but looking about half that, Tinyman wore sandals around the house, but on the campaign trail a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, generic sneakers. Either nobody could convince him to wear a suit or nobody had had the guts to try, but the base liked it. He dressed like them, on laundry day. 

Possibly Tinyman was possessed of greatness, of the sort that comes along once in a century, if that?

Although there were plenty of functional crime-fighting superheroes, such as Tinyman’s least favorite, Megaloman, they never got the numbers. They were washout candidates: dust. Megaloman had at least as much charm as Schwarzenegger, but in the polls he was a nonstarter, a wet match. Early in the campaign, it’s hard for the party to control their candidates in order to assert the most conservative one, and crazy progressives like Sanders, the pacifist Tinyman, and other loose cannons surge in popularity to the shock of the party. Betos and betas. The Democratic Party was vocally pro-choice, silently pro-war, and prone to hypocrisy on all other issues. And to their credit, having values that they couldn’t live up to was healthier than having no values at all. Or bad values. In the case of Trump, if the man held any values besides Trump, they were probably as bad or worse.

Tinyman was one of many superheroes organized around the NGO, the League of Justice. He rarely attended meetings and never did committee work. Or superhero work, unless he was cornered by criminals begging him to apprehend them. 

It was possible for superheroes who were born or naturalized American citizens to receive food stamps in exchange for staying out of the headlines through a government program that had been in place since the New Deal, although it was seldom taken advantage of. Tinyman had subsided on government bread and milk for many years. Though staying out of headlines was difficult for him. Somehow the status of being apprehended by Tinyman made bad guys seek him out. Paparazzi were always nearby. Bad guys wanted a touch with greatness without the violence that normally attends superheroic vigilante work by overly-strong superheroes (or trigger-happy white police officers).

And, as campaign documentation explained, according to law, a qualified superperson could run for office only if they kept their superpowers in check. Very few superpeople had the tolerance for the tedium of essentially bureaucratic government work, so few of them ran for public office. Tinyman wasn’t ready for a career change, but neither was he ready for a career.

In all, Tinyman was a piss-poor choice of man to campaign for the highest office of the land. He had stage fright, no talent at oration, and virtually no real work experience, having eked out a tiny living as a tiny hero. Most of his income had in fact come from using his powers to track down missing purebred cats for whose return a generous award had been offered.

And Tinyman—the reluctant-superhero-cum- reluctant-candidate­—didn’t know how to get out of it. Either Tinyman somehow confronted his charismatic campaign manager, Johnny Werd, and demanded to be released from the ticket—no…or Tinyman simply, inevitably, lost. And Tinyman was the losing kind.

Although, eleven months out from the election, it was hard to tell what the fuck was going on. Which is how democracy should look, right? If the process is crystal clear you’re probably looking at fascism. Funnelling the will of 327 million Americans through a few paragraphs of constitutional explanation is going to be messy, and a more effectively democratic process­—say in which Americans could vote for politicians directly, instead of delegates, or—wait­ for it—for or against policies such as war­—would be even messier. By contrast, the totalitarian incumbent and the Republican Party seemed very organized. Whatever policy mistake the incumbent spewed was immediately taken as the word of God by McConnell and the other agents of orange.

Impeachment or no, Trump was running for a second term.

Celebrity hotel magnate, reality television star, payer of hush money to porn stars, President Donald Trump was, in the polls, far ahead of any potential opposition from the Democratic Party, whose front-runner prior to going into Iowa was superhero Tinyman. 

Tinyman was sitting in his very favorite chair re- reading his very favorite comic book when he heard a knocking on the door. Tinyman quickly attributed it to an overactive imagination and continued reading without missing a single beloved word of this book he knew so well. The knocking came again, much to Tinyman’s annoyance, as if he had just dried himself off after a twenty minute shower with flea soap only to feel an all-too-persistent biting sensation on his right thigh. Tinyman knew full well that in cheap stories of this sort, the third time anything was repeated always brought disaster. He waited without breathing, glued frozen to his chair, his eyes paralyzed, staring at the word “POW”, his feet also unmoving, as still as the rest of his unmoving, motionless, completely still tiny physique. The clock’s ticks echoed loudly off the wall, like bricks being hurled through stained glass. However, there came no third scratch. Apparently, whatever it was that had been summoning him to resolve some treacherous imbalance in the universe had become bored and left. Good. 

Then somebody knocked a third time. 

“Tinyman, it’s Johnny Werd. Open the door, we’re late for the photo op of you saving a kitten from a tree. The kitten costs $500/hr. so let’s rescue it before it gets any more fussy.”

Two people came in. Johnny Werd was very white, with red hair that appeared permanently startled. He wore black horn-rims he kept breaking by handling them nervously and repairing with masking tape. He was carrying the cutest kitten in the state, which was hissing and thrashing its tail. There was already blood on the masking tape.

He was shadowed by a beautiful alien. For the campaign, a wealthy backer had hired illustrious designer Geert Jonsen whose savvy aesthetic, Werd reasoned, would suit Tinyman.

“Tinyman: the minimal candidate,” Werd riffed, ecstatic to have Jonsen present as a paid admirer of his ideas.

Always a pro, Jonsen preened in his unitard, pretending to be impressed by his client’s suggestion, while redirecting him toward a better idea. 

“Tinyman. Let’s all put our votes where they can do no real harm,” Jonsen said, enigmatically. Then he fluffed his feathers before turning to Tinyman. “I’m talking to the candidate now! Tell us about your issues!”

Tinyman looked at the toe of his sneaker where his sock peeked through a small hole. “Well, depression and anxiety, inferiority complex, imposter syndrome, insomnia, my mother and father, though honest, were poor…”

“No,” Jonsen explained with his fingertips.

“I think he meant the issues facing America­—” Werd the client attempted again to help, but it was to be the last time.

“Enough,” Jonsen snapped. “Tinyman: put your doubt in…” Geert waved at the air impatiently “…in a different place.” And with that he left the room.

With one inspired bout of savagery, the kitten scratched Johnny Werd’s face, leapt from his arms, licked itself, then followed Geert out the door, tail high.

Put your doubt in a different place.

Werd, bleeding, slightly awestruck by this media star’s ability to manage a room while sticking to a spontaneous and incoherent agenda, I mean, filibuster-quality stuff, managed to say, “Good meeting, everyone, great meeting, see you tomorrow morning,” before stumbling off to keep his appoint-ment with a cocktail napkin. “Put your doubt where the sun don’t shine,” he sang on the elevator, alone. 

Johnny Werd had ordered all three issues of Tinyman Comics and was reading them carefully under barlight for some allegation that might resurface. 

Tinyman, Issue 1
Tinyman Versus Landlord

Tinyman was at home, reading a comic book when he heard the sound of a woman being patronized in the alley below. He got up and closed the window. 

Then he sat down and tried to continue reading, ignoring the muffled cries of “Help! Tinyman!” that came from outside. Tinyman lived in a small one-room apartment in a bad neighborhood of Nillsville, and he was two months behind on his rent. Eventually, the alley became silent again, and Tinyman managed to finish the chapter he was reading. He carefully marked his place with a sock, and got up to fix himself a glass of milk.

Tinyman was standing in front of the refrigerator trying to decide how much milk to put in his glass when he heard a sound behind him. It sounded a lot like someone clearing a throat. And that’s what it was. A cockroach was on the floor staring at Tinyman expectantly. Tinyman stepped aside. The cockroach crawled past Tinyman under the refrigerator, and, with a giant refrigerator-shaking grunt, the cockroach pulled the plug from the wall, and proceeded to drag the refrigerator away, out of the apartment, taking some of the door frame with it. Tinyman sighed. He would have to notify the police now that his refrigerator had been stolen. Again.

Tinyman sat down again and tried to find the sock where he had left off in the comic book. No sooner had the cockroach dragged the refrigerator out the door, slamming it on the way out, than someone knocked. Tinyman froze in terror. Who could that be at this time of night? A giant, booming voice came through the door:

“Open up, Tinyman, this is your landlord!”

It was Tinyman’s landlord. Tinyman held his breath in the hopes that his landlord would think he was out saving lives. Somehow, this never worked.

“I know you’re in there, Tinyman! Who else would let a cockroach steal their refrigerator?”

Tinyman opened the door, careful not to let it off the chain, and tried to explain that he couldn’t talk because there was a masked gunman in his room, shooting people out of his window. When that didn’t work, Tinyman tried to explain that he had just gotten out of the shower, and was still a little wet.

“Quit lying, Tinyman! I’ve been letting you get away with not paying your rent because you’re a superhero, but my wife just got mansplained to in the alley right below your apartment, and you didn’t lift a finger to help her!”

Tinyman thought about explaining how he had got up to shut the window so the mansplainer would hear the sound of the window shutting and think it was a gun being cocked, but the landlord cut him off.

“If you don’t save somebody before the night is over, you will get an eviction notice in the morning!”

And with this, the landlord left. He was very upset. Tinyman could tell. Probably because it was his wife who was demeaned, Tinyman guessed, most likely by a perpetrator known to the victim. But now came the tiresome task of saving someone’s life. Where to start?

Tinyman did not want to go too far from his apartment, but neither did he want to walk around at night in this part of town, so he decided to fly to a nearby restaraunt and wait until someone choked. Then he would apply the Heimlich maneuver, and the person would be saved. Tinyman hoped that he wouldn’t have to stick his finger down anyone’s throat. That would be disgusting.

So Tinyman brushed his teeth, and crawled out onto the fire escape, took a deep breath, and flew. Not much of a flier, he always had a hard time pulling up quickly enough to miss the building across the alley, but he managed, except for knocking someone’s flowerpot off their windowsill. 

No sooner had Tinyman cleared the roof of the building then he saw someone preparing to jump. Aha! This simplified matters. All Tinyman would have to do would be to talk this person out of suicide, then go home to bed. So Tinyman tried to land gracefully on the edge of the roof, startling the woman, lost his balance, fell off the roof, startling her more, flew back up and landed again, and Tinyman, who was normally quite shy, said with his powers of superassertiveness, “Don’t jump!”

And the woman, giddy with vertigo, gasped with unexpected love and pleasure at the sight of Tinyman’s kind-of-small physique, messy hair, but very clean teeth.

“Oh, Tinyman, you saved me! Fly away with me! Make tiny love to me!”
Tinyman stared at her in shock. She stumbled towards him, eyelids fluttering, arms outstretched. Tinyman, eyes wide, took a step backwards, slipped over the edge, and fell fifty feet to the alley below.

After awhile, Tinyman stood up and staggered back to his apartment, his life-saving done for the evening. Hopefully his landlord would believe his story, but Tinyman did not feel like taking any names or telephone numbers right now. He just wanted to finish his comic book and get to bed. 

When Tinyman got back to his room he noted with a sigh that all his furniture had been stolen. He curled up on the floor and fell asleep.

Tinyman saves the world from almost certain nuclear devastation

One day, as usual, Tinyman got up and dined, his breakfast featuring a lightly browned croissant brushed in butter sauce, with a dab of raspberry preserves, a cafe déjà vu, and a beer. Two beers.

Tinyman’s mission for the day was to go to the bank to withdraw more money from his diminishing account for necessities such as food and rent in order to preserve his own tiny life as long as possible, or at least as long as it was worth the effort. Outside he heard the sounds of a Smith & Nazi semi-auto-automatic firing about 157 rounds through the windows on the first, third, and fourth floors of his building, and then the sound of a black Rolls Royce tearing off down Tiny Boulevard, taking a left on Winsome Avenue, and continuing for twelve miles until it reached the warehouses, where crates of heroin were unloaded from the trunk and two men were quibbling in Italian with one another about Swedish bank account numbers, and Tinyman shut his fifth floor window so his super-hearing would not be disturbed by the sounds of crime. This had the added benefit of sealing the room shut, preventing drafts. Tinyman decided it was a job well done.

On the way to the bank, Tinyman stopped by an elementary school to vote Democrat, effectively saving the world from almost certain nuclear devastation.

At the bank, Tinyman had waited in line for two hours, and was second, when the man in front of him drew a gun and loudly ordered everyone to lie down on the plush bank carpet. Tinyman did so, cursing, hoping there would be enough money left in the safe for him to make a small withdrawal. The quick and courteous bank tellers ran to retrieve money from the safe to put in the robber’s bag. Tinyman tried to suppress a cough, but found he could not.

Tinyman coughed.

The robber froze. “I’d know that cough anywhere! That’s Tinyman!” he yelled. He quickly zipped his bag closed (so as not to lose any stray bills to pickpockets) and ran from the bank. “After him, Tinyman!” the tellers cried, “After him!” And Tinyman found himself on the curb outside the bank, with a bank robber before him, fleeing with his month’s rent, and a god-ugly mob behind him. What to do? Blow the crook up against a wall with his super-breath? Stomp his massively powerful foot, causing an earth tremor that would shake the thief to his knees? Use the awesome and mysterious power of his superthumb to hail a cab to go home? The possibilities were boundless.

Ah, but what was this? The thief was running back. Toward the bank. Tinyman’s first impulse was to flee, which he did whenever someone was running toward him, but there was a mob of bank tellers behind him chanting his name most unharmonically. The robber fell to his knees before Tinyman, and, weeping, spread all the stolen bills on the ground at his feet. “Please oh please forgive me. I couldn’t run away, I was in such mortal trembling terror of the horrors you might inflict upon me from your mighty bag of tinytricks!” and with that he sank to the concrete, a pitiful, quivering mass of timid and pathetic emotion.

Tinyman stood over him, towering as well as a person of his size could, his feet planted firmly on the earth, his eye staring down through the man’s skull, into the very brain itself, probing for innocence. The people were hysterical, cheering and sobbing. Tinyman stood this way for a long time, then finally bent over, picked up a handful of bills (for food and rent and stuff) and walked home.

Johnny Werd prepared himself for the moment in the campaign when this issue came to light. At first pass, it didn’t look good for Tinyman. On the other hand, the fact that there were Trump loyalists showed a broad ignorance in Werd’s understanding of the American voter. So maybe the issue would help the numbers. Who could say. Still, it wasn’t the comic book Johnny Werd would have written.

But it was too late to get a decent comic book out before the election, one which would bathe Tinyman in the blue light of electability. 

Johnny Werd took out a pen and made to take notes on a cocktail napkin, but nothing occurred to him except to keep riding this crazy campaign train.

When Johnny Werd told Tinyman to bring tapes for the car, he assumed the comic aficianado would have a collection of superpeppy pop music to drive to. Tinyman’s only tape was a bad dub of “Bruce Springsteen Capital Theater, Largo, MD 8-15-1978.” On VHS. Johnny Werd just shook his head sadly at what he was prepared to endure for his candidate, until he thought of a campaign song: “Born to Run.”

“No,” Geert said.

At his first speaking event in Tallahassee, Tinyman had a sore throat and could barely make it to the podium. He had the malaise, the sleeping sickness, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Possibly mono. His handlers propped him up with a lemon fizz with honey, Bookers, and echinacea. 

He trembled before the television camera.

Suddenly he smiled. He realized his landlord was probably watching. (He hadn’t paid rent in a year and hadn’t been home in a month.) He waved to the camera, to indicate to his landlord that he was a presidential candidate with very wealthy backers, and that the check was in the mail.

“America,” he said, “the check is in the mail.”

The crowd went wild. Headlines.

The whole campaign would go like that. 

Tinyman seemed to attract the spotlight almost involuntarily. When he had no appearances, the Hope of America sat in bed in his hotel room all afternoon, covers pulled up to his chin, afraid of the outside world, watching game shows and soap operas with the sound turned down. Or in the campaign tour van he might lie on his bunk all day with the drawstrings of his sweatshirt hood pulled so tight only his nose was visible; he wasn’t asleep and fooled no one.

From the outset, there were so many contenders to claim the Democratic Party nomination that Tinyman fit right in. But the more candidates who were dusted by low numbers and dropped into oblivion (except Bloomberg, who could afford to continue to annoy America without any donations), the more Tinyman came under scrutiny and the ire of the other candidates. The Iowa Caucuses were sure to narrow the field.

Werd was driving to a town hall in Vermont and looked over at Tinyman in the passenger seat, his sweatshirt hood drawn totally closed, showing that Tinyman was too nervous to breathe. That was a candidate who was born to run, born to run away. Werd suspected he knew what it was about Vermont that had made the worried superhero superworried. 

But when the numbers say, take off your pants, you take off your pants, Werd always said. Tinyman was especially uncomfortable with that saying which made Werd repeat it. To just hammer him with the threat of compromise until Tinyman saw that there wasn’t any comfort in any of it except and until losing. Losing big. Not just losing in the polls but powdered, dusted, obliterated. Fifteen minutes and one second of fame. In the words of the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, “Party over—whoops—out of time.” This might be his way out of his superhero notoriety. Losing an election, hell, losing a primary. Would being powdered in that fashion destroy public interest in him as it had in every candidate except Hillary Clinton, the dying hope of a blue state dynasty? 

So Tinyman would take off his pants if it meant he’d lose the primaries. Tinyman, however, being Tinyman, could think of a lot of ways taking off his pants could backfire. Like if he got so nervous he tried to take them off over his head. Tinyman hadn’t so much as saved a kitten from a tree since his attempted retirement from superherodom to pursue politics, and yet the paparazzi were increasingly relentless, trying inane stunts to get a shot of Tinyman’s face beneath his sweatshirt hood. Yes, post-failed-political-candidacy oblivion seemed like a great gig. Gore had made a film about global warming which was eye-opening for the time; Tinyman wouldn’t do that. Government cheese and selling comics on eBay. Maybe his old copies of How to Vote would sell. The thought so soothed him that his hood was down when the rental car pulled up to the Rutland Town Hall and was swarmed by supporters. Security in the back seat did little and said less, but Werd could hear his muscles inflate beneath his suit as the—what were they calling themselves this week? Tinyheads?—waved signs that read MAKE AMERICA TINY AGAIN. 

Tinyman smiled and took a peek into the crowd and there he saw, amid the joyous constituents, his face a motionless scowl: 

Sanders, his hair white flame in the icy wind.

Werd had led him into an ambush. 

The footage of Sanders asking Tinyman the five-minute question about how superpeople only save the 1% that ended on an exclamation point instead of a question mark is by now ubiquitous, including Tinyman’s petite rejoinder which expressed the exhaustion America felt. 

Even before Iowa, Werd would later reflect, we had them all on the ropes. We kept the pressure up, he would say, until party unity cracked, Sanders and Warren got into it, Clinton jumped in... Regrettable headlines spiraled through his memory’s montage. The greatest campaign ever fought, he thought, and back then, back then, we had no idea, no idea, how it would turn out, and on whom the lights of the convention would shine in July.

In Iowa, Tinyman’s handlers left him in his hotel room to recuperate before his appearance before the union of comic book colorists, followed by a TV interview. 

Tinyman lay on the bed, covers up to his nose. There was a click and the hotel room door opened and retreated, opened in tentative acceptance of everyone and ideas unusual, retracted in wooden revulsion, air currents were fiendishly at work, pushing and pulling on Tinyman’s soul, so he was forced to change the channel of his consciousness, flipping clunkily past the static. There was nothing on at all. Tinyman screamed and clawed at his nonfunctioning eyes lost in the existential dilemma of one mortared inside his own skull. His fingers grew, slithered along the floor to the door, tried to hold it shut against the advancing tides of wriggling constrictors, electric tentacles sprouting from outlets, smashing furniture aside as they flailed for him. He drew the shutters apart, they collapsed on shrieking hinges to reveal the aquarium glass separating Tinyman from water, sealing him inside. He kicked the glass into shards, losing his sneaker in the process, dove through the window, and let himself sink the thousand or so miles to the pavement below. 

Submarine music whistling in the iron cavernous interior of his diving suit, he adjusted his faceplate and tried to wave away the inquisitive flocks of fish that stared intently at him. He flailed bubbles, tugged on his lifeline. No response. He tugged and this time the oxygen pump broke the surface and drifted down to the sandy floor. He screamed bubbles, soft rushing air escaping down to the last uncertain rising molecule. He woke up screaming, sweat and entrails across the sheets, never again to know what was nightmare and what was not. 
The tiny refrigerator door opened slowly, cold light flowed across the room, gripping him, his eyes clenched half-open in terror as the bread sat unassumingly between the milk and the broccoli.

Extracted from bed, given a vitamin shot, powdered, fitted with his first suit, he now sat opposite Rachel Maddow. When she asked him whether there was a check in the mail, Tinyman turned to his mind and groped through a grab bag of ill-gotten official phrases and told Rachel Maddow, superstar, America’s top broadcast journalist, calm cauldron of rage, the Rumsfeldian truism, “There are known knowns, and there are unknown knowns, which, now that I think about it, are probably unknown unknowns? In fact—” 

Maddow snapped her pencil into dust at this inanity. It was clear to her closest associates that the star of Democratic-leaning media was on the verge of some act of violence. “Mad Dog,” they would whisper to each other when her anger surfaced. But to America she was as cool as ever. “Tinyman please stay here, and we’ll be right back.”

“Tinyman, I want to ask you about your tiny green new deal. Obviously, you’ve done your homework on this, but tell me, can the market really undo the damage it has done, and continues to do, to the earth? I mean, how can you turn this, this barge around, point it away from the waterfall, while keeping the economy strong?”

“I will keep the economy popular. I plan to— immediately, day one, the first day I take office—make America a leader in wireless electricity.”

“And we’ll be right back. And I want you off my set right now.”

Tinyman wasn’t presidential stuff, and maybe that made him hands down the most appealing candidate. Johnny Werd figures Tinyman is a dreamer with no ambition. Being a superhero was not part of Tinyman’s self-image, or overall plan, but rather a role that had trapped this poor tiny man. He couldn’t help it, having those superpowers, real and fictional, that he seldom demonstrated. He was called upon to fight bad guys and frankly wasn’t up to the task. He was a shirker, Tinyman was, a very negative quality in a superhero. But Werd had a street sense about this little guy: one, he could measure up, and two, even if he couldn’t, he was irresistable. Why? He didn’t know why. If he knew why Tinyman was an irresistable candidate, he’d apply the formula to someone who had cred, the right kind of cred. Someone like the charismatic best-selling comic star and superhero Megaloman. In his comics, Megaloman almost always, on the last page, took two bad guys and slammed their heads together. BAM! Poverty and climate change? POW! Werd would take a winner like that straight to the White House. Except Megaloman’s campaign had tanked and he was already out of the race. He had gone back to comics and blockbuster movies filled with violence and American exceptionalism. WHAM!

The numbers showed a slim threshold of voters concerned with whether a candidate understood government from experience rather than from red or blue idealism; those were the voters it would be nice to reach with a middle-of-the-road senator with a minority running mate but no, Johnny Werd had been called to manage a, well, a loser. Except he was winning. A pacifist, a man without the ability to lead anywhere in him, ahead of him, or behind him. While Megaloman was now maybe in a hot tub with Jeb Bush discussing which companies to sit on the boards of—SLURP! And the contributions—both earnest and suspect—were pouring in. How long this gravy train would last for Johnny Werd was beyond comprehension. Right now he was looking like the next James Carville. But it was early, and, no matter the margin the numbers showed, a losing candidate became mere dust to history. You weren’t building anything with a losing candidate. Whether the loser lost the primary or the election, they were dusted—ground up into powder and swept into a rather small pail with the likes of Ferraro, Dukakis, Dole, and what’s-his-name. Nobody would have watched the documentary The War Room if Bill Clinton had lost. A look inside the mechanisms of a losing campaign was not a viable movie even with Bill Clinton in sweatpants. Carville might still have given the same great speech after the defeat but the same great speech wouldn’t have been as good and he would have known it. Musing on The War Room, Johnny Werd realized how Tinyman got his idea for how to dress on the campaign trail.

Werd ordered two shots of scotch for Tinyman and briefly considered each before downing it: one, could maybe measure up—GULP!—two, was so far irresistible—GULP! Or neither, slamming the second glass down on the bar: SLAM! Tinyman’s government experience amounted to being in a three-issue comic book. And yet Tinyman stood a chance of being chosen as the face on the dollar bill. 

A month ago nobody suspected that Tinyman had an ass’s chance of getting the necessary numbers, much less suspected that The Conspiracy had held the reins of American foreign and domestic policy since the time of Eisenhower, and suspected even less that, while openly obedient to the incumbent on the surface—controlling the Republican party—behind the scenes The Conspiracy was taking a—shall we say—positive interest in the possibility of a Tinyman presidency. Nor did anyone suspect that a choice of Tinyman as a primary presidential candidate was not as improbable, sentimental, inept, even sincere, as it appeared, but a canny move shrewdly calculated to appear as all of those things to an unwitting voting population. Nor was any of this necessarily true, as with all matters involving The Conspiracy.

Nobody at all suspected the KGB of interfering to boost Tinyman’s popularity through various manipulations. Tinyman was perhaps the one political figure the Kremlin had no compromising dirt on, but it didn’t matter because he was, in their experienced estimation, a pliable coward.

Tinyman was lying in bed reading Megaloman comics when he heard the sound filtering relatively unfiltered through the particle-board walls of his apartment of a thousand pianos being dragged down the hallway. He stopped reading for a second and then turned his AM radio up a little bit louder. The tinny voice shrilling from the tiny speaker was explaining the virtues of uncooked bacon as a wonder diet. Tinyman shook his head and entered the next frame of the comic where Megaloman was shaking the teeth out of a pickpocket who had picked up a wallet off the ground.

“You are a bad, lawless person. That is how I will rationalize the large pain I am going to inflict on…” Megaloman’s ballooned voice was interrupted by the sound of a freight train filled with wine glasses derailing in the hallway. Gunfire ensued. A hydrogen bomb was detonated somewhere nearby. A mechanical rhino bellowed as it fell down the stairs.

Tinyman stopped reading. He had a sensation that something, somewhere, had gone totally wrong. The voice on the radio was describing an experience it had had after eating a handful of uncooked pork. Tinyman switched to FM, realizing that it had an intrinsic soothing effect unlike anything the alternative could approximate, and absently attributed it to the better low-end response.

On a particularly local station that usually featured Himalayan square-dancing music, an unexpected band was playing. They were scraping the strings of electric guitars with razor blades. They were hammering battered drums with live kittens. They were clumsily dismantling the rest of their instruments in the midst of a song in an attempt to make them feedback more directly, the sound of short-circuiting voltage apparently appropriate to the particular mood. Tinyman listened in utter revulsion, drawing the covers over his tiny quivering head. Outside his doorway several head-on collisions occured between trucks carrying highly volatile chemicals and farm animals travelling close to the speed of light. Much noise resulted.

Tinyman yelped and, leaping to his feet, flung the radio out the window. He strode semi-heroically to his door, swallowed, and opened it. Outside, in the hallway, the janitor was changing a lightbulb, which emitted slight squeaks as he screwed it firmly into place. The man almost soundlessly wiped his brow and stepped down from the stepladder which creaked somewhat. He noticed Tinyman. Then, after polishing his spectacles with a starched handkerchief that crackled slightly, apologized for the racket. “I dropped my pencil,” he explained timidly.

Tinyman closed the door and silently prepared a peanut butter and Valium sandwich and a tall frothing glass of milk, before returning to Megaloman who senselessly pounded arbitrary bad guys until the sun rose.

A campaign plagued by a cloud of hackers generating crude lies might have been doomed by a discriminating electorate, but it was the new normal. Super-PAC-funded attack ads and bots iterating lies on social media: anonymous and near-total distortion of the process. Unnamed money sponsors opinion hacking of unknown origin. Overlapping ecosystems of bullshit. Lies emerge from nowhere and instantly find adherents, and when these pure tendrils of nonsense eventually creep into the diamond glare of fact, rather than be burnt into stumps—ZAP!—the lies instead seem to grow faster in the light of truth. Because there is no purple, no shared truth, every assertion is suspect, the shining light of reasoning based on fact more suspect than lies. 

As Trump would tell us if he could: there’s a conspiracy to push this thing called truth, a really insidious cult with tendrils in law, academe, science, even government. The incumbent is calling Truth out for what it is: fake.

By Iowa, Tinyman had been on the campaign trail so long that all his fears had been realized. Joe Biden had misspoken Tinyman’s name in a televised debate, referring to him as “Mighty Man,” which young people thought expressed a generally unwoke attitude toward SuperX Humans. Tinyman didn’t think Warren liked him; he thought this because she told him so. On TV. Hillary came out of her coffin to trash Tinyman on the Sunday shows, saying he had never even successfully rescued a kitten from a tree.

The establishment was clearly threatened by Tinyman’s numbers. Tinyman had re-energized a generation of youth who had become alienated by the process of standing in line to choose between two candidates who did not represent their interests, even as advance polling rendered their votes of no consequence. 
And though Tinyman definitely did not want to run, at this point, with Werd’s skillfilly wrought campaign apparatus locked around him, Tinyman estimated that the easiest thing to do was to run and lose. 

Or so he hoped.

As always before making a decision about the campaign, including where to stop for gas, Werd called Snave Evans, his numbers guy. 

“Evans. Werd. How is the Russian interference with the campaign affecting the numbers?”

“Very well.”

“Right. Yeah. Should we denounce it? Publically?”

“I’ll run a simulation and get back to you.”

“Very well then. Let me know if the numbers decelerate.”

“As always, boss.”

Werd crumpled up a coffee-ringed cocktail napkin haiku and tried to focus. What were the odds of Trump being re-elected? Herbert Hoover: Elected 1928. Not re-elected. The Great Depression, 1929. Bad luck: move over, Hoover, and let Frankie take over. FDR: Re-elected as fuck. Do not tell Trump he served more then two terms, tell Trump he was a socialist. Truman: Re-elected, but not really elected. We will count him re-elected, because what we’re after is how probable it is for a seated president to get voted out of office after their first term, the outcome we envision for Trump. Ike: Re-elected 3, unseated 1. JFK: shot. Johnson: Re-elected without being elected. We’ll count it. That’s 4 re-elected to 1 unseated going into Nixon: Criminal, war criminal. Re-elected in what could be taken as evidence of deeply-rooted American stupidity or Republican party loyalty, or the place on the Venn diagram where they overlap. But Tricky Dicky resigned to dodge impeachment. Ford: Not re-elected, but not elected either. We’ll count him with reservations, making the score 4 to 2. Carter: Unseated by the creepy Reagan campaign machine. 4 to 3. Reagan? Criminal, war criminal, re-elected handily. 5 to 3. Bush 1: Not re-elected, despite being a staggeringly popular war criminal. The only President to unexpectedly conceive, brand, wage, then end a war in a single administration. All to save Kuwait. And he was not re-elected. Because of a faltering economy, supposedly. Slick Willie was re-elected, and in his second term was impeached and acquitted for the crime of lying about adultery under oath. It seems the impeachment process either works or doesn’t work, depending on what you think the outcome should be. Because Bush 2, AKA W, despite having been quite arguably, up to that point, the worst and most embarrassing president in history, whose poor grasp of elocution filled novelty books and whose wars are still generating flag-draped coffins with neither end nor objective in sight. Re-elected. Did better the second time, won the popular vote apparently. Dusted Kerry. Was it the sheen of the 9/11 wartime president? Landing on the aircraft carrier with the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner. Was it? Because it is exactly that that I am the most afraid of. Trump as a wartime president. Trump waging war. Please please please please no. Do not let him think of that. Everybody pretend you are going to vote for him and then trick him at the last moment. Obama brings our score up to 8-4 from which we can crudely infer that Trump’s odds for being re-elected are 2 to 1. 

The incumbent has inertia, Johnny Werd wrote on a cocktail napkin. The bartender picked it up, read it, and called him a cab. 

“Fuck is this? Poetry?”

Werd had requested an attack ad on the other front-runner, Sanders:

Vermont. A train pulls up to a station. The supercity is composed of giant skyscrapers which are red and blue with golden comets and lightning bolts. Some have capes. The train sighs, releases a weary puff of steam, and rattles off leaving Tinyman at the station. Tinyman looks around. The camera pans back and forth revealing completely blown-out derelict warehouses. The camera pans all the way right. There is a man with sunglasses standing at the far right. The camera begins to pan back, stops, and whisks back to the man. This time he is holding a tiny piece of paper. A sudden zoom reveals it says

Tinyman.

Tinyman approaches the man. There are highly dramatic shots of his footsteps. Each shot takes place against a different floor involving a different shoe. The man tears off his overcoat and is wearing green tights with the letters BS on his chest. Sanders. He looks quite old. Really should have left that overcoat on. He hits Tinyman on the head and takes his wallet. Inside is only two dollars, some change, a condom dating back to the Carter administration, food stamps, bread coupons, a fake ID, a miniature golf card, and a Wallyburger Scratch-and-Win-and-Rake-It-In card. Damn! Sanders mutters and flies away.

Geert preened at the new ad, radiating thought. “It’s a pastiche...”

Tinyman raised his hand. 
“...socialism will steal from you! And it is painful and unAmerican like an arthouse film.”

“I don’t get it. Bring me one I get.”

“Well, yes sir, Mr. Werd.”

Tinyman slowly lowered his hand.

In trying to assemble the policy platform on the Tinyman campaign wiki, Werd was cutting and pasting large portions of Warren’s and Sander’s online text. He wondered whether this was plagiarism—he recalled the British intelligence dossier of 2003 used to justify war in Iraq plagiarized word-for-word from, among other sources, an online master’s thesis. And that, he murmured, is an example of a fact. That plagiarism that was a lie was a fact. A fact that makes sense only as part of the larger story told by facts—that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken on completely fraudulent premises. Plagiarism, rather than intelligence, had become a means of justifying the war on Iraq. There was no yellowcake uranium from Niger, there were no aluminum tubes, no WMDs, no ties to Al-Quaeda. Just like the fact that President Trump extorted Ukraine makes sense only as part of the larger story, the story of a man who would do something like ask the British ambassador to somehow get the British Open moved to his private golf course, the story of how Putin wanted to occupy neighboring countries and still get a seat at the table of democratic nations. The story gets larger and larger the longer you study it, the fraction of the story for which the president is being impeached doesn’t even merit a full chapter in the larger story, a story we may never know.

Tinyman received lots of letters from supporters, as well as detractors, but one of them was so disturbing that he kept it and reread it.

Tinyman,

They cranked out candidates on an assembly line, Tinyman, for real. I’ve seen it. There’s a long conveyor belt. It gleams. It’s made of chrome. The men in suits come down it. There is a constant murmur of rhetoric. Apparati descend from a ceiling of machinery and give the candidates each a different toupee, a different tie, knotted by a specialized mechanical arm.

Did you come from that place, Tinyman? Because your suit doesn’t fit like the other candidates and the incumbent. It makes me like you, makes me think you’re real. You have a weakness. You’re too short. You seem to have a lot of weaknesses, Tinyman. It’s made you humble, sincere. Or so I believe when I see you on TV.

Your loyal constituent, Betsy Albatross

To Werd’s surprise, when Jonsen rolled out the new ad, the popular consciousness was newly ignited. Against a field of burning, upside-down flags at half-mast, a Morgan Freeman sound-alike intones:

So. You’ve either been to college or done an equivalent amount of hallucinogens and you’re ready to be a citizen. Okay. First thing you’ll probably want to do is switch up presidents. Low-hanging fruit to improve operations as well as self-respect. And that means you only have one thing to do, right? Mark your calendar for the day when you get to vote for Tinyman. Simple, right? Nope. First you’ll need a sharp critical analysis of everything from the electoral college to the fascist temptation to a serious look at what is crawling under the rock that is Amerca’s brain. You’ll need the kind of critical distance that comes from not really taking a stand on such issues as what will we do if the incumbent simply refuses to give up office? And it is precisely herein—being a chickenshit—where, if the drugs don’t work, going to college can really come in handy. Second or third, if neither using the election as an occasion to improve the country nor to impress others with your political acumen appeals to you, then vote for Tinyman. On the other hand, if you like Trump, okay, then vote Tinyman anyway. This country is for all of you. From one deranged and possibly dangerous citizen to another: friend!

A lot of people who had never been to college nor taken drugs felt left out of the discussion. People who were neither deranged nor damaged were alienated and took offense. Werd was about to go on damage control and call Evans in to HQ when Jonsen walked in. He grabbed Werd by both cheeks: “Tremendous!” Then he walked out, dancingly.

Werd had no idea what had gone right, and stood there, his phone in his hand, Evans squawking, “Werd. You there?” Werd hung up. There are no dial tones anymore. Just silence, meaning that if silence is a dial tone or busy signal then these sirens of disconnection are always beeping, we just can no longer hear the warning and take action against isolation. But all the time, beneath the noises in the street and room, there is an inaudible busy signal that sings auras of our alienation. Next time you are meditating in the woods, try to hear it, try to feel them, the dial tones and busy signals that sing of our loneliness.

And the hackers were another source of noise. What’s weird, though, is whoever was behind the interference, well, they seemed to want Tinyman to win. Every lie the reclusive tiny political figure refused to deny or evade led to a surge in media interest and the sheer repetition of allegations and Werd’s sweaty counter-allegations meant that the lie and its reverse had been repeated so many times that people who watched the news headlines with their volumes turned down or those who simply couldn’t parse all of CNN’s simultaneous scrolling chyrons came to believe that both things were simultaneously, seemingly paradoxically, true. A combination of two intertwining contradictory stories grew where every lie was planted. Where no facts existed now there was a troubling forest of distortions.

Joe Biden was connected, somehow, to Ukraine and hackers and the deep state and he invented the novel coronavirus along with Hunter Biden as part of a plan to take your guns away so you’d be defenseless against the black helicopters. These lies swirled endlessly on Facebook like a clogged toilet. 

The incumbent probably couldn’t point to the earth on a globe but he was good at repeating things enough that their corrections had to be likewise repeated, which gave both the desperation of lies.

Because if you have to repeat the truth over and over, you’re using the same technique you would to lie. If you have to refer to facts, figures, dates, names, chronology, causality...you’ve already lost their attention.

Even if candidate Tinyman were to speak the truth, it wouldn’t register as truth but as partisan bickering. What’s in a fact? Is a fact loud? Fancy? Does it give away hats? Does a fact have lobbyists? Yes, it often does. But lies have lobbyists as well. Tinyman stayed out of the ongoing debate about whether reality was true by, well, saying nothing and hiding in the van. Until Geert shook him awake, propped him up, put a cold milk in his hand, and showed him another new ad:

Red, white, and blue. Americans can count to three. Life, liberty, and private property AKA the pusuit of happiness. Why is liberty granted but happiness something we must pursue? Legislative, judicial, and—okay, I’ll slow down. Football, basketball, baseball. Maybe there is hope for a viable third candidate. This is the pursuit of intelligence. Clinton, Bush, Perot! Gore, Bush, Nader! See? White. Wait, is white a color? Dogs, guns, trucks. What about the fourth estate? Red, white, blue, and yellow, from which all—No? Just red states and blue states? Americans can count to two: us and them. So vote Tinyman, because less is more.  

All over America people who believed in three or more things were furious, as were those who lived in a singularity in which any collision with even a single fact could trigger an explosive event.

But the majority of Americans were fine with us and them, or else they might grant that white was a color as well as red and blue. There were even the fringe who would insist that white was a better color than red or blue, a multiply unpatriotic stance, but scientific inasmuch as white light could be made red or blue. And of course there was the Green Party and other chromatic aberrants. 

Sports, comic books, and divisions exploited by the incumbent, had created the context for this political moment in which each party saw itself as home team good vs. other team evil.

Tinyman knew of the disturbing, mostly disregarded, and generally unwelcome power of books. Books could become real. Even comics; especially comics. But even without any power, reading comics alone provided him with levels of social contact that satisfied the need others had to satiate by swooping underneath trains that were about to go across a canyon on a bridge that had dynamite strapped to it and somehow lifting the entire train to safety, capturing the bombers, and having a press conference. Megaloman. Press conference? Tinyman grabbed the drawstrings of his hoodie. Vote for the incumbent; vote for my fellow Democratic hopefuls; vote against me. That’s how. Don’t muddy the message, for it was muddy enough with Werd and the party fighting to keep Tinyman’s numbers up and Tinyman fighting not to help.

“Mr. Tinyman, would you rescue a kitten from a tree?”

“Well, uh, how high, uh, up…is it?”

They loved him. 

In his indecision they saw a man weighing the options scrupulously. In his fear of being on camera they saw humility. In his apparent refusal to take a political stand that might have opposition, they saw a man they could not disagree with. And in the rumor that Tinyman never touched alcohol, that he might in fact be a recovering alcoholic, they saw the candidate they could have a beer with. With a little cajoling.

The party was healed. 

It was a seedy business to be sure, truth be told, and sometimes Tinyman felt his tie unraveling during the waning cocktail parties, so many hands to shake, and the unbearable presence of Security.

He had ordered a peanut butter sandwich from Security, who looked infuriated. Tinyman had asked him to leave it outside the door. He never did. So what was he so mad about?

Now, the next morning, or, he realized, evening, Tinyman sat in the private Amtrak car with Werd and Security and tried not to ask Security to get coffee from the snack car. Well, he looked more than capable. Tinyman’s head ached miserably. Peering out the window, he tried to experience the scrolling twilit Pennsylvania landscape as a soothing flow of cool liquid, the pressure of his synapses blocking out visions of comics, thoughts in panels like boxcars, moving past in an endless pan from left to right. The world of the campaign separated into frames, into squares, became a chess matrix on which he could see but chose to overlook numerous strategies to lead to victory. He passed rectilinear subdivisions, houses of tiny boxes, his earliest memories of failure as the star of a short-lived comic book whose writer and illustrator had stopped speaking to each other, citing artistic differences.

Exhausted, Tinyman slipped into a dream in which a cat meowed endlessly in hysteria. The meows gathered in strength and frequency until Tinyman could hardly stand it. Handlers groomed the cat and discussed what might make the cat calm down and adopt a stature befitting a candidate for vice- president. Was the cat hungry? Or was it just that Siamese cats tended to be vocal? And was there some way the cat’s loquacious nature could be spun favorably for the press? 

And among all there was unvoiced paranoia that the cat had a hairball.

The suited Werd discussed this with the prim elder Jonsen.

“There is a way,” Jonsen said, leaving the room.

Jonsen returned with a dead cat. “The perfect cat,” he announced.
A hand on Tinyman’s shoulder shook him awake. He had been having a nightmare about the cat, the hand explained. The hand handed him the text of his next speech and asked him to read through it a few times before the run-through and final dress rehearsal. Tinyman tried to read but couldn’t focus. Something about an economy. His head swam. 

In the cat dream had he seen the vision of his life dwindling before him at the point where a highway met the horizon, while he stood beside the flat tire of his deflated esteem, and would have kicked it, but was afraid of the pain.

The cat had a hairball. It was a warning meow.

The Amtrak and fresh coffee massaged him into a pointed nausea. But no matter how he tried to amp himself for the moment, he could not manage to stay awake. It was so much safer asleep, or had been.

Back in the press car a row of clowns sat before make-up mirrors frowning beneath painted red smiles as they meticulously affixed make-up. They passed around the ingredients for a Black Russian while telling White House press corps stories. Reagan’s catastrophic soundcheck in which he announced he was outlawing Russia forever. Palin. Bill Clinton with Ray-Bans and a saxophone on Arsenio. Cheney shooting a guy in the face and not going to jail. Bush throwing up in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap. Howard Dean’s suicidal scream. Beta O’Rourke taking your guns away. Jimmy Carter’s UFO sighting. Billy Beer. Clint Eastwood excoriating an empty chair. Jellybeans, broccoli, Ford. All these wonderful stories about our colorful leaders. 

The clowns jostled each other for space at the mirrors. Werd was among the journalists, Tinyman saw, as he moved closer, though Werd was not a journalist, and was much too young. Like a boy of 12, the childlike Werd held court. 

A wreath of smoke drifted in a mobius strip around Werd’s head as he chewed a lozenge and told the story of how he cleaned up his act since his rebellious youth. His voice had not yet changed. His horn-rimmed glasses were held together by a wad of masking tape at the bridge. He nonchalantly pulled a yoyo out of his suit jacket pocket, did a yoyo trick, and slipped it away. One clown had passed out in a plate of cold French fries beneath a halo of flies. 

“Stubborn defiance,” Werd explained, “is a highly subtle and nuanced undertaking.”

The other reporters paused, then took out their notebooks to write that down. Stubborn defiance, they wrote, is a highly subtle and nuanced undertaking.

Werd pointed at the guy from Al-Jazeera. “Let me see that there, that notebook there.” The reporter handed his notes across the table to Werd, who dragged on his  cigarette with one hand as he flipped through the pages with the other. Finally, he shut the notebook, held it up to show the other reporters, and said, “See?” 

“Good work,” he told the Al-Jazeera reporter as he handed back the notes. “Emphasis on stubborn, like I said.”

Tinyman ground a bowling ball into powder and stopped to look up triumphantly. Nobody seemed to care, they all circulated randomly continuing conversational loops that had been started by the people before them. Spitefully, he raised his voice to a whisper and growled with menace. Nobody paused, too intrigued they were by conversation that would conclude exactly where it began. Tinyman ate an entire refrigerator, spitting out condenser coils like uncooked pasta. He played Led Zeppelin XXVII extremely loudly on a poor stereo and ranted that democracy was vile. He ate uncooked bacon, chasing it down with shots of wood grain alcohol, and got violently ill as a result.

Finally, they all took notice, and fell silent as candidate Tinyman wrestled back a chair, sat down at the table, and poured himself two fingers of cream, neat. Werd closed his eyes halfway because he knew. Tinyman looked up from the cream. Werd lowered his eyelids the rest of the way closed. Tinyman was seizing his moment to be quotable. 

“The pain inside my head won’t go away, not even in this breeze. Because I am America. And I’ll be dag-nabbed if I ain’t a sore loser.” Having somehow ended his sentence, Tinyman was aghast and a little flushed. He never thought he’d make it this far. 

The reporters fumbled for their gear and Security’s muscles squeaked and one of his suit’s seams split revealing a muscular arm strapped with handguns. Desperately, Tinyman tried to think of a soundbite, but it was no use. He scrounged within himself for old-timey hoaxsterisms but came up empty-handed. He offered a weak grin and each exploding flashbulb was like a fishhook through his eyeball. “Well, gol’-dang, I could skin a raccoon,” he considered, and exchanged hushed counsel with Werd whom he privately decided to appoint as his colloquialism advisor after being wisely advised against any further efforts in this direction.

“I back candidate Biden!” Tinyman announced brightly. A murmur of interest passed through the reporters followed by a volley of questions.

Tinyman raised his hand for silence. “I am violently opposed to comic books,” he said. 

Werd nodded. Tinyman was learning how to spin a double truth. A comic book character opposed to his own origin story. A candidate for both those who liked comic books and whatever lunatic fringe didn’t.

“Tinyman Opposed to Violence in Comic Books,” said the L.A. Times. “Tinyman Opposed to Violins,” said High Times.

Tinyman leaned into it, made a statement about violence in comic books and how children should not be allowed to read them. Flashbulbs popped, indicated by the word FLASH!

A close-up of Tinyman’s face now, his frown. “Tinyman of America, candidate for the presidency, has secret doubts,” read the boxed caption.

The League of Justice issued a statement ephasizing that it was not a political organization but an empathetic support group for people who were dealing with issues caused by being superior to mortal humans, but endorsed Megaloman as a potential VP pick for Tinyman or frankly whoever won the ticket.

At the first debate Tinyman was a no-show, making him a convenient target. Yang, who was familiar with Tinyman and who did read comic books, took the moderator’s question about Iran in an unexpected direction. “I am not opposed to violence in comic books,” he said. “I think that’s a non-issue.” 

The crowd went silent. Yang glared at the camera.

The moderator spoke: “Mr. Yang, do you think part of your opponent’s success in the polls comes from the fact that he sticks firmly to the non-issues?”

“Yes. No.” Yang winked. And then, to top it all off, he declared, “Ladies and gentlemen of the press, this statement is a lie, and you may quote me on that.” Though few may remember the Yang candidacy, this soundbite is now taught in freshman philosophy classes. And graduate-level poli-sci courses. “Well,” Tinyman said to the interviewer on the Morning Show the following day, “I’m sticking to my guns on this one. Someone has got to be willing to go to bat for the kids. They want their violence in comic books and I say we give it to them. Being a kid is very stressful today, more stressful than it was for us, what with all the tension caused by school shootings. So if my kid, after a nerve-wracking day at school, wants to read some Captain Wham!, or even Megaloman, I’m not going to stand in your way. Their way.”

“Tinyman, I thought you said before the debate yesterday that you were opposed to violence in comic books.”

“Oh. Did I? Well, I’m entitled to change my mind, aren’t I? After all, my opponent Yang isn’t even willing to consider the issue, much less give it the kind of reasoned and open analysis that would cause him to lose track of where he stood… Need I remind you that were it not for comic books I would not be here today. That holds even more true for my more successful industry colleagues, Megaloman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Daredevil, any of whom is more deserving of my vote. Any of whom is welcome to smash through the roof and encase me in a block of ice and stop my campaign by brute force if the words I say are harmful. Anyone?”

The press found him very funny and tasteful, honest and courageous. No superhero could be reached for comment.

Why didn’t Tinyman participate in the first debate? Cowardice. But Johnny Werd tried to spin it that they couldn’t agree on Tinymn’s preferred format:

In the first debate, to be held on October 3 at the University of Mudbucket in Idaho, the Democratic candidates will stand at podiums in the conventional style, not speaking, only wearing silly hats.

But in a break with tradition, in the October 11 and October 17 sessions, Tinyman and his opponents will be seated in an extra-wide jacuzzi with Rachel Maddow and Fox News in the Californian style. 

In the final debate, the format will be a dunk tank, with the candidates seated on a mechanism over a tank filled with water, and the audience will be allowed to ask the candidates questions, or throw baseballs at a lever that will cause the mechanism to drop the candidates in the water. 

Originally, Tinyman had refused to appear in public in any format. And then he leaned into it, demanding no compromise on the debate format. In a dunk tank, Tinyman would fare little better than an origami candidate, it was true, since his superpowers did not include swimming. Tinyman was scared of water. Prone to dunk tank nightmares. In some of them, he was dunked. In others, a hissing multi-tentacled apparition of pure evil sat above the dunk tank and Tinyman threw the ball at the target and missed.

And Werd demanded Yang appear above a dunk tank with sharks unless he was chicken, and Yang’s team never called his bluff or issued another word about debates. 

Johnny Werd was disappointed, however. In their shared hotel suite, Johnny Werd loosened his bow tie and let it hang down the front of his tuxedo shirt. He sat in the chair and faced Tinyman in the hotel mirror. Tinyman slumped on the edge of the bed and looked up; he looked defeated, hardly the prize of the winning ticket. Werd stared at the indefatigible low self-esteem in the margins of Tinyman’s face.Werd’s gaze was unwavering, even as he lit a match on his cufflink and held it to a cigarette dangling between his lips.

“Let me tell you what this country is about,” said Werd softly.

“No,” said Tinyman, reaching for his hoodie’s drawstrings.

“Money,” said Werd, pulling on his Lucky Strike, picking up his rattling glass of iced scotch, and holding it to the light.

“Is that it?” Tinyman finally asked.

Werd nodded with confidence, eyes closed, Lucky dangling. Tinyman began to sigh with relief. Then Werd held up his hand and shook his head no.

“No. There’s also classism. And racism.”

Tinyman suddenly stood up and poured himself a milk on the rocks. “You’re b-boring me, Johnny,” he muttered, and with a click unlatched the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony. As if to prove someone’s point somehow, an American flag hung flaccid, above the swimming pool. In the pool there was a single swimmer, a powerfully built male of voting age in the African American demographic, doing laps steadily.

Tinyman raised his glass to the night but he had misplaced his beverage so he just raised his hand, uselessly, to the night. The Atlanta night responded with a simple breeze. The flag stirred.

Werd was fixing himself another drink and then appeared, unwelcomely and unsteadily at Tinyman’s elbow, breathing in that way of someone who can’t stop talking.

Tinyman was too drunk to fly, but he kept staring down into the pool. As if maybe he could dive into it. Or fall. He was an exceptional faller.

“I never wanted to be a politician, doc, but I’m a dreamer looking for a chance,” he muttered.

“That’s good. Use it,” said Werd, interrupted by a chime, and he pulled out his phone and did something. Tinyman took advantage of the distraction to go lie in bed and pull his hood closed.

As Tinyman snored, Werd, lit in the glow of his phone, checked and double-checked and read over the polling material and it was true: Tinyman appealed to the half of the Democratic Party who did not approve of escalating gun violence. Which meant that 3/4s of America were in favor of escalating gun violence. How were those polls worded? Regardless, this was not an America that could be sustained. Folding the numbers like compost. 75% Americans in favor of escalating weather in any form. But that’s—well—if global warming is a fact than somewhere there must be people who believe in global cooling, because for every fact there’s an equal and opposite lie. But who were these fanatics? The answer was a click away: three out of every four Americans want more of everything faster. One in fifty believed that it had never been proven that the earth was round. One in twenty believed the moon landing was a hoax. Nineteen in twenty had a family member who believed the moon landing was a hoax and they tried not to talk about it at family get-togethers. One in three believed that no conspiracy theory was complete without the Jewish people somehow involved. Four out of five believed the existence of the CIA was a hoax. One in ten believed the next ice age was upon us. The Ice-Agers looked to leaders like Trump and his newest energy secretary Dan Brouillette to make sure the fracking continued unabated to trap the earth’s dwindling heat.

This was the mainstream lunatic fringe, and the base Tinyman needed to convert to his side. 

Tinyman looked worried and stood up and sat down again. Tinyman’s fitness coach, Clench Macnamera, a tiny bald man in a proper tracksuit, got worried, tried to calm Tinyman down, or, to put it more precisely, encouraged him to adopt a cooler demeanor.

Tinyman made to punch Clench but missed.

Werd observed the whole thing, taking notes.

“Tinyman,” he wrote, “is actually capable of…action, even thought, however tenuously.” Werd hit send, and left the laptop open for the response. Instead of the chime he got the ding.

Young people registered in record numbers thanks to Tinyman’s grassroots social media campaign, which, according to one private investigator Werd hired, was being orchestrated by the Russians. And, according to another, from a source within the campaign itself, possibly Johnny Werd himself. And a third investigator said it was tied to corruption, Joe Biden, and Ukraine, our ally, who had also been the ones who interfered with the American election, not Russia, our enemy, the country who was at war with our ally, who had annexed the Crimea, been kicked out of the G8, been punished with sanctions, and who the intelligence communities believed had hacked the election to give the presidency to the obviously deferential to (if not reverent to) the vile dictator Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, who would subsequently recite Russian disinformation, attempt to get Russia back in the G7 by hosting it at his private golf course, make no criticism of any Russian policies even putting bounties on the heads of American soldiers, and even threaten to leave NATO which would be Putin’s biggest gift, with multiple side dishes of abanoning international treaties, human rights organizations, and even the WHO. And so was Ukraine, a country so obscure to the American public that no stereotype existed for its people, at the center of the American hurricane, in which it remained perpetually out of frame whether the U.S. had become, in fact, a puppet state.

They went with investigator 2, who suggested that the reason Tinyman had the numbers was because he was genuinely popular.

Still, Werd wondered the unwonderable: were he and what he thought was his savagely effective and well-wrought campaign without, ultimately, agency, and just borne along on the tide of unseen interests?

It was 6 a.m. Werd picked up his cellular and called Evans his numbers guy. 

“How many babies did he kiss in the past news cycle?”

“Let me check. Dan, how many babes did he kiss? One moment, we’re downloading that data now…1325 babies since midnight last night, Washington D.C. time.”

“And of those babies, what percentage were African American?”

“Just over half, I’d say. What does the data say, Dan? Fifty-two percent, sir.”

Werd hung up the phone. Tinyman must be using his superpowers. To win. There was no other explanation. That was a fuck-ton of baby-kissing for anybody, especially an introvert and germophobe. It’s illegal to use superpowers to influence an (U.S.) election, Tinyman knows that, but, well, who’s to say a normal person couldn’t kiss 13, hell, 1500 babes in a full day?

Werd couldn’t confront the unconfrontable. For it, like all would-be facts, presented as a paradox: If Tinyman was using superpowers to win the election he was breaking the law, but also good with numbers. Or else he could be losing the election by breaking the law. All in a display of superpower and bravado so hopelessly uncharacteristic that it threw into question the real Tinyman, and his motives. Sure, Tinyman claimed he didn’t want to win or lose, but how badly did he not care? Maybe those numbers were addictive.

And could he somehow be using telepathy or some obscure superpower to make the viral grassroots campaign happen without touching a single computer?

Werd also suspected Tinyman was crafting off-the-cuff remarks using superpowers which in a normal mortal were only obtained in university English Studies programs.
There was time to call in Geert before the next meeting in Washington. The next morning Tinyman would be putting in an appearance at the superhero office and the League of Justice to convince all the other superheroes to support his platform and candidacy. Superman and Batman’s endorsements would be meaningful, plus Wonder Woman or any woman who might show up. Tinyman hated Megaloman but grit his teeth and extended his left hand and let the big Megalo crush it in his grinning grip. (Tinyman was right handed but learned to offer his left to his superpeers.) 

This part was all handshaking for Tinyman, and reminding these tall capable superfolk who he was, these muscular figures, each a superhero emeritus who only saved lives for occasional, well-timed, photo ops. Superman’s hair and teeth, Tinyman suspected, had had some work done.

“Remember me? My name is Tinyman. I used to have a comic book that put out three issues. Now I’m running for President. Because there’s a real-life supervillain in the White House. He’s like the mind of Lex Luthor marinated in bronzing solution and buried in the body of the Michelin Tire Man. And I want to save the kittens.” 

Great shit! We’re the only candidate talking about the kitten issue, Werd thought, and hammered out a radio spot for Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan:

My name is Man—Tinyman—and I stand where you think I should on all the tough issues. When I was 21, George Bush declared war against Iraq. I wanted to enroll, but I was too engrossed in my studies. An honor roll student, I had a dodecatuple major in finance, history, political science, advertising, business, technical writing, drama, rhetoric, creative writing, golf, psychology, and accounting; coupled with a icosatuple minor in basket weaving, aviation, chemistry, pre-law, pre-med, graphic design, Russian, math, speech communications, Hebrew, sociology, social engineering, French, swimming, badminton, Spanish, computer science, library science, juggling, and leisure studies. I am your man in times of crisis. And now, with eleven percent of Americans out of work, and, of the remaining 89 percent, 48 percent earning less than a living wage (and, of those, 27 percent living below the poverty level), and of the remaining 41 percent, 22 percent working in temporary or part-time positions in which they can receive no benefits and are guaranteed not even continued employment, 18 of the remaining 19 percent living off their parents, and the remaining 1 percent receiving an income equivalent to that of the aforementioned 99 percent, in sum total, rather than in average. Obviously the system needs a little twiddling. With my tax cut, poorer Americans will have a fraction more to spend, and this will help build the economy into the popular topic it has always been. No questions, please.

And then came the inevitable attack ads:

I don’t know. When Tinyman was a congressman, he seemed to be all but alone in voting how I wanted everyone to vote, on the WTO and U.S. involvement in it, in gun control, voting against nuclear weapons research… But it’s clear that now he’s changed, and my guess is that there is more than the election year spotlight behind it. 

Tinyman had never served in a public office, the fact-checkers clarified. Which, inasmuch as it applied equally well to Trump, was immediately projected into another attack ad.

It should be obvious to everyone that there exists a secret government, and that they have chosen Tinyman to be their inarticulate, charismatic, genuinely and refreshingly ignorant figurehead.

The relentlessly curmudgeonly leftyites on Counterpunch, who called Klobuchar “Klobocop”, wrote at length about the establishment New York Times affirming cases of kittens saved by Tinyman, and took Tinyman to task for his failure to rescue actual rescue kittens, only purebreds with owners offering awards. They never found a nickname as good as “Klobocop” for him, though they floated a few patronizing variations in their typo-choked missives.

That night, on Seth Meyers, fuzzy on his poli-sci, Tinyman tried to address the problem. Such things as inequity suggested that the problem lay in any hierarchical ordering. But Meyers countered with: a more anarchical ordering might engender more suffering than it would eradicate. Well, Tiny-man swerved, perhaps it would be more helpful, he wondered desperately, to think in terms of the economic relationships between people. Perhaps an economic system based on sharing, rather than competition, or cooperation, rather than exploitation might, well, work. Together the two men tried to figure out what that would be, and how to figure out how to institute it along with a means of evaluating its success or failure. The studio audience gazed on, mesmerized, as the two intellectuals seriously tried to lay out an agenda for the survival of the human race. 

“You should be running for president of the galaxy, Tinyman,” Seth gushed. Tinyman blushed. “You are without a doubt,” he continued, “the most sincere and humble to the point of self-deprecation presidential candidate to have made a bid in the 21st century.”

Tinyman tried to enunciate a reply but was overcome by laryngitis. He bit into a lemon, and coughed horribly.

“No matter what your policies turn out to be, Tinyman, and believe me when I say that your public can sympathize with your reluctance to sort this whole politics business out, we, or, I should say, a lot of people out there, support you.”

Then the show ended, the cameras went down, and a group discussion session spontaneously erupted on the topic of a sustainable, equitable new society. The camera crew, cue card guys, and all the writers came out and got involved. Tinyman was pleased, and he thanked Seth as Security maneuvered him out a side exit into a waiting limousine. 

That’s what a Tinyman presidency should be, Werd thought. 

Passing through the night, through Pennsylvania, on the way to Iowa. Off the turnpike. Past the pines. The night was full of the antlers of elk, like the television aerials of Americans earnest to catch the latest popularity polls. Through this colossal nothingness drove Johnny Werd and Tinyman. Tinyman asleep in the passenger seat, slumbering as the signs panned by. Signs, Werd pondered. The American landscape passed in a blur of nighttime gasoline and flattened caribou.

It was hard to express the loneliness of life on the road. The signposts and coffee. The American flag on the side of the van. And will we all end up on the road, as refugees in our own country?

The whole drive to the next hotel in darkness, Werd thought about Trump, impaled in the United States, whose punctured breast heaved rivers of red and blue blood. All we learned in history class is not enough to tell us how the German people overthrew the Nazis, because they never did. Has any good ever followed a military coup? Trump was a wrecking ball assigned to demolish American institutions, credibility, and power. Perhaps Putin was behind the wheel, but the damage was colossal. As climate change became a reality would Democracy suffer a similar erosion? The profiteers, weirdly, were on the side of destruction.

After checking in to the next hotel and carefully carrying the sleeping Tinyman to his room and tucking him in, Johnny Werd discovered Tinyman was awake. 

“Werd,” Tinyman rasped, “you’ll never be a speech- writer, son, until you learn how to lie and tell the truth at the same time.”

“Ah—” Johnny Werd stopped himself from discouraging the tiny candidate from speaking about politics.

“It’s a balancing act if there ever was one, son,” Tinyman proclaimed, sitting up, bringing his tiny fist down upon the little hotel wet bar on wheels which disintegrated under the impact. Werd tried to reckon with that.

“When did you start calling people ‘son’?”

“Well dip me in molasses and roll me in pork rinds!” Tinyman announced. He was listening to an instructional cassette through headphones. Werd made a gesture to indicate that colloquialism was off the table. Gastronomically incorrect. “We’re opposed to trans fats, in favor of trans people—read the campaign wiki!”
Tinyman reached for the phone to call room service for milk. Werd knew they shouldn’t spend like that, but was curious to see whether Tinyman was assertive enough to place an order. 

They continued the conversation down to the hotel bar, sitting in a cramped booth beside a jukebox in the corner. Tinyman watched the bartender polishing glasses. Tinyman told Werd that he was scared and wanted out, but not to tweet that.

Werd assured him that tweeting that statement of Tinyman’s would not adversely affect his chances of winning the election, inasmuch as Tinyman’s popular appeal rested on his meekness, but that, no, Werd would not tweet it, because he wasn’t sure he wanted Tinyman to be elected.

Tinyman was relieved. He didn’t want to be elected, either.

“Tinyman, it’s that I’ve been reading your comics, and, well, you don’t look good.” 

“I didn’t write them.”

“I know, I know. But sooner or later somebody’s going to find issue one and then…” 

Tinyman, Issue 2
Tinyman Versus Godzilla

Tinyman began to suspect all kinds of things when he watched the evening news, so he rarely did.

At the moment, Tinyman was walking to the store, his tiny shopping list permanently stored in his super-memory. He wanted a carton of milk, a loaf of bread, and a box of cornflakes, hopefully one with a prize. Tinyman’s grocery list was etched on the stone of his mind. Unless he was distracted by something immense, he would be sure to remember. 

And so began Tinyman’s quest not to be distracted on the way to the store, his tiny mind hopelessly, furiously concentrated on milk, oh white milk, milk that pours, milk oh milk oh milky white, white milk, 2% or whole, skim milk, buttermilk, it’s all the same, it’s all white oh milk oh milk oh milk, it is all affected by gravity, high winds and low temperatures, it is spoilable, warmable, drinkable milk. Tinyman crossed the street at an inopportune time, and a car, swerving to avoid him, hit another car straight on. Needless to say, there were no survivors.

Tinyman blinked at the crash. Oh no! He had almost forgotten…bread. Ah… Bread the loaf of wheat, it can be sliced, it can be heat, with a few joules you can create some toast, or you can let the natural warmth of the earth heat it up till it becomes toast. It takes a few years, bread, made of dough, heated, yeast, flour, maybe a little water, maybe. Peanut butter goes nice, Tinyman loved peanut butter best on bread although he had no objections to just spreading peanut butter on the walls and eating it that way, and a twelve thousand ton jumbo jet came crashing from the sky, landing right on top of a small traffic jam with a force so powerful that it drove the cars and the plane straight down into the hellish unknown underneath Nillsville, leaving only a smoking asphalt crater. Not only were there no survivors, but the next of kin of everyone who was involved in the accident died suddenly and inexplicably, all around the world. 

Tinyman quickened his pace to avoid a falling building, and wondered slightly if this was the week of the big bread sale. Hmmm… But oh my god, thought Tinyman, taking a big step to get across the place where the ground had opened up, for no apparent reason other than the wrath of Satan, and was spewing flame upwards. What was the other thing? Was it cornflakes? No, couldn’t be. Tinyman screwed up his forehead, trying desperately to ignore the sounds of goats being stabbed and still living chickens being burned at the stake, or perhaps being roasted lightly for the steak, as law and order broke down in Nillsville and anarchy took the reins. Tinyman decided, by the time he got to the store, that if it wasn’t cornflakes, it couldn’t have possibly have been anything better. Tinyman stepped through the giant hole in the shattered glass front of the store and proceeded straight to the bread aisle (in case the sale was still going on), trying not to get trampled by the hordes of desperate, panic-crazed people who were looting the store for supplies, canned food and water, anything to take down in their bomb shelters with them in the last five minutes before the big one dropped. There was only one loaf of bread left, and it was clutched in the hand of a nun who had been torn in half by one of the pterodactyls that had just now freed itself of a block of ice in the frozen foods department where it had been frozen alive for eons, and she was bleeding from her truncated torso, muttering the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. Tinyman took the loaf, and went to the cereal aisle, trying to remember the neat little trick he always used so he wouldn’t forget that cornflakes was his favorite. The bodies were, surprisingly, coming back to life, lifting their bleeding, trampled carcasses off the floor with jerky, machine-like motions as their brains were controlled by an evil alien warship in orbit above Nillsville. Tinyman remembered: cornflakes was what he always bought so therefore he liked it the best as the zombies with glowing eyes, stumbling off to the cash registers in the invisible grip of their alien puppeteers suddenly burst into flames, one by one, as a warship from a rival galactic empire joined a synchronous orbit, and attempted to thwart those plans (though not out of any real respect for human beings) by firing silent but deadly death rays of death down upon Nillsville’s supermarket. Tinyman pulled a gallon container of 2% out of the refrigerated dairy goods section, which was on fire as the electromagnetic rays from the warships had caused a reversal of electricity flow as well as an overload, and appliances across town were exploding, and houses were burning down as the fireman rolled across the floor of the firehouse, unable to help as his hands were locked in a death grip on a snarling warthog which had somehow got inside and threatened to tear him from limb to limb if he let go of its tusks. Tinyman did not want to shoplift because he feared authority, but the cashiers had all soaked themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire as a protest to the seizure of power by the white supremacists in Washington, D.C., so he left a dollar bill on the conveyor, which had suddenly come to life as technology arose to crush the human race which had created it, and it was spinning back and forth, trying to catch someone’s fingers so it could draw them in and chew them to a bloody pulp in between the gears. 

And so Tinyman walked home, his mind finally free and able to take in his surroundings. It was quite a lovely day, the sun had come out and the birds were sweetly serenading the squirrels, who chattered treetop philosophy pleasantly as Tinyman strolled by, happy-go-luckily kicking the autumn leaves. Tinyman took a deep breath of autumn air, as clear as spring water and as cool as melting snow. Simply magnificent! Tinyman said, almost out loud, as he slowed his pace slightly to avoid being crushed by the giant foot of the horrible nightmare mutant gorilla that was crashing off in the direction of the church steeple, a tiny little girl who had been blind since birth clenched in his giant ugly hand, crying Tinyman’s name softly, and also to enjoy the trees, simply magnificent!

And the race was on.

To court the gun lobby, Tinyman would advocate guns.
To win the votes of the rich, and therefore fund a gigantic campaign apparatus, he would cut taxes.

To win the kids, he would be photographed wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

To win the senior vote, he would appear onstage on television singing “Getting Sentimental Over You” in a duet with Barbara Shoepolish.

To win the election, his handlers would rig the entire thing.

Tinyman. But who was his opposition, ultimately? Beyond the other Democratic candidates he was polling ahead of?

The Trump bumper stickers could be seen on every new Tesla and rusty truck, the signs could be seen in yards in the company of working fountains or broken appliances. The brand worked. The guttural, one-syllable name was easily articulated.

Trump was poised, historically, to be the last Republican president. It seemed that anybody who had inhaled deep the fragrances of America would see things that way. A social experiment had run its course and culminated in a leader so obviously prejudiced and stupid and crooked and under the thumb of international war criminals that some unknown share of his supporters were terribly afraid of him. There were two thousand billionaires worldwide looking for a candidate to protect their interests. The early Trump initiatives—“Making America run the gauntlet”—were too alarmingly asinine for even the rich and bigoted to fully sign off on. Such as the death penalty for casual marijuana use. Or mandatory search and seizure for all American citizens living beneath the poverty level. Trump was too ambitious. The American right was mostly looking for someone clean-cut who might rant and rave when the occasion demanded but who for the most part only existed as a smokescreen—dramatic but gaseous—for U.S. policy, which was, for the most part, as far as the rich were concerned, mostly fine; its details would be fine-tuned with their interests at heart. (Although even those who vacationed at Mar-a-Lago were beginning to get nervous that they’d be tapped for open cabinet positions.) The Republicans were no longer a political party operating inside a democracy. They were a threat to democracy. From Barr to Trump to McConnell. And FOX News, standing in for a fourth estate.

But it was not the Trump supporters they were looking to turn. It was the Trump-doubters. Surely they were fault lines in any allegiance to Trump. Allegiance to Trump meant allegiance to selfishness, and a truly selfish American would want to live in a world with breathable air. Cracks in their resolve must be myriad.

And then there were the “undecideds.” This attention-hungry segment of pollable Americans would, or so the campaigns were waged, be unmoved by the daily vomit of news from Washington, D.C. but might be touched by a campaign ad. 

This fickle electorate seemed to be so much ticker tape confetti, easily blown away in a gust of opinion polls, mere pie charts in the face. The population was like dust in the wind, or smoke in the bottle, as Werd’s speechwriter carefully spelled out: “Now remember this ‘We are one big alphabet’ thing, Johnny, I think that one’s gonna make USA Today.”

“Well,” Trump tweet-snorted, “if we are one big alphabet, then some men are meant to be punctuation. And I’m the strike-through key, Tinyman. Mark my words!!!”

The typewriter reference was greeted by enthusiasm by octogenarians who used the Google to seek out Tinyman.

In a spectacularly poignant and yet dull disgorgement of the democratic process, articles of impeachment were drawn up against the belligerent president, but his supporters made it clear they would not put up with such bullying against their indefensible idol. 

It was time, then, to introduce Tinyman to his real constituency.

It was dawn. A bird had landed on the balcony and chirped loudly. Tinyman awoke in a hotel chair with a bad headache.

They were having brunch with The Conspiracy. There was a fireplace with a fire, and a buffet with an entire salmon surrounded by exquisite dishes. Tinyman ate cornflakes. He sat next to Mr. Grey, who was studying him. Mr. Grey was a man about whom Tinyman knew very little. But Werd knew him. Werd knew that he had been involved with the CIA in Laos. Nobody knew his real name.

Mr. Grey studied Tinyman, while Tinyman ate spoon- fuls of cornflakes.

Security stood by the door, his wireless radio plugged into his ear, his sunglasses flickering in the light from the fireplace.

“You’re perfect,” Mr. Grey said.

Werd had told Tinyman that Mr. Grey was a natural killer, a reserved and distinguished psychopath who dealt fearlessly with Nazi-trained butchers and mad dog Central American dictators on a daily basis. Mr. Grey scared Tinyman.

The Conspiracy could have chosen to let him alone, and keep shoveling money, but instead they insisted on meeting like this.

Finally, Mr. Grey took a quail from his plate and he cracked the wing off. And put it in his mouth never taking his eyes off Tinyman. Tinyman wondered for that long moment whether the quail was fully dead.

Time wriggled its pincers.

“Remember,” Werd chuckled, “when Trump, I swear it was like one week into his presidency, went to Langley and stood in front of your wall of stars and lied—lied­to the CI fucking A about the size of his inauguration. I mean­—ha—say what you want about the CIA, but you guys, aha, I mean—”

There was a stone cold silence into which fell a munching, a sip, and then Werd again:

“Not that he’s such a bad guy, don’t get me wrong, I mean you must be a first name basis with...Trump.” 

Tinyman felt awful. He imagined himself saying to Werd, in a voice that sounded very far away, his ears filled with the mastication of his corn lakes:

“I want to get out, Werd. I don’t know why these people chose me or what they have planned for me. There must be some way to throw the race. There must be. Must. Be.”

And maybe he committed a telepathic slip. Because it was then that Werd turned his gaze inward. If I were a bookie, I’d capitalize on this. But to throw an election, one that’s being handled from the very beginning, one that may in fact be entirely rigged, is a difficult matter.

Next was the reception. A caterer is passing around a tray of tiny burnt things with their legs folded over their breasts. Werd is wearing a tuxedo and coming in and out of phase. His martini glass is shaped like a sickle. Werd clasping his hands in simulated victory for the flashbulbs his face stoic smiling inwardly wondering what has become of the country, or whether it was ever any different. Werd was a sockpuppet in a ventriloquist’s dummy’s pocket. I have been drugged, he realized. Truth serum? Did I talk about the Church Committee? Iran-Contra? Oh, jeez. Did I ask who shot Kennedy, or about Roswell? These guys in the room were the guys in the room. They were always the guys in the room.

The KGB wants the red states. I have just met with the American Kremlin, the real Democratic National Committee.

Tinyman woke up from a comfortably drugged sleep in which Bruce Springsteen (circa Darkness tour) moaned about making love. The shouting had become louder and the sky was filled with the flickering of police lights as their limousine passed slowly through. Tinyman looked out, cupping his hand against the window to see through the almost opaque glass. “What’s going on?” he asked quietly.

“Protesters.”

Their limo pulled out into an intersection, and down the street Werd saw a row of giant policeman advancing on a wall of young people holding signs. Some of the young people were backing slowly away from the policemen, others, worried, held their ground. SMASH The Conspiracy, read one sign.

INSTITUTE DEMOCRACY IN THE US, read another.

This latter sign confused Tinyman. There was a blur of nightsticks and that sign fell as its holder doubled up on the sidewalk. The limo proceeded past a closed sporting goods store.

ABOLISH SWEATSHOPS, said the spraypaint.

POLICE, said the car.

PEACE, said the t-shirt.

“A handful of protesters, protesting who knows what, were jailed today. Their bails were set at $1,000,000,” said Sean Hannity.

END SECRET GOVERNMENT, said the big red felt tip.

“No!” screamed the college student.

“Fuck you!” screamed the policeman.

“Are they protesting us?” asked Tinyman.

Geert, wearing a perfectly blank expression, turned to stare at Tinyman, and did not answer.

“Water…please…?” gasped the prisoner.

“And I’m sick and tired of those screaming protesters trying to block my freedom of speech,” said the commentator on national television, “and if it takes more policemen to lock them up and throw away the key then I’m all in favor of that!” to deafening applause from the studio audience, as the host, enjoying himself, tried to calm the crowd down.

“Conspiracy,” said the judge. 

“Democrat-run cities,” said Donald Trump, “Chicago, Chicago.”

“Freedom of assembly,” said the Constitution, “freedom of speech. Still number one in my book.”

A man with a pail walked through the abandoned slaughterhouse, and disappeared, leaving only Tinyman and Johnny Werd.

Werd gestured around him: “See, Tinyman, this place used to be filled with American workers butchering animals. Many of the workers worked here their entire lives. And now…” Werd gestured expansively, emptily, almost a shrug. “They’re out of work, on the dole, starving. Bad coronavirus outbreak. Poisoned water supply. This whole town is dead, Tinyman. Because the company has changed its strategy and now genetically-modified hogs fed distilled hormones and chemical soup are slaughtered on a conveyor belt in West Virginia. And it’s missed. It was a life for these people. Even though this plant hasn’t had a very good environmental record, run-off from the hog waste lagoon at the new site wiped out the entire town, and I guess it’s up to them to clean up the site. And these genetically-engineered hogs, Tinyman, well they’re nothing to look at. And the meat is gristly.”

Tinyman wrinkled his nose. The two passed through a vast swinging door out into the old hog yard, where rows of force-feeding cubicles stretched almost to the horizon. Tinyman peered inside one and there was a pig skeleton lying on the ground.

“See?” Werd said. 

“See what?” asked Tinyman, somewhat impatiently.

Werd realized more explanation was in order. “In Europe, see, they’re opposed to those genetically-modified meats. They tried to block it, but the WTO considers that attitude—wanting to preserve the fine cuisine that is at the heart of their culture over there (except Britain)—a barrier to free trade. No matter how it gets resolved, a bunch of lawyers are going to make, shall we say, big bucks.”

There was a period of silence and the gravel crunched under their heels as they walked an endless industry-ravaged landscape where aluminum hangars slowly baked beneath the blazing desert sun. 

Werd stopped, stooped, and picked up from the dead earth an object. He held it out to Tinyman. It was a chiseled stone arrowhead. “Native American,” Werd said. “200, maybe 300 years old…”

Tinyman looked at Werd.

“See?” Werd said.

“See what?” Tinyman asked helplessly. But Werd only swallowed and shook his head slowly. And then Werd stooped and put the arrowhead back where he found it.

“So…” Werd began, “I guess I’m just wondering how to spin all of this when you give the speech at the town square this afternoon. How are your economic policies going to differ from those of the incumbent?”

“How?” Tinyman stalled for time with a clarifying question.

“See? That’s a tricky issue. Almost like splitting hairs because, you see, your policies won’t actually matter since you’ll have to defer to the pressures of international commerce, which means your actual aspiration, is to be, ultimately, a humble apologist for the current system, but one who uses optimistic rhetoric. I may as well be honest since I think we’re having a moment.”

“Gross,” Tinyman said.

“So let’s, ah, go get some breakfast. I saw a Bob Ebeneezer’s Smoked Sausage Shack up the road apiece. Let’s go…boost the local economy.”

“Okay,” said Tinyman.

“But actually Bob Ebeneezer’s is a chain owned by, essentially, the same parent company that owns CCN, WTV, and Americash. I’ve heard that they’ve relocated their headquarters to Shanghai. But we can still boost the international economy. See?”

“No.”

Tinyman’s campaign speech went differently than his campaign advisors had planned. He had been warned that the audience might well be infiltrated with protestors from an anarcho-syndicalist group called “The Purple Hand.”

The Purple Hand were a no-show. The Green Hand were there. But they were supporters, not protesters.

Nevertheless, his teleprompter sputtered, and Tinyman, seized with a muscle spasm, raised his tiny fist and shook it, unintimidatingly, at the crowd. 
They cheered. And, making a surprise appearance, The Red Hand flung the carcasses of flayed animals onstage, to show that they were supportive of Tinyman’s environmental policies.

Somehow, despite the magical feeling, a police riot broke out.

Since entering the campaign, Tinyman had called the superhero central office and asked them to hold his calls. The campaign would keep him too busy, he explained, to attend to diabolic criminals or large natural disasters, accidents, or terrorist acts.

But one day Tinyman got a call on his two-way wrist radio indicating the coordinates of a burning airplane above the Pacific he needed to save. Tinyman sprang into action, and immediately composed a speech. He practiced it, silently. A cotton ball smeared with make-up base fell behind the dresser.

Tinyman got on the red phone after pouring himself a tall whiskey and skim milk.

“Listen. I’m, uh, sick, and can’t, uh, save the burning airplane.” 

“You’ll lose your benefits.”

“How about the Blue Avocado. I would like to recommend her for the job, the burning airplane job. She’s a good, a real good, flyer.”

“She’s all tied up with a deadly meteor shower.”

“Yeah. Well, how about Dr. Brain?”

“He’s a bad guy. He won’t do burning airplane work for us.”
“He used to.”

“We don’t talk about that.”

“Right, right. Well, uh, let’s see. What time is it? Has the thing crashed yet, I mean we’ve been on the phone—”

“It’s still hanging at about 12,000 feet over Japan. I give it a little over four minutes.”

“Yeah? Hey, can you hold, I got a call on the other line. It might be my campaign manager.”

“Hey—”

“Damn it, Tinyman, just save the airplane!”

Was his martini talking to him?

TINYMAN SAVES BURNING AIRPLANE SECONDS BEFORE TOKYO CATASTROPHE

“Tinyman, why did you choose to save the burning airplane when U.S. law forbids a superhero from using their powers while seeking or holding a political office?”

“I had to.”

ROGUE CANDIDATE TINYMAN ANSWERS TO NO ONE IN QUEST FOR JUSTICE

Tinyman, Issue 3
Tinyman Versus the Blue Avocado

Tinyman finished composing the letter he would never write, then set his pen down on the sky. On junebug daze like these with the birds, clouds, etcetera, Tinyman really preferred to stay at home. Regardless of what the options were. Regardless even of birds, sky, etcetera. Then Health Food Girl, now the Blue Avocado, rose from the sky atop a silvery web of corn syrup, soybean oil, vinegar, lecithin, xanthan gum, spices, carbon monoxide oh no I’m sorry a silvery thread of…wheat? A silvery thread of thread? A silvery thread. The Blue Avocado had come to Illinois to silently tell him goodbye because she was staying. She was going to board an idling Greyhound bus and wave at him through the window for the rest of his life in a parking lot, each of them in separate all-encompassing everythings, divided by textured reflective opaque glass. She told him to stop staring at the television, or at least turn it on. So they went to buy inedible food without paying for it. She did. He didn’t eat. Except coffee. The food mart was protected by security cameras, electric barbed-wire Doberman Pinschers, and rented cops who casually and conspicuously stood around. Because her bus would board sooner than a few minutes ago, an official Greyhound bellhop had followed her inside the grocery store offering to load any grocery she even glanced at on the bus the luggage compartment was under. This was Store™ the generic store. They had registered rights reserved for everything without a brand name, including all works of art entitled “Untitled.” The security guard walked up just to make sure they weren’t ordinary people who had climbed down from the shelves in aisle 13: animals. Nope, they were superheroes: the Blue Avocado and Tinyman, the bashful hero. She read the ingredients on the side of the banana and frowned... An ant crawled across the tile in search of the pet food aisle. This particular pet food aisle was once the scene of a brawl between two women, one of whom owned a Pekingese and the other a Great Dane. Afterwards the stockboy cleaned up the mess, put the dented Alpo cans back on the shelf, and drove home. Driving home he passed me hitchhiking with a sign that said, “hell or bust.” Nobody picked me up but one time a truck full of chickens drove by being driven by a cow, all escaping aisle 13. Tinyman explained all this but the Blue Avocado seemed kind of spaced out. So Tinyman crawled into her ear with a flashlight to find out what the problem was. Stapes okay. Tympanic membrane? Uh oh. Inside her cochlea was a tiny jazz combo and the goateed bereted drummer was playing her eardrum with paintbrushes. Tinyman wanted to do a soft-shoe shuffle, play trampoline on it, listen to her eardrum with a stethoscope. What can Tinyman do? Tinyman awoke in his chair with a start. The television had started that terrible buzzing and sure enough it was unplugged. He fell asleep again and the Blue Avocado was promising to take him flying. Once he got down off the floor.

Tinyman Versus Goofy the Wacky Duck

“Oh yes,” Tinyman moaned, “feed me that vanilla ice cream in large spoonfuls, freely allowing it to dribble down my chin and bare chest.” She moved obligingly as Tinyman attempted to peer into the crevices of her glittering gold jumpsuit. “Oh yes,” Tinyman moaned again.

Thug struck Tinyman another fierce blow across the chin, causing his tiny body to bounce around within the straps that held it to the chair. Tinyman regained consciousness for a short time, and murmured: “If only I could escape... Oh, I can. But I better not.” The Nazi stepped into the harsh light, towering menacingly. He spoke thickly.

“Can we believe them?” he asked. Tinyman looked around uneasily.

“Can we believe them?” the Nazi asked again.

“Yes and no?” Tinyman said.

“Ah,” the Nazi said, “thank you. We’ll get you out of these straps in just a second.”

“Oh. Don’t bother,” said Tinyman, ripping the straps away.

Werd had to save the day. He had to. Tinyman wasn’t doing shit, having passed out drunk in the plush hotel room armchair, wearing the plush hotel bathrobe, a roll of toilet paper draped about his neck, as he had cut himself trying to shave then applied as aftershave a half glass of bourbon. The pain of the sting was so intense he had fainted.

And now Werd stood out on the balcony, the pleated white drapes ruffling in the wind.

Werd stood there, in the flicker of the TV static, brandishing the razor blade.

America, he said, I’m your daddy.

Because I grew up fed on toys, and then…and then…There was a fire, yes.

And Werd grabbed the glass of bourbon from the snoring Tinyman’s endtable, and held it to the night, the decimated night…

And then, I went to college and had to find a…job, yes.

Werd gazed down upon the skyscrapers, bare and brutal, their dull steel gleaming by moonlight. 

Nihilistic city, I beseech you.

But I survived. I even went through a period where I thought I wanted to be a hipster but…I pulled through it okay, look at me, I am success. My name is Johnny Werd and I am running for president.

And all you people can vote for me…or go fuck yourselves.

A flashbulb popped.

Tinyman turned toward the microphones slowly, his right hand raised in a gesture that meant intentional, willing victory. The crowd cheered, then a hush fell over them like locusts descending upon a field of votes. Tinyman’s smile wavered. Was his fly unzipped? What if there were mustard on his chin? He then attempted to focus, relying on the techniques of the Bhagwatami Khan to overcome adversity so intense that the warrior is tempted to fall down and sob.

Later, he was handed his Twitter account. Werd waited on the other side of the hospital curtain while Tinyman tweeted his only known tweet:

Ha. James K Polk didn’t build a wall he simply stole half of Mexico. He loved Mexico. Yeah half of it. And he sought no second term. So why is this buffoon seeking a second term? He hates Mex

Werd yanked the phone from Tinyman’s hand before he could hit “tweet.”

But that night, on the campaign Facebook page, he spewed a drunken ramble he forgot about:

Voting against this asshole is like ending a sentence with a period (or a commuted sentence in the case of this asshole’s friends). C’mon! We’ve been so well-behaved for him. It’s like flushing a toilet whose gurgle followed by a glissandi diminuendo is returning to the tonic. Like wiping a gob of spit off America’s face. Now it’s time for him to return our favor—we’ve respected law and order including executive overreach, we’ve resoundingly conceded that he’s a bad president, not the inevitable outcome of a busted system—America works fine, this nut is cracked—so now he can respect common sense and bow the fuck out. Let someone in The Conspiracy back in power, maybe Joe Biden. This is serious. The whole two-party system would fall apart if not for Republican unity. The legislature and judiciary follow the executive branch as though they were compromised by the KGB who had embarrassing dirt on everybody, except Mitch McConnell, who is not human. So. Let’s summarize what we’ve learned. The president is a spy. Buried in this is the awesome possibility that, by a slim margin, voters are actually sensible, and, after the difficult transition to democracy, we might succeed as a nation in not putting our most embarrassing men forward because we couldn’t come up with a world leader. We know now that a rapist and KGB spy can be president if Republican. And that adultery is a potentially impeachable crime for a Democrat. We’ve seen how low the bar is for them and how high for us—stratospheric, nose-bleed, Obama.

It was not really by accident that Werd turned on the TV in the hospital room where Tinyman was recovering from fainting.

The president, in keeping with tradition, had escalated a foreign war in order to regain popularity. Though in hindsight it’s not clear there was that much of a plan. Well, he actually started a war in a blazing conflation of executive overreach and American exceptionalism. He assassinated the second in command of Iran in neutral territory in broad daylight. Whether the U.S. and Iran were now at war depended on which channel you chose. All sides seemed to be leaning toward de-fucking-escalation, except the president, who appears oblivious. Perhaps Putin or another one of Trump’s icky world leader friends made the call.
Werd hit mute and sat down on the bed next to Tinyman, who was nervously eating apple sauce with a spork. “Eat up, buddy, you’re gonna need all the apples you can stand. Did you see that? Now let me ask you,” said Werd quietly, pulling away the tray of apple sauce so as to capture Tinyman’s reluctant attention, “Are we at war?”

Tinyman mumbled something. And then glanced at the tray but it was not moving back. 

“What?” asked Werd, “into the microphones, please, candidate Tinyman.”

Tinyman cleared his throat. “Yes and no?” he asked. Werd shoved the tray back under Tinyman’s spork. “Correct. That is the world we need to make transparent. When you are president, yes, but starting now. Now I know, I know, you can do it. I mean, you, Tinyman, are like the Michael Jordan of wimpy white guys.”

“So, not a lot like—”

“Nothing like. Bad analogy, yeah.”

“So…”

“But you can still play, right?”

“Basketball?”

“Yeah!”

“No.”

“Your superpowers don’t include basketball?”

“Sorry, no. Or singing.”
At that moment Werd glanced at his phone. Tinyman pretended not to read the caller—UKRAINE—as Werd snatched up the phone and recused himself to a semi-private pose in the bed on the other side of the curtain, through which Tinyman could hear him trying to adjust to a business-like posture.

It seems someone wanted a lot of apologies. “Ah,” Werd said, “we have a misunderstanding.” “See,” he said, waiting for the translator to catch up, “Iran shot down one of your passenger jets while in a state of heightened paranoia, but the opposite is also true.” Tinyman presumed a stunned silence was taking place. Good thing, because that was only the most recent apology the beleagured nation was owed by someone, anyone, whose phone number began +1. 

“And anyway,” Werd cut in, “we’re impeaching the guy who extorted you with some bullshit, so—fair and square, yeah? So—” Werd listened for some time. “Reparations…” he repeated, neither asserting nor negating the word, just letting it rotate in the air. “But back to the impeachment thing—if we can’t beat a guy with that kind of rap sheet, then—” Tinyman could feel Werd staring doubtfully at him through the curtain. He pretended to be eating the last of the apple sauce even though it was all gone.

The Naked Party had become organized enough to cause a provocation, and had to be turned away from churches and civic centers nationwide. Had there been an election, it could have meant the breakdown of the system, that is how disordered the thinking of the ballot attendants would become when confronted with citizens who when disrobed became ghastly monsters loping about on impure feet, with pinched elbows, sores, and hair.

And they were, Werd realized, they meaning the Naked Party, ready for Iowa where mostly white people would soon narrow down the candidates for the Democratic Party.

Werd chewed a pen and considered the playing field for the last televised debate.

Biden. A sure win. Except for the fact that his name had appeared with the word “corruption” in too many scrolling news tickers for anybody to dissociate the two things. Regardless. Cred. As a man, though, a somnambulist safe in the slimy white of the egg. Unable or uninterested in pronouncing consonants while boasting of his support of black Americans, whom he differentiates from the working class. He is the lead vocalist the producer can’t ever get a good take from, no matter what. Joe, when the moderator asks about the economy, before you speak I want you to imagine your mother dying. 

Warren. Purple. Most definitely a winner. Good look and feel. Telegenic. Hard to pin down, yet always talks until the moderator cuts her off. Homey, but a curve ball, something fresh and penetrating. Might even be a superhero like Tinyman, only with skills.

Sanders. Sanders spoke the truth. Into a discourse in which each truth is refracted to appear with its mirror untruth, like the two wings of aimless butterflies circling in pairs. What is needed, Tinyman e-mailed Werd, who was sitting across the helicopter from him, is a third reality. Because in this world are two equal and opposite worlds, or perhaps around each untruth, each ignored fact, each talking point, time and space bifurcate. We are bridging one world in which the president committed a criminal shakedown of Ukraine—(“Who is that, by the way?” asked Tinyman. “Ukraine,” Werd explained to the candidate, “is a fucking country.”)—and another in which the president committed a noncriminal shakedown of Ukraine. To step back and forth between the two realities is as easy as changing the channel, pulling on a red t-shirt over your blue one. But butterflies poured out of Bernie’s mouth when he spoke of taking to task the fossil fuel industries. And he ends with an exclamation point before the moderator cuts him off, very professional in a wild-eyebrow way. The way he pronounces “fraud” is like a bowl of New England clam chowder. Will he stop yelling if we vote him in? At what point will he calm down and get with the day-to-day of the Green New Deal? I mean, the first part is always the most fun, but can he pace himself?

Buttigieg: Not a milquetoast. A man who will stand up for things. Like facing tough issues, not from a podium, but on the ground. Uses the word “policing.” 

Steyer: Climate=Jobs. Smart, smart. Fought the Keystone Pipeline. Has the words SHUT THE FUCK UP occasionally projected on his head by someone in the audience at the debate. Buttigieg is dying from suppressing laughter. Biden chuckles, missing the joke entirely. Buttigieg is so seized with suppressed laughter that his hair is standing on end. “…and together we will defeat the world...” is all Johnny Werd catches. 

Tinyman: A no-show again but won handily by most accounts.

Klobuchar: Red. I believe that we need a president who is going to work for you. While Tinyman sorts out the syntax, the spotlight hits Warren who seems ablaze with Win. 

Just then Biden comes back on and Werd pumps the volume just in time to hear “…let’s go do it!” What? Do what? What’d I miss? And now over to Anderson Cooper.

For the next four hours the moderators gave a play-by-play and declared Tinyman, who, along with Bloomberg, was too cowardly to show, the absolute winner. 

Flashbulb. The reporter asked Tinyman, as he stepped down from the helicopter to join the Hampshire College Truth-In, where he stood on the impeachment. 

“Ukraine is a fucking country,” Tinyman said.

UKRAINE IS A FUCKING COUNTRY, SAYS TINYMAN, the headlines said.

And it turns out this was news to a lot of people. The facts were not in dispute in this rare case. Werd sat Tinyman down with a jigsaw puzzle of a world map.

Tinyman was afraid of oceans, as should be anybody gifted with the ability to fly but not land.

“Tinyman, are you afraid your message of love won’t get across to the American voter?”

“Tinyman, do you think that Vladimir Putin is getting the message not to hack our elections?”

“Tinyman, what do you have to say about the first two primaries taking place in predominantly white states?”

A string of angry tweets from amped-up Warren supporters who took offense at the tweet that said a woman could not be a criminal president just as well as a man. 

Johnny Werd was so startled that he read the New Yorker piece out loud:

Neither of them left much room for the possibility that the truth was somewhere in between, or that, for example, Sanders might have sent a message that went beyond his words.

Neither did CNN. Phillip simply asked Sanders, “Why did you say that?” “Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it,” Sanders replied. “And I don’t want to waste a whole lot of time on this, because this is what President Trump and maybe some of the media want. Anybody who knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be President of the United States.” He cited a raft of evidence, including statements he had made decades ago, his own willingness to defer to Warren if she had decided to run for the White House in 2016, and Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote victory that year (when, after losing the Democratic nomination, he vigorously campaigned for her). The expression on Warren’s face as he spoke—CNN went with a split screen—was one of studied indifference punctuated by brief sidelong glances that seemed to convey bemusement.

“Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here,” Phillip said. “You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?” He replied, “That is correct.” Phillip, without missing a beat, said, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?” It was as though he hadn’t denied it, or as if there were no need to grapple with a different view. The audience, anyway, laughed, and Warren, after a flash of a smile, said, “I disagreed.” With that, she closed the loop of a story in which her version of the meeting was an unquestioned fact.

It was one thing for a fact and its denial, or a lie and its denial, to co-exist, and in its most benign and insoluble form it may amount to he said versus she said, but another thing entirely for a person to have the charisma to reach into a paradox and pull out a, yes, a fact. And, as with Trump or Putin’s simple syllogism that whatever they say is unquestionably true because they are unquestionably powerful, so with Warren truth did not rely entirely on empirical evidence, logic, a due process in a court of reason, Enlightenment thinking, but with power, her power to present for the camera. Hers was the more compelling story.

Everybody had secret hopes Bernie was unstoppable. Even those who pretended to try to stop him.

His midnight face a frowning mask in the light of his phone, Werd checked the numbers, which he was convinced were finally starting to slip, and then he checked in on Maddow, who walked on a stage before a giant bar graph of campaign spending among Democratic hopefuls. Tinyman’s bar was so high that in gesticulating toward it, Maddow tripped over Warren’s spending bar. And then all that anger that had been building up inside her poured out and she destroyed all the bars except the one for Tinyman, which was twice her height, before they cut to a commercial.

Werd carefully set his phone down, as if it were a gun that might go off and blow the whole fraudulent process into electoral carnage. Who was Tinyman’s base, really, beside the annoying naked people? The Conspiracy, yes, but what was their play?

Werd got sleepy wondering whether Barack Obama had actually been a president on this planet. He clicked the TV on preparing to drop his critical dipstick into the froth of sewage on FOX.

“None of it matters,” said Tinyman, snapping off the TV. His hood was down and he was animate. “Do you think it does?” he asked, turning to Werd to deliver his important message, with even a hint of restrained super-breath: “There is no room in history for the type of recovery America needs in order to regain its seat at the international table. One term? Two terms? It’s not enough to fix the damage before the pendulum heaves back and puts another criminal in power. Don’t you see? The Treasury Department is investigating the legality of President Trump’s tax cut. Why wasn’t it investigated before it was pushed through? I’ll tell you why. I will. Because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

“Seth Meyers,” Werd sighed, rolled over, and pulled a pillow over his head.

Is this what Michael Moore was referring to when he said we had to fix the system that allowed President Trump? Or who said that? Or was it Sanders who said that? Sanders now had two women with monochromatic tops angry with him. As if anything mattered but what was going down in the Senate.

Trump was being impeached for crimes he denied. Were crimes. He didn’t deny having done them. What he denied was that a president could break the law. Everything the president could do was by definition legal for the president to do. Or at least that’s how his legal team would explain it.

Meanwhile Sanders and Warren were still warring. Werd chuckled at the slow-motion instant reply of the two accusing each other of accusing each other of being liars unaware they were being miked. And then Michael Moore did a podcast about the dispute, generating an hour of content over a five-second hissed exchange in which no fact was proven. “The Democrats are back, baby,” Werd laughed, slapping his knee. Tinyman, conversely, grew worried. What if the party tore itself apart, the grey-haired beltway insiders pushing and shoving to get to the front of the line, and…Bernie. Or, if it were Bernie, it also had to be Warren. The crossed swords of their mutual denials had brought them into orbit around opposite sides of a fact. Michael Moore presumed there was a truth, and the debate moderator chose an equal and opposite truth. But was the hunt for truth the game, or was the game illuminating the conflict? Was Sanders the lie and Warren the equal and opposite truth? If one chose the other as running mate, would they explode? WAP!

Unbelievably, Maddow was interviewing Lev Parnas, whose mug shot she had been cheerfully mocking for months. She put on thick glasses in the hope he would not recognize her. What was this thug doing on the Sunday show circuit? Iowa. Caucuses. It hurt Werd’s feelings to see Lev again. On TV. Maddow. He remembered playing ping pong against Parnas, late into the night, just going at it, Lev stripped to the waist and his body slick from hair gel. And now Lev had gone from mug shot to superstar. He may as well announce his presidential bid. Helpless to turn off Maddow, Werd held the remote, sitting on the edge of the hotel bed while Tinyman, down in the hotel pool, was forced by his personal trainer to swim a lap. In the dim glow of the screen, Werd saw his old friend Lev, international bag man, I mean international, talking to his media hero Rachel Maddow, the paragon of compressed rage, and there Werd sat, just a campaign manager. Like Paul Manafort. Paul. Werd smiled, remembering the tapes he and Paul had made as kids on the colorful portable with the two red microphones, interviewing other kids in the street, stealing. And now Paul again was way out in front of things, in jail of some kind, I mean, the guy has some serious street cred. Compared to the rest of us. Well, and Lev, who looks like he’s busted a head or two back in Ukraine or wherever he hung up his shingle. When Giuliani was on Monster.com looking at portfolios of prospective legal assistants, this one caught his eye. How? How did they meet? How had Giuliani managed to steal away Werd’s childhood friend? —whom he would have loved to have on Tinyman’s campaign, Manny too. He’d love to be working with the old gang.

Werd knew them all. Hell, he hadn’t spent the last ten years shaking every hand he could find for nothing. Werd had done his time at Fraud, Inc., lobbying candidates who no longer mattered on behalf of forces that prefer to remain nameless. For one withering moment Johnny Werd noted how many of his former associates were under indictment, then he wiped the fear off his lips and washed the taste away with scotch rocks. That’s how he ordered it anymore: “Scotch rocks twist.” He was a man who used to have a rich verbal life but his prepositions had fallen away. After the race he might need to go back to meetings (“John alcoholic”) until he got some parts of speech back. His prepositions seemed to have been contracted out by unnecessary phrasal verbs. “I’ll send that out,” “I’ll finish that up,” “We’ll share that out,” and “We’ll tweet that out.” So desperate was he for movement that orientations seemed to bud off his otherwise directionless verbs even as he could no longer orient himself. 

The Naked Party was staging scream-ins all up and down the West coast until massive wildfires forced them to retreat and consider how to weave climate change into the naked agenda. A Naked Earth wasn’t quite the image they were looking for, as it brought to mind a scorched desert. Before they could finish their platform about the naked green earth with tufts of green growths and vast salty wet places, they had to break to start fundraising for the trip to Burning Man. On the other coast, Mike Pence woke up screaming, drenched in sweat, from nightmares about naked people and science. 

Meanwhile the Senators were sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts to conduct an impartial impeachment trial for Donald John Trump. The behavior shown by the serpentine toady Mitch McConnell could barely be understood, and his whole-soul obsequience could barely be couched in nonsexual terms.

If every fact had an equal and opposite fact, then was Trump the fact or the denial? Was he the lie or the truth? Depends on whether truth=power. Was Warren the opposite truth? If not, is there an anti-President Trump out there? How much older than President Trump is Chomsky? How much younger is Obama? Please tell me there is symmetry in the universe! Matter and anti-matter, light and dark matter, positive and negative, all adding up to zero, because if not, how many of us will it take to cancel out Trump?

And what about Mitch McConnell? 

The impeachment at the Senate was beginning. 

Remembering Clinton, Werd reflected that whether impeachment works or not depends on whether you agree with the outcome. As with so many things, notably the economy. But the Republicans do policy for the purpose of partisanship and not the other way around; the Senate won’t vote on any legislation passed by the House, whether or not it even agrees with it. Nothing in the behavior of the Republican officials is in service of anybody except Trump. From whose bullying rule the Democrats were defending the nation.

Mitch McConnell had yielded on some small matters in scrawled amendments to the documents outlining the process by which the president would be immeditely exonerated along party lines. McConnell would allowed evidence to be presented and maybe witnesses, if they didn’t complicate the exoneration. The Facts are False lobby approved with a social media blast.

This historic moment, from the Mueller Report through this rare trial, projected to be no less inverted than Clinton’s impeachment trial in which stupid not-crimes were amplified to crimes, and in this case unelected lawyers would reduce crimes to not-crimes, but, god damn it, maybe, just maybe…

The impeachment had happened with terrible slowness, but this next part had been scripted by the pale, hairless salamander McConnell to happen waytoofast for any jurisprudence to take place. This wretched reptile who didn’t know what to do with his prosthetic hands had issues. Most likely a Kremlin file on his reptilian sexual tendencies, any of which would be disgusting. Or bribes were also good at keeping bloodless lips clenched tight. Or a wee Kremlin-style threat, like coming home to an open window by his bed to intimate his falling to his death, his tea left out to intimate poisoning, the KGB’s assassination method of choice. Did Putin have compromising information on every single Republican senator? Because otherwise that was a lot of bribes, more than an oligarch like Putin might want to invest in his new puppet state. Especially when it had come so cheap: slaves and free Facebook accounts. And now assurances from Zuckerberg that political lying and manipulation would be free and open across his network. Putin’s compromising photos of Zuckerberg could stay in the bottom drawer—he was good comrade. 

A historic moment. Werd switched on C-Span and a congresswoman he couldn’t identify, with her well-supported calls for witnesses, put him into a hypnotic state. 

Werd stared into Adam Schiff’s eyes as he delivered his closing remarks and thought, he crushed that fucking speech. For a guy who did not sign on for the job of taking down the worst Presidency in history, and, it seemed, the most entrenched. He wondered whether he could make it through this historic impeachment snooze-fest until 10 EST. What a burden President Trump would create, I mean not just for the entire free world, but for the presidency itself. Unlimited power. A job with no boss whatso- ever, completely malleable to your every whim. Build a wall on the border but ask whether you are walling out or walling in? Are you afraid all your frightened supporters will emigrate south of the border and leave you throwing hats to empty rallies? What if he stays in power for another term? The damage he could do to very nearly every one on earth is without limit or, it seems, law. I mean, would you want a job like that? To surround yourself with hinky yes men who will bow to your every tantrum, to have no guidance and near-omnipotence, and no way you could get in trouble? Fuck a porn star, bully a country, spill state secrets like wine at every gathering, withhold tax returns, stand in front of the walls of stars of their fallen colleagues and lie to the CIA, have weird meetings with despots and confiscate the translator’s notes, put Steve Bannon in the White House. Pal around with Lev and Igor and Epstein, don’t divest your business holdings, force diplomats and the Secret Service to stay at your overpriced hotels, be a dick to John McCain, and that’s just for starters—what he does to Marie Yovanovitch creeps beyond dickery to threatening a faultless individual American from the pulpit of the Twitter Account of the President of the United States—abandon long-term Kurdish allies to slaughter by Turkey and Syria, sort of start a serious-ass war with Iran or something, hate on Chicago, cut taxes for the rich, pardon a murderer, brag on TV with an improvised routine about how a terrorist assassinated by U.S. Special Forces whined and pleaded for his life and really dwell on it thereby pissing off more terrorists, seize private land for a large piece of racist conceptual art along the Mexican border, lie, again just be a dick sort of at every opportunity and every level, from mocking disabled reporters on a rally floor all the way up to character assassination on Yovanovitch, lie, smirk, invite interference in an American election by an extraterrestrial rock band, cheat, brag that you have the authority to murder a stranger in the street, and of course extort Ukraine, a fucking country with fucking problems, fucked over by Russia and fucked over by Trump, which was the one bad thing he did that got underscored for impeachment proceedings. Never mind any number of other gaffes that his torrent of bad news had hosed from the popular memory. Bad news. 

Bipartisan support. Considering Russia an enemy used to have bipartisan support to a fault. Support for Ukraine had bipartisan support, but not withholding aid had only half of the party or rather, well it made no sense unless you chose another mode of thought, Werd reasoned. Evil? Would evil thinking help make sense out of the persistent support of President Trump? Was there a course on evil thinking he could take. He tried to get inside the mind of Cheney, Kissinger, Satan, Vader, guys like that. Strength in numbers, safety in numbers, blind obedience to…the leader. The President, who, thankfully, was probably not evil, just stupid and narcissistic and sleazy with defiantly stable hair and make-up that journalists love to take a shot at describing (“Pancake”—Martin Amis), all that cosmetic trouble, but without the bearing of a Vader, and he just didn’t seem to get off on killing people in large numbers. So far. His idea of power was a hotel with his name on it in Moscow. His idea of putting his stamp on the office of the presidency was to replace the historic Oval Office drapes with gold drapes, because, well, gold, right? It’s the most expenisve color in the world. Did evil people dig President Trump? Decidedly, yes. White supremacist rallies in Richmond felt explicitly empowered by Trump. Unarmed black children and adults were shot by police seemingly without end. Were these white people erupting from some chasm of darkness that had broken open by the one-degree-of-separation support implied by the smug President who spoke of Mexicans crossing the border to rape white women? Yes. 

Tinyman, how the fuck can a slacker like you save the Republic? And, if we won, would I care about saving the Republic? I’m no Rove; I’ll take the win and grab the revolving door into industry. I’m fifty—fucking fifty—and I’ve given my last youth to this shit. I used to have thick red hair and 20-5 vision in my prime. I want to be a winning campaign manager, a winner, and that’s it. Then I’d like to slide into being an anonymous member of the 1%. Who owns the 99%. Sometimes I even work out the math on a cocktail napkin, what my share of the 99% would be, what percentage. Werd lifted his head from where it had cratered from discouragement on his desk and noticed that the cat had messed up his papers somehow. It’s true, you can figure out the math. Back of the envelope stuff: 1% global population over 99% global wealth. Even if you were off by a couple billion it still looked comfortable. Werd had scheduled this two-day break but he couldn’t stop reading the e-mail. The headlines. Trump rolls back U.S. water pollution controls. Three U.S. firefighters die in air tanker crash in Australia. Doomsday Clock moves to 100 seconds to midnight. Study shows high amount of ‘forever chemicals’ in tap water. Officials believe they’ve found the ‘Pillowcase Rapist.’ The suspect was building a ‘dungeon’ beneath his home, officials say. Chinese city of 11 million on lockdown amid deadly virus. So…a regular day. He took an Ambien. Pleasing flowers grew on the wall and Tinyman sat on the trellis that was his bed and watched them grow, curling figure eights and snaking around the vertices of the rose trellis. A waterfall of flowers without end.

Werd felt that gnawing he hated, that desire, the need, to trust, not so much the president but language. The president’s wrongdoing is beyond dispute, but it can be repaired, all of it, as long as language isn’t broken. So much depends on a single word: literally. A fact can give you sunburn or ding your car or melt your favorite glacier, but can enough of them remove a Trump from where it’s lodged a millimeter from the aorta of the body politic? The closing statement and Schiff has another slam dunk, Werd thought, but he’s all fact. 

“If the truth doesn’t matter,” Schiff says, “we are lost.”

And back to the phone lines, here’s Lev, Republican, from Kiev: “Yes, I’m ashamed to be Republican right now. I’ve been a loyal—hello?—a loyal party member for three year. This President he goes too far, and he cuts me in on none of it. He can pardon me, does he pardon me? Some friend.”

Now here’s Spokane, Democrat: “A week into his presidency, when he stood before the CIA—now say what you will about them, but they know things, anyway, the CIA, absolutely not the guys to lie to—stood before the wall of stars commemorating the fallen agents and told them he had had the largest inauguration in history, when any kid with Google can prove he didn’t even have the largest inauguration of the decade, well, why didn’t someone pull him aside and say, dude, are you feeling lightheaded or drunk right now?”

“Three years later, someone asked that. They were called ‘The Whistleblower.’ Now here’s Wichita.”

Do I believe? Werd wondered. 

“Hey Tinyman, wake up.”

“What?”

“Do I believe in America?”

“How the fu-heck should I know? What am I, telepathic?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Well, yeah, but. I also have the power to lift up the lids of public garbage cans and inspect their contents, but I choose not to exercise it. Believe me—you don’t want to be telepathic.”

Werd hoped he wouldn’t use that one in front of reporters.

Madness. Speaking to auto workers in Detroit, radical knitters in Brooklyn, and a $5000-a-plate dinner in Seattle where the ad-hoc pro-tech Tinyman gave a speech about how his cell phone was nice because he didn’t ever have to answer it.
“Where do you stand on climate change?” 

“I’m opposed to it?”

Viral. They loved him.

The Onion: Tinyman’s Plan to Accidentally Save America.

Meanwhile the impeachment ground on. Trump did not appear and offered no credible defense. Zoe Lofgren (R-CA) was on C-SPAN trying to explain basic law to the Senate, every member of which was drinking milk, the only food allowed them during this exhausting stretch of participation. Adam Schiff was playing a secret game where he got a bingo if enough people said “framers” in their speeches. He was on his second glass and a meme went viral DRINK MILK VOTE TINYMAN with a photo of Tinyman holding a carton of milk, his beverage of choice. Rep. Hakeen Jeffries (R-NY) used the word he knew would tick off the opposition—“cover-up.” It was their side’s version of “witch hunt.” It was the “cover-up” versus the “witch hunt,” and the “witch hunt” theory had more votes in the Senate according to every source, with the few possible swing voters enjoying and exploiting the attention. The witch hunt was a negation of the opposition’s evidence, the cover-up was a negation of the opposition’s truthfulness. Jeffries was explaining what he thought Trump meant by not showing up to his trial, saving Trump the task of making a coherent statement. 

Werd felt himself slipping, in the Las Vegas Luxor sports bar, where, ordinarily, horse races and such would be on the screens but where, today, the impeachment trial was what was being wagered on. Odds leaned heavily that the incumbent would be unscathed by the consitutional machinations. Werd found this refreshing, a paradise almost. One always wondered whether horse races were rigged, but in this case there was no doubt that everything was rigged. On his way to get tokens to place a bet against the incumbent he slid some more. He had, having left Tinyman alone in the hotel room, wandered alone and anonymously through the Tudor and Camelot and met some rather interesting individuals and had taken something he thought would help—slipping some more—him orient his soul in this mirror maze of lies and reverse-inciminations. It was red white and blue drugs. She told him not to take the blue one. Or maybe the red one. Her name was Lizzie. Someone on C-Span turned into butterflies and Werd, casually fingering his martini, glanced at the bar to see whether anybody else had noticed. They had. Everybody stared at the TV, except Werd who stared at them until they looked over and stared at him and he stared back at the TV and consumed his martini in a gulp, dropping the cocktail olive on the table. Then the olive on the table started emitting high-pitched noises. Werd felt relieved: he was being bugged. Somebody else was controlling things. I know you’re here, he whispered sweetly. He had love for The Conspiracy, he felt. And Adam Schiff he could barely make eye contact with on the golden horse race screens without weeping openly. Unless there is an article two, there can never be an article one. What? Unless there is an article two, there can and will never be an article one. But—aha! I see what you did there, Schiff, you sexy little serpent of jurisprudence. I have five chips riding on the outcome of this. And, I suppose, if they ram the thing through and remove the creep from office, then most likely his creepy successor will run for re-election this year which would put party loyalty, swing voters, to the test. With Tinyman or more likely Biden cruising to victory against the jagged and gnarly juggernaut of the last crony standing. In other words, democracy and its future and my career could also be riding on this, but five bucks is five bucks. Or, if I win, $500. But to cash in, he’d have to sit here for 24 hours of negation spread out over three days. He looked outside the sports bar and saw the bulbs popping at Tinyman photographed wearing gold chains, his arms slung around Tom Cruise (whose head would end up pixilated in the photo) and Kanye. “You guys should run for president,” he could be heard joshing drunkenly. Tinyman was the favored candidate among Scientologists, although he had no idea who they were. Tinyman appears confident in the photo op with Cruise, but just before it was taken, when Tinyman was pulled onstage in front of the staged audience to pose making various powerful and victorious hand gestures, before giving his now barely-remembered “Vegas is the cultural center of a savage desert” speech, Tinyman had been sitting alone at a bar where Werd found him wondering aloud what the purpose of things was. And before that he had blown all the spending money his handlers had given him—all $20—playing a lousy video strip poker game. Well, Werd was going to turn five bones into history, whether he won or lost. Because he believed that the cocktail olive itself was talking to him. Because, at a deeper level, he understood (as the olive explained) that there was a systemic disorder at work in the world, and that no matter how hard say someone like a functional Tinyman might work (though the dysfunctional Tinyman hoped to avoid such work altogether, truth be told) at saving lives by, for example, rescuing people from natural disasters or crime or accidents, he would only be eradicating the symptoms of a deeper, shall we say, malaise, or illness (problem). What was necessary, the talking cocktail olive explained, was to save the entire human race. Nothing less. The band-aids will not hold.

Werd nodded in agreement. The prospect made him deeply weary, actually. Then he got irritated.

“Save the human race? You aren’t even human. Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m your Jiminy-fucking-Cricket, kid, now just let me—there—hop into your hatband. Woo-hoo, I can see all the other martinis from up here!”

“A conscience?” Werd wondered aloud. “Coming right up, sir,” the bartender said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got one already,” the talking olive chirped. Schiff was still working his magic on the gold framed horse race screen flanked by golden pharoah statuettes. A nice bar. A bit overexposed, a little bit of trouble keeping the walls planar, some of the bulbs seared the retina. Werd smelled the smoke of his own synapses. The sports bar was closing. The Senate was adjourned. Werd wasn’t sure how to leave what had become a pulsating organ but he discovered he had the ability to walk through doors. One block from the Strip he lay down in a cradle of desert and watched the lights in the sky. Polaris, the incumbent North Star, was threatened by a newcomer—Vega—a bright star poised to move over the millennia to eventually supplant Polaris as the northernmost bright star. But would people believe their compasses, or stick with a losing candidate who was the tiny tip of the tail of a small bear. Ursa fucking minor, he wrote on a cocktail napkin. The bartender brought him another drink unsummoned along with a fresh napkin and removed Werd’s inspiration to the trash. Party unity, Werd felt it, and the supreme love for Trump shown by his supporters for reasons now knowable to Werd with his impure, misdirected love. The incumbent had risen to accept their unconditional love conditionally, and gave them hats about himself out of love. And Sanders? Was there love for Bernie among his supporters among legit socialists in the broader English-speaking world? Well, naturally. Bernie was a fluorescent, day-glo Peter Max poster of radiant love for all the unsung, as were his supporters. Warren? Werd was blinded by love. Warren: Blinded by Love, he wrote on the cocktail napkin but it tore when he tried to underline Love three times and the bartender brought him a new one rafting a new martini. He felt the love of Las Vegas as he felt himself wandering past the musical fountains and mountains of flowers. When he passed a television on which Rep. Jason Crow (R-CO) was speaking, he realized the impeachment hearing had begun again and it was the next morning. He wondered where the van was. He realized that at 3:00 a.m. in Las Vegas surely there was a place he could vote. And get a drink. A 24-hour voting casino with slot machines next to the ballot booths. C’mon, Vegas, I’m talking to you. I know you’ve got a place I can vote. 

Werd had somehow returned to the van with two martinis and a wreath of flowers. Jake the talking cocktail olive was also in the tour van when Tinyman returned from his secret meeting with the Scientologists. Jake appeared upset. He jumped up and down on the rim of the glass and squeaked in fury. Tinyman, seeing green and red spots already, tried to wave off Jake’s wrath, but it was to no avail. 

Tinyman sat down and picked up the martini and took a sip. And when he did he could see Jake close-up, the little green olive with the red bowler hat and the red bow tie and the patient, condescending grin. And the words:

“I saw you on TV, Tinyman, talking to those workers about globalization. You had them all cheering. Did you know that Gloat Pastries closed five American factories last year and sent them overseas where labor was dirt cheap and there were no environmental regulations to prevent them from dumping unused creme filling into rivers?”

“I didn’t write the speech, Jake.”

“You sissy!” Jake screamed, hopping up and down, jumping from glass to glass, from martini to Manhattan to margarita, where he kicked salt at Tinyman. “Why don’t you learn about politics?”

Jake the talking cocktail olive stood on the decimated carcass of a lime, his red-gloved hands on his hips, his red bowler askew, glaring at Tinyman. Tinyman got the spins and threw up.

“You guys shut up,” Werd said, “I want to watch this.”

He was trying to click on “WATCH: Senate Impeachment Trial of President Trump Special Broadcast January 21, 2020,” but the van’s wi-fi was feeble. He tried Luxor-Guest and the beach ball spun.

“Oh man,” Tinyman stood up and didn’t take to it and sat down again. “You should have come with Cruise, man. John. You would have loved the Science guys!”

“Scientologists.”

“The—Christian Scientists.”

The Senate chaplain intoned: “We trust the power of your divine providence…We know that your thoughts are not our thoughts and your ways are not our ways.”

“Oh that guy was there,” Tinyman pointed at the screen.

“That—McConnell was with the Scientologists? That guy there?”

“Yeah, he’s a science guy too. Real alien. Oh and the guy from Welcome Back, Kotter and, uh, yeah, him.” 

“White House Counsel Dipollone.”

“Wait until you hear about the flying saucers, wait—” the drunken Tinyman stumbled into his bunk, felt his way forward until he recognized a pillow, and fell asleep.

Werd wrote the impeachment defense down on a cocktail napkin. Ukraine did not know that their military aid had been suspended until they read about it in Politico, so they didn’t miss it and could not have been extorted for it. That they did not use the promise of a White House meeting to manipulate Ukraine is proven by the facts that A) President Trump was scheduled to meet Vladimir Zielinsky in Poland (but cancelled) (which counts as a White House meeting) and B) They did meet eventually at the United Nations, in the men’s room. So they got their White House meeting, according to the defense. Because there was a delay between the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea and U.S. military aid being established, it can be said that Obama delayed aid more than Trump did. Something about Clintons. One White House lawyer stumbles over his tongue, refers to “Menators.” How Freudian is that? There is also some business about how due process has been subverted in that the president was not allowed to…what? testify? cross-examine witnesses? Didn’t the House actually invite him or his insectile counsel but they refused? Clintons? Wait, right, it’s that Hillary, four years ago, in allegedly trying to get ahold of the Steele dossier (from England?) was using a foreign government to influence an election. Good stretch, but either both are guilty or neither are. Assuming it is the case that two wrongs don’t make a right. Never mind that during the same period Trump called on the Russians to hack her e-mails out loud during a debate. And then they did.

The bartender shook his head and crumpled up the napkin, ran it along the edge of the bar to get some spilled drink, and threw it away.

“You’re right,” said Werd.

“You’re right!” yelled Jake.

“I’ll never figure out their defense. Crime #1 asking Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and corruption for the end of throwing dirt on Biden that could hurt him in the election. That’s it. Just asking is the crime. The stuff about withholding aid and a White House visit is also criminal but not relevant to Crime #1. Therefore no known defense—which would of necessity entail that Trump did not ask for the investigation—exists. Crime #2 is resisting subpoenas and ordering White House employees to ignore them: obstruction of justice. No known defense exists. Blanket obstruction. What they can’t put into their legal argument was that it was also rude. Now that may seem like an insignificant fact, unless you notice that the president has been a thuggish ass with a mean streak and a racist, too, that in this very very slim cross-section of him encompassed by the articles of impeachment there is a microcosm of the whole story.”

“What are you, a logic teacher?” yelled Jake.

“But you can pull the 15 isolated facts admitted into evidence out of the larger story and tell something else, some other little story. Doesn’t matter as long as it can be stretched to fit, but still loose enough to take apart and rebuild in case Dershowitz’s handlers manage to get a tranq dart in him and properly net him and get him off the floor before he claims that President Trump can break the laws of physics, along with the laws of grammar, the laws of logic, and the laws of laws. The defense is all prestidigitation and misdirection but essentially the wounded narcissist at its center is fundamentally incapable of the sort of reasoning, or the degree of nuance of lying necessary to hold his own in a court of law, or any situation more challenging than a filet o’ fish surrounded by yes men who agree it’s delicious.”

“Listen, listen, I know, I know I’m only your conscience, but you need a little help in the marketing department.”

“Fuck you, you fucking…olive.”

“You think the Republican senators appear to be in lockstep in deference to their party leadership, but maybe enough reiteration of pure truth will give them a glimpse of an even higher cause than the party.”

“Yeah.”

“No. It’s the opposite. The senators are held hostage from below, by their voters, who are all President Trump supporters, and President Trump supporters don’t care about facts. They care about their brand, their story. So—”

“So. How can you persuade a President Trump supporter that their guy broke the law? And that’s illegal. Which is bad.”

“He could blow up another planet with the Death Star for all they care.”

“They’re unskakeable. Nothing that man could do, including performing an abortion himself, would turn off his base.”

“So we can’t convince them of Trump’s base vulgarity. Can we distract them with something better?”

“Something better or something worse?”

They both looked at Tinyman.

There was some trouble with the scheduling and they were stuck in Las Vegas. Werd realized that the longer they stayed, the worse his hangover would be when they got back on the road to Scottsdale, and also that this would be the worst place in America to find epistemological or ontological footing with which to understand the president’s defense, and thereby crack the logic and emotion of the incumbent’s slavering base. What did truth mean in Vegas? For the supporters, truth was emotional. In Vegas, truth was an artificial pleasure, biofeedback, a dopamine hit, usually for cash. Isn’t that quasi-emotional? Is this why they liked Trump? Was his slanted hair like the sculpted roof of a casino, his insane tweets like the semiotics of random cherries, throwing dice that came up snake eyes every time? Did he offer, like Vegas, a spectral anonymity and the rush of spending in which the most hind-brain urges come to the fore? Instead of sex or intoxication or elegance, his casino offered hate, a profane voice, hats, racism. They’re scared, they want someone not too book-smart with the speechifying. Tinyman fit just fine. But how could he top the incumbent in not being all that book-smart? Cowardice: Tinyman. Avarice: Trump. Boyish good looks (acne): Tinyman. Looks better from the other end of a hat thrown a long distance: Trump. Evasion: Tinyman. Prevarication: Trump. Insane choice: tie. In Vegas, Johnny Werd could not stop rolling on whatever handful of red white and blue lozenges that Lizzie had sold him. On hallucinogens in Vegas watching Trump’s impeachment defense was like finding oneself in that mythical world that lay beyond the sun, where maybe logic didn’t operate with the same rules. Where two wrongs maybe made a right, where people in glass houses throw stones. The TV the TV. Because he got caught, no crime was ultimately committed. The Representatives may not call witnesses because they’ve done a poor job of proving their case. And criminal presidents suffer more sadly than the rest of us and it would look bad to the rest of the world? And anyway an election’s coming up so why are you denying the voters the right to decide Trump’s innocence by contesting it in a court of law? Someone had sent Johnny Werd a copy of Bolton’s book and the PDF seemed to glow on the laptop screen. It was glowing. The whole screen was glowing. The Strip was glowing, the coins were glowing, the fountains and flowers were glowing. And the hairstyles of every lawyer, visible in the C-SPAN camera from above, and their strategies for dealing with bald spots, which were glowing. Dershowitz’s hairline was his punishment from God. The rest of Trump’s Slime Team had cosmic resumes not much better. Here on a handful of red white and blue drugs, sitting in a hotel suite, watching the country teeter on the brink of totalitarianism, watching President Trump’s Slime Team lawyers knit a gauzy defense in front of 100 senators now switching to chocolate milk, that the impeachment was not reality, because the defense was not real. It was a flight of fancy, an escape from reality, as was the president. But in that fraud was the new truth. It was as if money had found a voice that could speak through the poor who saw the impeachment proceedings as nothing other than a crucifixion, such was the limited historical context in which they understood themselves. Western Civ’s greatest hits: Jesus, Elvis, and Trump. Where was Guiliani in this clown car of lawyers, each of whom had the head of a smaller clown car spewing colorful goofballs as if they were legally sane. This isn’t a legal battle, this is a lover’s quarrel between the nation’s two branches of power: government and capital. 

Werd was addicted. The C in C-SPAN stood for crack. It was Day 10: Senate Impeachment Trial of President Trump, January 30, 2020, and he had TV as a drip fed directly into his vein, and hobbled around the suite carrying the TV into every room with him. They put Dershowitz back in his cage in the basement of Harvard Law School after his proclamation (and tweeted denial) that every candidate thinks their candidacy is in the public interest, therefore nothing a candidate does to benefit their political campaign can be perceived as criminal, impeachable, or wrong. Tonight is the end of history, he realized. As long as C-SPAN is on the air, Schröedinger’s cat is in the box, and the Republic is caught in the moment before its towers fall forever, John Bolton forever circling in the revolving door of relevance. But tomorrow, when the Senate votes not to allow witnesses into the trial, and not to remove the president from office, then the president, nine months later, will be re-elected by an America that can no longer be penetrated by reason, law, constitutions, and texts of the Republic. And after Trump becomes a monster who is the state, whose every tantrum is the official state tantrum, Bolton’s book will come out.

Dream Team Dershowitz and Slime Team Dilbin, Dipollone, Durpuro, and the loud mean guy Dekulow. By turns condescending, nerdy, belligerent, palms-up confounded, stalling, bobbing, weaving, these brilliant men turning their encyclopedic minds to the art of stupidity. How much they must be paid to so earnestly pee on America’s head! All of their hairlines on display from the bad camera vantage, bald spots on the record—why, why, in this hall of old white men, do we mount the camera from above? 

Versus

The Guardian Angels of Democracy: Adam Schiff the human Viagra pill, in the endurance contest of all time, backed by the eloquent Jefferson-loving Jeffries, the other New York guy whose tie would not hang correctly, Crow (D-CO) with the most endearingly poor hairline, and the others. The humanity of them compared to the savages from Harvard with their index cards, obscure theories of constitutional law, and generally icy, evil gists. Even now as they round the last lap in the race against history, Schiff losing his consonants a little, saying, charmingly, “Otay” instead of “Okay”, but not slowing down even at 8:40 EST.

Which one is the tower about to fall, and which the airplane that hits it? The government workers—the House Managers, rumpled and diverse—versus the Slime Team—the rich lawyer guys who had defended Epstein, Weinstein, OJ, who had brokered the “Peace” agreement with the jailed Netanyahu, who had written the findings for the Bush administration allowing torture and detainment, just a great buncha fuckin guys. The least sincere people ever stamped out of a roll of Armani silk, just people you don’t want to be friends with, don’t want to be in an elevator with, don’t want to be at a urinal next to, don’t even want them to ask you to sign your book for them, nothing. Want them to not exist. Loathe them more even than their client Trump because they at least have their shit together, should know better, are actively trying to feed souls to Satan. You can’t tell they are on the ropes, repeatedly cherry-picking the same facts, trying to tell the presiding Chief Justice that, with all due respect, they would be mortified if he, as the House Managers suggest, intervened. That’s a wild card that couldn’t hurt the House any more than the House is already hurting. 

This question and answer is mostly a softball practice, or a softball practice with Bernie Sanders throwing one wild pitch and Rand Paul being ejected from the game. And Ted Cruz reaching out to his human colleagues on his side of the aisle—across the species gap—to formulate one-sided and loaded questions that explode like colorful piñatas under a light tapping by the president’s counsel’s eminently reasonable hand gesticulations.

The basic facts are not in dispute. They are a timeline written on glass that each team is on the opposite side of, seeing a different causality, or contriving one, in the case of the president’s counsel, bloodless thugs, draping the story of a reasonable man over the facts of the president’s actions, a story inconsistent with the emotional facts of the president and his range of possibly impeachable offenses—the assassination of Iran’s leader, detention camps at the border where children are confiscated from parents and women are unknowingly given hysterectomies at the whim of some vile bureaucrat, seizing private land for a piece of racist conceptual art along the Mexican border, and other stuff prior to February, 2020, and, we can speculate, a bunch of stuff after. 

Bolton, the Ace of Spades. Where the fuck were you when Yovanovitch came forward, when Hill came forward, when Vindman came forward. Cowering between your lawyer and a book deal. Too bad the pace of impeachment outpaces the pace of New York publishing. Your book may not cash out so don’t spend your advance, but you can still do right even if you can’t monetize it now: wipe that old man moustache off your face and step to the mic in the next twelve hours, or have your revelations be remaindered, $2 on the Barnes and Noble table.
Moscow Mitch gets a secret message and calls for a five minute recess for the Incumbent at home to swap out diapers without having to miss anybody talking about him. 

On the strip, when the guy by the taxi offered Werd meth, he said, “I have Democracy, thanks.” America is Vegas, Vegas is truth, truth is disposable income. Those without extra money have their own truth but ours has a capital T. 

As Noam points out, President Trump’s crimes against the poor and marginalized are not being used as articles as impeachment, only his perceived crime against another member of the ruling class—Biden; in much the same way Nixon was never impeached for the bombing of Cambodia or the overthrow of Allende, only for fucking with the Democrats.

List of things I want to take right now: red white and blue acid; my pants off. Other than that, just feed me C-SPAN.

Back in session, the egghead council uses his extra neck joint to bow to the judge behind him. The Strip would never sleep, Werd would never sleep, the Senate would never sleep, Schiff would eventually sleep standing up in his suit for three hours in his office closet. Vegas, the thing is, Tinyman said in his head, his voice radiant with harmlessness, Las Vegas is a soda fountain in a desert. Las Vegas bleeds the power from Hoover Dam, the water from the desert, and dumps tons of plastic cups and half-finished shrimp scampi somewhere every day. A flood of garbage, where does it go, and where does the water come from? How does the whole thing work? It’s America.

Werd saw the fang. They want to out the whistle-blower. Like Plame. Think they wouldn’t? It’s Miller time. Werd accepts a free drink and finds himself naked wrapped in an American flag enjoying the show. He’s back in the suite, luckily. Tinyman is uncomfortable with Werd’s body, Werd understands, and feels throbbing resonant echoing symphonies of sympathy for the poor normal-sized man. He should be unashamed of his un-tiny-ness. Tomorrow when the system was forever broken he’d be free to be a superhero again and let his fears chase him into low-rent hideouts instead of being forced to confront them on camera. He’d be freed into a different prison, this sad little dove. You can tell evil or at least lack of empathy by facial muscles. They appear atrophied or prosthetic, thick, numb, just flesh arranged on a skull. Schwarzenegger. They are what the rock band DEVO warned about. And this is 1984, blessedly, cruelly late. We should have sandals on the ground in Iowa by now. But the fountains are re-enacting the fall of the World Trade Center while the national anthem is played throughout the mezzanine and the beautiful collapsing watertowers are illuminated in red, white, and blue. As am I, Werd thinks. It’s too bad I need these medicines to be able to engage this debate. The red yin and blue yang locked on the Senate floor. Where is Tinyman? He’s going off with the Scientologists; I am just off. I am understanding that my country ‘tis of thee pending a vote in the Senate tomorrow sweet land of liberty of thee I sing is a casino where a few win big, cashing in their chips for a cabinet position. Will the harsh desert reclaim all this reality when it’s 200 degrees in the shade of a saguaro? We weren’t trying to argue that the truth of America was permanent. In fact, the disaster industry or the Green New Deal is where the chips are going. The desert is bouncing back in a big way. But for today the oasis is pumping. A grey cloud blanketed the sky over Vegas, the Capitol, from sea to shining sea a solid sea of cloud covered the country. Right now Adam Schiff was waking up standing up in his suit being spoonfed hamburger by an intern to whom he had never acted inappropriately, Bill Barr was flossing his jowls, Dershowitz was being fed in his cage which was a gorgeous thing of brass and paneling emblazoned with the seal of the Harvard Law School, McConnell was kneeling in a pentagram of fire begging the demons for the power to hold off justice one more day, and Trump was running the country by Twitter.

Trump needed the votes, votes are the nectar of the American people. The insectile lawyers discussed their defense: Trump shouldn’t be impeached for election fraud because the election was coming right up. So let the defrauded voters decide, by election, whether he’s innocent or guilty. And break. Time to recovene for two hours of one-sided arguments made by the heroes of state versus the warriors of capital. 

By the end of the vote which, 51–49, waived the Impeachers’ right to call John Bolton as a witness, with no doubt laying out how the vote to remove the president would likewise fail, it was all over but the shouting, possibly fifteen minutes of shouting by each Senator with fifteen minutes and five seconds by Sanders. It would play well in the White House if Moscow Mitch would reverse course and drag out the now-inevitable failure of the articles so, as the incumbent had so cavalierly labeled them, “Sleepy Joe and Crazy Bernie,” along with Warren and Klobuchar, would be unable to campaign in Iowa. But the Toadies of Totalitarianism would likely not plan that sabotage because King Toad was giving the State of the Union Tuesday for which his swollen ego required the entire Senate floor.

In politics, history is written by the winners. Would the plucky House Intelligence Committee, the Floor Managers, be remembered as heroes, or be as embarrassing to recall as Kenneth Starr? They were honorable, but in their crucible, endless executive power was forged. They fought for law and lawlessness won. The parents tested punishing the child for its behavior, and the child’s lawyers and Cub Scout troop threateningingly voted him innocent. No, this proceeding’s 18,000 pages of testimony was the slimy skin the monster shed when it grew in size. Even without witnesses and evidence, it was made clear that the elephant in the room was an elephant in the room, that the emperor’s genitals were on display.

Now the naked emporer riding the elephant in the room was made explicitly clear, and clearly legal. The stone-wallers versus the bone-ballers, Schumer trying a near-filibuster. McConnell doing what he does, shutting down process like America should shut off their TVs, and pray as the Senate Chaplain does.

What did it mean? The narrow vote did seem to reflect the narrow division in the polls. Wait, does this mean that Tinyman, as a candidate for the office of chief executive who would never over-exert his executive reach, is the hope of America to right this anti-consitutional wrong?

Fuck! 

Tinyman heard distress in the midnight city below, so he flew right on by. Later, in the airport lounge outside of town, he was having a cappuccino, and he heard the super-high-pitched whine outside of a jet engine that was about to explode five thousand feet in the air. So Tinyman quickly put on his hat and coat and started to leave, with a big tip on the table so as not to arouse suspicion, but someone recognized him and shouted “Hey! It’s Tinyman! He’s trying to get away without saving any lives!” Tinyman tried to explain that if he started saving lives there would soon be an overpopulation crisis, right here in the airport, as all the emotionally-shattered survivors lined up for free coffee, but the man was impractical and wouldn’t listen. 

So Tinyman, sighing, adjusted his cape, and jumped through the window with a crash, and swept up into the sky to save the airplane. Balancing the plane on his head, Tinyman descended, calculating that the ground would hit him in one minute. Unfortunately, he was wrong. He recalculated just as the ground hit him with the force of a gulp of pond water. The plane crushed him into the tarmac and landed safely.

Tinyman muttered an insult he had learned in the Navy as he dragged himself out of his crater and walked to the road to hitchhike back to town.

There was now a sound reason, grounded in the wobbly theories of constitutional law, to elect Tinyman. Because he would not assert or over-assert executive privilege. Because he was not assertive. Because the executive would let the public shame and sway him, let the Congress bully him, appoint whatever Supreme Court justice the Supreme Court wanted.

At the World Economic Environmental Forum, where journalist Amy Goodman confronted Senator Warren about the racism inherent in having a white-ass state like Iowa decide anything for the country, Warren laughed the question off. She won’t be laughing now.

After the Iowa caucuses were sunk by crap software made by Shadow, Inc. (no known relation to Fraud, Inc.), Tinyman declared himself the winner, upsetting everybody, especially Pete Buttigieg. Tinyman didn’t realize that he hadn’t won, he was told it was a rehearsal in case they won. Wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey he just read the teleprompter in front of a grain silo hung with a red, white, and blue banner that said: CONGRATULATIONS TINYMAN, UNDISPUTED FRONT RUNNER OF IOWA CAUCUSES. This banner was a bit long for the photo op as it spiraled around the silo and was mostly illegible. 

And in the midst of his impeachment President Trump delivers a State of the Union address. His approval rating is at 49%. The party is a shambles. For the first time, Johnny wondered how secure his arrangement with The Conspiracy was. They funded the campaign, but they could afford to fund every-body’s campaign. So—

Hi-def POTUS SOTU. Trump’s slow procession through the gauntlet of sycophants, including Rush Limbaugh, slated to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President assumes the mic, snubs the Speaker of the House when she extends her hand, and gazes into a sea of chanting, yes, chanting senators. 

And then he hurls metaphors of superlative progress, strength, inclusivity…? (off message, but) jobs, jobs, jobs. Amazing camera booms describe the soaring prosperity that awaits all. Jobs for African Americans, women, veterans, the disabled, workers without a high school diploma, young people, it seems nobody is safe from jobs, wages, standing ovations, investments, exports, blue collar booms that lift the viewer over the crowd of cheering senators in a manner C-SPAN can’t replicate. Floods of prosperity pour through poor neighborhoods, drowning everyone in a choking tide of wealth. The United States has been the largest—what—source of oil and natural gas and is energy-independent? That sounds incredible. There should be a sign language interpreter as well as a fact-checker. Factories and plants impale the cities. Here is a man who protects intellectual property. Who calls out China for what they have done to us, decade after decade. The Speaker of the House is checking to see whether he’s off the script he handed her without shaking her hand. Fighting dictators. Calling out by name and applauding several most unusual guests in the audience. Freedom. Oh to be a fly on the inner wall of the Speaker of the House’s skull. Military spending. There’s a Space Force, finally. After decades of merely Air Force security. A lot of this Tinyman had somehow missed but it seemed somehow familiar; did Space Force start as a comic as he himself had done? And was Star Wars a policy or a movie? Schools. Be Best Initiative. The tender fascist. Families. Healthcare. The defender of Medicare and Social Security, pre-existing conditions, mental health. Eradicator of the AIDS epidemic. Is that worldwide? Or just among the one percent? C’mon, Werd urges, show the fangs. That what everybody wants. There we go: the socialist takeover of the healthcare. We will never let socialism destroy American Healthcare. “There we go!” Werd shouts, slapping his knee. Now he’s going after the illegal immigrants. House Speaker Pelosi is transfixed like she can’t deny that he isn’t good at making shit up. Her micro-expressions will be dissected by the press but misunderstood: she represents only the incredulity of the people. Drug prices down. Protesters in the hall! Women in suffragette white! Chanting something the closed captioning does not translate. Fighting the opioid epidemic is a great transition to introducing the famed addict Rush Limbaugh! Werd takes off his broken glasses and runs his fingers across his scalp, worrying his hair, wondering whether—wondering if—his own perceptions of this were somehow off. This was serious Triumph of the Will shit from Twitler. Preemies. Ah, here we slide in the anti-choice agenda for his league of one-issue voters. And there it was, calling on Congress to overturn Roe v. Wade. WAP!
The moment of not bullshit.

He is for the blacks, against the Hispanics, for the babies, against the rape and murder of a 92-year-old woman. An alien who went on a killing spree. 

And another one: POW! He calls on Congress to allow lawsuits against sanctuary cities, where refugees are welcome. Not due process, really, to drop that on them during a State of the Union—classic. Werd punches the air and dances around in his t-shirt and boxers. If this is the Descent into Fascism, Democracy Dying in Darkness, this triumphant speech is the opening theme. A parade of phoniness with no hint of what is actually to come. 

Then more insanity, including putting more men on the moon and a U.S. flag on Mars. Is this under a different bullet than Space Force, Werd wonders? Luckily for Mars, whatever he does do probably won’t make it there. He’ll kill us all long before we can put a Trump tower on Mars.

Mars, bringer of war, segue into war on terrorism. Will they give a standing ovation to the assassination of a terrorist leader? Of course they will. Of course they will. Will they give a standing ovation to the assassination of a brutal state leader on neutral soil? Do you really have to ask? 

Hmmm, Werd thought, standing on the bed in his socks, because this is opposite world, perhaps we can draw some conclusions: he intends to prolong wars overseas, he couldn’t give a fuck about Mars, and the economy is heading for a cliff. But he really does want to overturn Roe v. Wade and persecute immigrants. By the end, he appears bored by his own teleprompter. Let it never be forgotten that the Speaker of the House tore up his speech on camera as his Secret Service guys ran him back through a gauntlet of obsequious sycophants.

“It’s unfortunate having to vote against a fascist for whoever he isn’t. Yeah, bummer. I mean, an obvious choice isn’t really a choice unless you consciously choose to do the wrong thing. We aren’t yet ruling out doing the wrong thing. But for now try this. Pretend.” 

“Tinyman: Pretend.”

“Yes?”

“Very positive. Go with that one. In pink.”

“Pink? You sure?”

“Hot. Make it hot pink, very hot.”

Trump had given a State of the Union that seemed somewhat presidential, according to the news. He followed that up with an insane ramble­—a sort of post-impeachment victory speech, with his legal team crammed into folding chairs, shoulder to shoulder. Dukelow was wide and short, like a great angry cube of a man, stuffed with seafood platters that hadn’t set well, making him more irritable than usual. The human insect with the yellow tie. All of the miscreants, everybody but Giuliani, who had been sent to Mexico to start investigations into Joe Biden’s Chihuahua (mostly to keep him away from the camera during the impeachment), and Lev, who was in but is now out, wandering Capitol Hill wearing an ankle bracelet, looking for his remaining five minutes of fame ratting out the president, speaking with authority from a position of criminal sleaziness, his robotic lawyer by his side. A whole pack of baseball cards of crimers and their enablers, standing stiff as furled flags. “I never thought a word could sound so good. It’s called ‘Total Acquittal.’” Werd tries to jot that down—that’s two words—but the bartender immediately takes his napkin away knowing no good can come of it. 

If this is fascism, I thought it would have better hair. But what the hell, Hitler wasn’t blonde-haired and blue-eyed, why should Trump be actually white and actually rich?

“Tinyman,” Geert snapped, “I do not like this President. You are hope of America, yes? So why not you lose the hoodie.”

Werd was careful to turn his back to the bartender when he wrote down on the napkin something he later couldn’t remember about how he was in danger of losing his objectivity. The president who had had sex with porn star Stormy Daniels had to be deposed. And after Iowa, ah, after Iowa… After Iowa Tinyman was prepared to declare victory in any state and it was now imperative that he win the popular vote beyond any margin of error or any loophole between…the bartender brought him a martini and took his napkin away. Jake was sitting on the edge of the glass. Werd leaned close to hear what his conscience had to say.

“Which was? You tell me, chump.”

“Let’s win this. For Howard Dean. He tried, he cried, he died. For all the dusted ones, especially Gore and Kerry. Hell, Clinton took down an incumbent Republican. Let’s win it for Slick Willie.”

“To Wilbo Waggins,” Jake agreed, and dove into his drink. Werd unscrewed and raised his flask and poured it into the martini.

Tinyman was photographed with the Nillsville Fatales, local roller derby legends, known for picking fights with Tinyman when they were drunk, but adoring him by day the way only a small town roller derby team can love its local superhero. Flash. One for Werd to tape up in his locker in the van. Next to Carville. 

But they had to win. Two days after his acquittal, President Trump fired witnesses who testified against him at the impeachment hearings. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman was fired late Friday afternoon. Some 15 minutes later, Vindman’s twin brother was dismissed from his White House post. For the disloyalty of having been Vindman’s twin brother. Two hours later, E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sundland was also fired. Trump seemed a monster. But the firings were nothing compared to the acquittals he would soon spoon out. 

“I did it my way,” shrilled Jake the olive. “You want to hear how I make a dry martini?”

Tinyman had no idea. “Um, is that—an empty martini glass?”

“Good guess, kid, you got it half right. The empty half is full of vermouth. Now have a sip for America. And tell me about your policies. I mean how do you know, how do you know, how do you know, exactly what to put out there, kid. You’re a whiz at this not so much. Even doing supershit. So have one for your baby, one for the road, and tell me.”

“I usually eat the olive. Are you—?”

“Into being eaten. No, and, let’s just add, to be on the safe side, no. Well well, here’s Johnny. I didn’t see you there.” 

Werd was reeling on a paranoid jag. “What did you tell Jake? Is Lex Luthor or one of those supervillains hacking into our media accounts?”

“I don’t like the way you said ‘supervillains’ just then. What, you think they’re just­—what—comic book panels? Huh? Is that what you think of me? Some moron in tights?”

“You wear tights? Why didn’t you wear them for the roller derby op? We have to get a photo of you in tights,” Werd was getting out his phone.

“No. No. Figure of speech. I wear two pairs of sweats. I think you don’t take me seriously.”

“Do you?”

“Hey. That’s personal.” 

“Do you take the incumbent seriously?”

“Do you?”

“I think he could win. I think he could be re-elected. He’s an idiot, but he’s proven that won’t stop him. Ignorance might be his best asset; maybe not-knowing is what America is at home with. You, Tinyman, represent Hope. And Change—don’t mouth it along with me, you fuck! Super. Fuck. Tell me you aren’t a change from politics-as-usual or The Conspiracy?”

“I’m, yeah, more ineffectual, I guess.”

“For example, do you think the president should have unlimited power?”

“Yes? No. Unlimited power can be bad. If you look at Megaloman—”

“Enough about him. Would you consider seeking a third term?”

“No way in hell! You didn’t tell me that—”

“Relax, relax. You’re perfect. We’ll get you in there, and you won’t fire your advisors who disagree with you. Right?”

“Who disagrees with me? I have tried very hard throughout this whole campaign not to have a clear opinion for which I could be taken to task. I don’t even have advisors yet. I haven’t even taken a stand except the sheet you gave me.”

“Relax. I’m just saying you could save America. That’s all. Reassert the balance of powers, the will of the electorate, cease partisan bickering and all work together for the best outcome.”

“Work? How much?”

“Government work, government work. That’s how I want you to think of it. Take all permissible leave, surf the web on the clock, you got this. You see, Tinyman, and I’m not saying I doubt your ability to lead, but I think that, as president, the less you do the better. I’m saying I think it will be even less stressful than rescuing kittens. You’ll be surrounded by experts.”

“You’re a dreamer, John, a kid with no ambition.”

“Wait—are you fucking telepathic?”

“Like I said, I can also use my X-ray vision to see the contents of lint traps. I can also see UV in our hotel rooms. There are things, John, you don’t want to look at. Okay?”

“Right. Hello, Evans. Look into whether this is a fascist state—we want to look into that before we squander all this campaign finance. Call me back. Tinyman, if there’s a fascist takeover, I mean, I can totally see you sitting on the city council. Wait, he texted me… ‘Depends on who you ask. Turning phone off—am bugging House.’”

“Bugging… Oh no.”

“Don’t worry, it’s probably my house. Wait, did he say a house or the House?”

The bar was closed so there was no bartender to crumple up his cocktail napkin revelations. Cautiously he reached over the bar and found a tumbler in a drying rack and a bottle of vermouth. He stole. But he had done it for the sake of the nation, because on this cocktail napkin he was to figure out whether the nation had slid into fascism. 

SURE SIGNS OF FASCIST TAKEOVER

President seeks third term

    (Wait five years and see?)

Impeached

    (The impeachment had been, like those before it, divided along partisan lines and, like those before it, had not removed a president from office. Its failure, as terrifying as the legal defense was allowed to get, was not statistically significant. If anything the impeachment and acquittal was ahead of schedule. So Werd ruled it out as evidence.)

President is overtly and egregiously sexist. President is overtly racist against Hispanic immigrants and maybe all Hispanics. President enables white supremacists. Like all presidents, he is unapologetically nationalist and speaks the language of American exceptionalism.

    (Racism was a key ingredient in the fascist soup.)

He started another napkin and wracked his brains for unprecedented behavior—aha!—holds secret meetings with two evil dictators with whom the U.S. does not sustain normal diplomatic relations, and claims to like their style of leadership. 

    (This is something new.)

Having jotted that down he chewed his pencil. Corrupt as fuck, but predictably. Hmmm.

Installs family members in government positions inappropriately.

    (Hmmm. Hunter Biden? Billy Carter? Apples and oranges, and all predictable oranges.This is more the behavior of a monarch. In this case, the improper political appointment of his children to positions which, in some cases, allowed top secret clearance, would last as long as his reign and likely not a day longer. Unless. Unless he sought no third term and the Republicans put forth another crook to replace him. And the crook won. This sort of projection made his heart sink. He might instead be asking if he is a fascist, what protection possibly exists? A military coup would be a rather hopeless road but the only known road. There was nobody to police the police, and the police were learning that.)

So, to summarize. In five years there might be some clear signs that the system had broken down. For now, the nepotism, the corruption, the idiotic bungling of speeches, the hatred of the media, the impeachment, weren’t, taken individually, unusual. The racism was a bad symptom of a bad disease. The tweeting was likewise uncharacteristic of a president, especially so deranged and unfiltered. This might seem to pose a threat to democracy in that he has an unofficial channel to deceive and mobilize his supporters, though Werd doubted social media led to organization.

The lying. 

    (Well beyond his predeccessors. So we ask—)

Werd had run out of napkins and flipped over the last one to write on the back, 

    (We ask first whether he knows he’s wrong other than in the most brazen used golf course salesman type of exaggeration. In other words, he knows which direction to steer his words to avoid the most trouble, but he’s a drunk driver, DUI with himself. He shows some semblance of knowing where the road is. His lying strategy resembles Goebbels, sure, but repeating a bunch of whoppers isn’t a strategy that requires a canny mind to pull off. Trump, the stumbling fascist.) 

But he wouldn’t exist long as a political figure without the context of Republican Party unity. It takes more than one guy to overturn a state, but fascism, monarchy, they’ve got to have a subject for the people to revere, loathe, and be utterly distracted by, ideally divided by.

So. Werd could conclude, and for the sake of his job he had to, that the Democratic Republic was still on the rails. And that, although, Democracy’s frustrations still held true, the system could produce a good and winning candidate. Cue “Yes We Can.”

Trump’s campaign song, in a promise of where the economy would be in six years, was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Sanders, out there, chose “Starman.”

A fucking campaign song. They needed one. He called Geert.

“‘Hanging on the Telephone,’” Geert proclaimed, the perfect song. “Except you know which song is perfecter is ‘Starry Eyes.’”

Werd called Snave and asked him to play “Starry Eyes” over the phone. Snave quickly borrowed an intern’s phone and held the two phones together.

“Evans, who owns the song?”

“The Records, sir.”

“Ah? You mean a record of who owns the song? A record of the song existing?”

“There is literally a record of the song existing. 45 RPM, sir.”

“Good. Uh, well consult the records and get back to me.”

“Consult the Records? They—”

New Hampshire was like an atom bomb. The most electable candidates didn’t win. Much to the chagrin of the establishment, the anti-establishment candidates won. Tinyman. Buttigieg and Sanders, even Klobuchar. Bernie had a little under a point on Buttigieg by 8:52 EST with Sanders being far and away the easiest to spell. 

“Mayor of Idaho, right?” Tinyman asks, munching Al Capps Hot Fries. Werd reaches across the hotel bed and slaps Tinyman’s head causing him to sneeze and spew fries particles. A bioterror alert is called by Security who does not appraise the situation effectively.

On another screen, Trump unveiled a budget that would deprive the poor while threatening the world. Vile evil. “As you know over the last few years, we’ve upgraded our nuclear. We’ve got the super-fast missiles. We call them the super-fast.” And an 18 billion dollar Space Force. Like a child who is an idiot savant, unable to grasp facts but somehow understands the Republican position better than Kissinger. 

On the first screen Joe Biden giving a speech in South Carolina, sounding drunk, making sense only in the closed captioning. “I coulda sworn he just pronounced ‘prisons’ ‘pritizens’,” Werd muttered, “that’s a fuck of a Freudian slip.” Snave was working the numbers on a laptop. Numbers were coming out of New Hampshire. After one drink, eyes closed, Werd could feel the numbers passing through him along the grid of human behavior, sloshing him back and forth like ocean waves. Was this speech Biden’s dusting? It won’t help that the woman on his right is frowning most uncomfortably. After a few dozen mispronunciations, Biden slurring like a boxer, she just looks resigned. Is she suddenly feeling the Bern? New Hampshire is. Someone got the cane because WaPo Live cut to Klobuchar’s speech before Biden was finished. Or because Biden was finished in the sense of dusted. The white man with the beltway experience was somehow not a winning formula, even with the sheen of having served as VP under Obama. A man who knows Washington, its history, its current human landscape. A white man who talks about race perhaps a bit too much. On to the south!

Would Tinyman finally drop the veil of cynicism and come forward as a true-blue Democrat, admit that this election was turning back the tides of totalitarianism in a very urgent way?

Buttigieg, Bloomberg court racist vote.

Trump shakes down New York State.

Masha Gessen: “Institutions will not save you.”

Timothy Snyder: “Choose an institution you care about…and take its side.”

Trump: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maddow: “It’s time to lay down on the proverbial gears of this machinery.”

Werd: “Maddow has finally let her facade of faith in the system crack. Three years after the Washington Post changed its masthead to Democracy Dies in Darkness. Dear Lord. She was always the democrat and I could turn to for the faith in the system, the truth, the Mueller Report, the Intelligence community. She was clear and convincing and a strong signal with the resources of corporate media. Amy Goodman for the darkness. Rachel for the silver lining, Goodman for the shadow. But Rachel has finally gone dark. The repressed rage of the educated is finally coloring her analysis. She no longer sees the news as fascinating, unpredictable, exhausting. Instead all messages point to one conclusion, and that conclusion is that we have fallen.”

“Can you turn off the TV? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Aren’t you listening, Tinyman? You can sleep later, in Trump’s labor camp, where everybody with student loan debt is taken to the Mexican border to work it off in wall-building, those that survive. Say, didn’t you go to art school? For a semester? Don’t you see? We need to win this. We need to reintroduce legislative authority and a depoliticized Justice Department with a timid president. Or else—tell you what, I’ll let you off the ticket if you just use your superspeed to get in front of Bill Barr, and just fucking slappety-slap those Deputy-Dawg-ass jowls, and turn invisible before the Secret Service can shoot you?”

“I don’t know. Tonight? Aren’t we going back to Nevada?”

In a sane world, Bill Barr would be slapped by every American in turn, as would Mitch McConnell.It would happen every year, like voting. The whitest of the white-collar criminals in the government in stockades where they are forced to confront the public they serve, they disdain, they don’t think about.

In Nevada, unbelievably, Werd would once again find Lizzie, hanging with Senator Warren taking a furious break from campaigning at her favorite dice table at the Bellaggio. “Do not obey in advance,” Lizzie said, handing him the glassine envelope. In Nevada he would finally melt his mind and by extentsion the political machine. A flood of purple would overtake the red and blue states and unite them all. Four prosecutors quit the Roger Stone case in protest after his sentence was reduced through executive overreach, as Stone was not only Trump’s friend but most likely had further incriminating evidence aginst him. Not that it mattered, given his blanket immunity established in articulate, insane theory by Dershowitz and manifested in inarticulate, insane practice by Bill Barr. The AP reports Klobuchar also courts the racist vote. But this time he had too much news in his head. The fountains were spurting explosive news stories and each collapsed in a pool overflowing with vice, ink, and filth. No more offensive moves by the president would be anything but a dangerous distraction because he already had all the news he needed. The flowers in the lush pyramids were all dying like the news stories that could not be cultivated; Stormy Daniels didn’t even make the front page. Werd wondered whether Tinyman would be safe. Both in the caucuses and outside his hotel room, if he dared. He probably wouldn’t, as this time Johnny Werd had spiked his milk.

So Tinyman drinks his milk and gin, drops condensing, descending glissandi glistening on the curvature of the glass, fingers tracing out tapbeats, time, the clockwork of latitudes, coriolis pendulum finger. Tinyman in an international airport notes the departure times carefully, at each one he wants to flee the building and his fear roots him and he leaves his tiny body on a transcendental liftoff up through the muzaksphere. Tinyman is stuck in a film projector and his image jerks quasi-spasmodically in a rigid trance dance until the orange curls eat through him. The bartender was going to offer him another drink but changed her mind. Tinyman shuts the projector off and apologizes to the guests who are all leaving. End of script. Tinyman gets tired, goes to the furnace room. A hexagonal tool he needs to adjust the plumbing is absent. He suspects thievery. His investigation leads him into trouble. Tinyman wearing a kilt and carrying bagpipes at the Scotland-themed retirement party where the Loch Ness monster has been photographed with the host, although the prints did not come out. 

Sound of steel door clanging shut. America: Sorry, we’re closed. Saving America was not really in the job description, Werd mused. 

“So will we remember Trump’s February 5th acquittal as the date when everything changed in America? Did Republican senators end impeachment only to begin something even more dangerous and divisive for the country?…The answer, I’m afraid, is yes…Trump, unhinged and unleashed, may actually turn out to be everything we feared.” —The New Yorker 

Maddow has Dr. Timothy Snyder on, and in her interview she is beseeching. She wants answers to guide her because her pretense that the rule of law was not collapsing is collapsing now. She wants to know what the effective journalists did during the rise of Hitler, she wants the Yale guy to provide a clear path from history. He’s good, he’s good. But not that good. Werd knows that America, like him, can’t afford to order room service because there was no lock on the minibar. Expand the historical focus to millennia, and, yeah, maybe the U.S. style was a flash in the pan. But it’s a shock to experience, as Gessen writes, that our political instituions are sustained by good faith actors; they are not enshrined in law. In fact, the whole array of institutions from the FDA to the EPA to the State Department are in fact a china shop. And it takes one bull, just one, and you know those pieces can’t be put back together. 

Will a tyrant in control of a failed democracy implement a new rule of law, or simply allow chaos? Chaos is looking like an option. Given the president, and the flooding in Mississippi as well as the promise of more weather disasters, and a willingness to engage in military strikes that promise to be more frequent, creating scattered connect-the-dots of violent interventions, making America unsafe. The Republicans have the home field advantage, but have lost control of the ball. Which is nuclear. A lot hinges on how badly he escalates foreign war. Let him build his wall. They dig tunnels anyway. Let him pardon Blagojevich and a raft of other cretins. Why did he exonerate a corrupt Democrat? Paul Waldman of the Washington Post writes that Trump wants to normalize corruption and hypocrisy, to disillusion Democratic voters who will lose faith in the system. Waldman writes that we can expect him to accuse the Democratic front-runner of everything Trump himself is guilty of. It is calming to think there is a logic to his actions, even a calmly terrifying one­—to disrupt meaning itself. I thought W was the end of the world, and no doubt his doing the old executive streeetch, with Cheney firmly on the side of unlimited executive powers­—Oh, sing me that old Patriot Act—help set the stage for the swaggering whiz-kid-turned-whiz-man Trump. Making America grate again. But who wouldn’t take W back in a heartbeat if he were running as a Democrat right now? 

Only a Tinyman victory could reduce executive privilege and restore the balanced and elegant gridlock of the legislature, bring back the pure and unpolitical Justice Department. Only a Tinyman win by a supermajority, enough to override all electoral manipulations by however many countries were allied with Trump and Putin, could save America.

Fuck that, Werd thought. I’m no goddamn hero. To uphold an institution, like Timothy Snyder says. 

Tomorrow night Tinyman would be once again looking into the black pupils of Sanders. Onstage. “The rule of law is no longer in effect,” Maddow says, and she has never seemed so grave.

The Trump has spawned innumerable organisms into the machinery of democracy, more mushroom than monarch.

The bartender picked up the napkin, read it, shook his head, crumpled it up, and sunk it in a wet glass in which its signifiers clouded.

“Any more poetry,” the bartender told Werd, “and I’m calling you a cab.”

Poetry, thought Werd. Fuckit.

It was time to conquer the Carolinas. And get on the country road again.

Back home for two days, Tinyman found waking up difficult, his skull filled with aching ruins of the exhausting engagements of the week before. He would often drink his milk with an expression of pained disbelief at being cursed with the painful tediousness of his existence as a tiny hero on one of the more mediocre planets in the galaxy. This particular morning Tinyman played with his milk and stared at the peeling fabric of his kitchen wall. It seemed like a good day to go bowling.

However, as Tinyman had a bad habit of squeezing too hard when going to roll and crushing the ball, sending a cascade of dust and shards down the oiled lane, ruining it for the night, he opted to stay home and brood instead.

Tinyman tended to keep the door locked. He lived in fear that someone someday would walk into his apartment and stand in his living room and call him names. It was a vile city.

Tinyman had watched with sullen interest the progression of a crack in the wall, that, in the course of one immaculately dull morning had grown from one inch to several. At this point there came a sharp knock at the door. This was a development that Tinyman found unappealing, at best. He supposed that if he answered the door it would certainly be someone he had no interest in seeing, as he had no interest in seeing anyone and the knock was decidedly human, on the other hand if he abstained from answering, the person could quite probably never leave forcing Tinyman into the situation of hiding under his bed until his bread ran out or eventually admitting that he had been inside all along, and receiving certainly a bop on the nose or sharp words in reference to his mother. The knock came again and Tinyman spilled his milk with anxiety. Eventually the decision gripped him to confront the stranger, so his nerves could slacken and he could eventually lead a normal life. Tinyman was the type to avoid trouble unless trouble was blocking the exit. In these situations Tinyman figured that it was best not to make trouble impatient.

Tinyman began to disassemble the complex series of locks that ornamented the edge of his door. A few short minutes later, he drew a deep breath, and cracked the door. His breath stopped short in his tiny windpipe, for there, sagging on his doorstep was horrible arch-fiend Donald Trump, with a pleading expression on his face.

“Let me in,” Trump begged, “please Tinyman.”

Tinyman gulped. “Are you going to call me names?” he squeaked.

“No. Not any more. I’ve come to give myself up.” And with that, Trump shouldered the door open and staggered in, tears tumbling down his unshaven cheeks, each erasing in its path of sorrow a hue of orange over pallid. “I’ve abandoned my nasty ways, Tinyman, my sleepless nights of fear that you would explode through my bedroom wall in a shower of bricks and devastation and seize my evil throat and squeeze the life from my utterly bad skeleton and cardiovascular system. I can’t take it anymore!” And with that he fell to Tinyman’s bare tiled living room floor and sobbed with remorse.

Tinyman stood expressionless. He was always afraid something like this would happen.

“You see,” Trump wheezed, “I can’t live with the knowledge that a bus is out there waiting to someday devour me. I had to go find it and settle up so I could relax and maybe someday sift myself back into society again.” 

Tinyman cleared his throat, about to explain his own personal philosophy on how it was foolish to go find trouble when if trouble wanted you bad enough it would certainly come and knock on your door when suddenly somebody stumbled through Tinyman’s still open door, sobbing. It was Bill Barr, villainous wretch.

“All right!” Barr moaned, “I give up my evil ways. Tear me to shreds with your tiny opposable thumbs.” 

Right behind him were a chorus of sobbing men in orange jumpsuits: Cohen, Flynn, Bannon.

Before Tinyman could respond, the east wall melted all over his kitchen carpet, and a gleaming alien warship glided to a smooth humming stop in the middle of the tiny apartment, shoving Tinyman’s furniture up against the walls. A dome on top rapidly unscrewed and slid to the floor and several fleshy yellow octapeds exited shrieking through the steaming hole, laying many odd devices at Tinyman’s feet and quivering like lemon custard with tentacles in extraterrestrial terror.

“Um…” Tinyman began, but, before he could assemble a thought, the mailman arrived with a crate full of letters of apology written by anyone who had ever considered misdemeanoring, and Kissinger and Cheney fell past the open window, screaming for forgiveness as they leapt from the rooftop many stories above into the smoke of the many other former Trump associates who had escaped from prison and had set themselves aflame on the sidewalk below, just their way of saying sorry.

“Um…” and Tinyman’s apartment was filled with lecherous evil-doers of all varieties, all sobbing or writing letters of apology or writing large checks to worthy charities or wiring themselves with explosives.
 
“Um…” Tinyman envisioned himself spilling many many gallons of milk and suddenly awoke, his head aching.

He thought he had heard a knock on the door. He held his breath for many minutes and no further knock came, so Tinyman rolled over and went back to sleep. After that he took a nap and then watched TV.

Amy Goodman screens a new documentary about Biden’s support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With scary music. Danny Glover narrating. She’s gone after Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and she’s taking down Biden in deadly propagandistic style, but only for those who are still pissed off about the Iraq invasion that took place when most college students were zero years old. Directed by Mark Weisbrot, whose Center for Policy Something had studiously ignored the Tinyman campaign. 

The idea of Democratic Party unity may not really be a concern for Amy Goodman. She, Weisbrot, Counterpunch, they get more juice out of taking down puny centrists than the gorilla. For those who are moved by industrial film music, Biden is dust. For those anti-1993-Iraq-War movement folks who missed this episode of Democracy Now, they could happily cheer Biden on as he limps along more acutely aware than anybody under the sun that he lacks Obama’s elocution. He witnessed from just behind and to the side the spectacular speeches of Barack Obama, possibly every single one. He knew he wasn’t worthy. But the boomers wanted him, those who wanted a Republican in Democrat’s clothing. The kids, on the other hand, didn’t need another grandpa. Just crazy Uncle Bern.

Meanwhile the night was ebbing with danger. Tinyman polished his boots for occasions such as this. He drew them out of the closet theatrically and shined them deeply until only sheen and luster remained forming the shape of a boot in the air. Then he would put them away again and wear his tennis shoes. 

Tinyman set foot on the frozen lunar pavement stretching from the steps of his derelict apartment building away, everywhere, in great elevated rivers of grey stone, where vehicles clicked and whirred, came and went, here there and everywhere. Tinyman set off on foot toward the wharf.

Somewhere else, danger spilled a perfume bottle of anticipation to the wind; Tinyman’s super-nostrils wavered as they detected it, his sneakers turned in that direction and strode away down Large Avenue. Tinyman had to run to keep up. 

Something about the heat in the city made me impatient with strangers.

Billboards and billiard ballrooms, I slanted my hat so’s to deflect some of the blazing late afternoon light razoring in between my Venetian blinds. My coffee pot bulped and boiled obscenely, “Shut up. Shut. Up.” Was it talking to me or to itself? I grunted, lit a thick match on my thumbtip, and puffed a fat cigar just there appreciating my own company between cracked plaster walls staring blankly at the door. A figure approached on the other side casting a silhouette in the window on the door of a tiny, unasssuming character too short to really provide a good silhouette higher than a couple of inches.

“It’s Tinyman,” I realize, and while he knocks I grab my briefcase, open my blinds, and climb out the window onto the fire escape and while he continues knocking I put the briefcase in my teeth and climb down the shaky ladder into the alley and run away while he discontinues knocking and walks away in disapppointment.       

Tinyman, distracted by a death ray that narrowly missed his head while shearing an orphanage in half, tripped over a crack in the large pavement and badly twisted his ankle.

“Ow,” he stuttered as the shadows of the pterodactyls circling overhead glided silently across the pavement. 

Tinyman thumbed a ride home and gets badly mocked by a taxi driver with a particular attitude about tiny men. 

While Tinyman stayed in his Nillsville apartment to rest up for North Carolina’s debate, Johnny Werd immersed himself in the numbers. Sanders was right behind Tinyman. Warren way behind him, Biden right behind her. 

Know that if an assassin ever shot Tinyman, the bullet would bounce off his super-but-to-all-appearances-unremarkable body right back into the gun which would explode and leave the assassin with an injury that could prevent them from making another attempt on another life. Imagine if the U.S. military could precisely and instantly destroy any weapon ever used against it immediately when it is used. And the rest of the time they could be handing out blankets and preventing crime so Tinyman doesn’t have to.

“Bring home our troops; give them jobs making our homeland security secure,” Tinyman muttered. But he was asleep so nobody caught this keyword-efficient sound bite. “Homeland security blankets...” he muttered campaign promises into his pillow.

Tinyman accidentally slid sideways into a parallel universe in which Bernie Sanders was a socialist president, but also a mythical winged creature whom legend had it would lead for one thousand years. And it had appointed a major donor as Postmaster General, who promptly began to take postal boxes and sorting machines out of service. And then slipped back. And found himself in a cold sweat and afraid of stepping on a banana peel and slipping back to the place where Sanders loomed over the dome of the House of Representatives, belching greasy flaming drool.

Comic book over his face, Tinyman slept through all five alarms. The first was a dove whose leg was attached by a golden chain to a silver pail of ice water with live thrashing trout, and at seven a.m. the dove cage door would automatically open, and the dove would try to fly out the window, the chain tightening and knocking the pail off its marble pedestal pouring icy water and whipping fish cascading down across Tinyman’s pillow but he didn’t wake up. The second alarm was limited nuclear warfare. The third alarm was a Led Zeppelin concert. The phone rang. The fourth alarm was the end of civilization as we know it. The fifth alarm was a clock radio that didn’t work but it was another tiny morning and the tiny sun rose between the cracks and bullet holes in Tinyman’s tiny window. He glazed contemptuously across his acres of dingy sheets. He opened another blue bottle of flies, his seventh since the end of the world began the night before. There seemed to be a smudge on the wall so Tinyman put in his glass eyes and put on his eyeglasses. It was indeed a smudge on the wall. His clock radio was offering him the music of Hank Angst and the Pank Twankies. Tinyman was good at games. Four-Dimensional Phonetic Boggle and Underwater Braille Scrabble were two of his favorites. He also enjoyed Zero-Gravity Twister. He used to be good until he underwent the trauma of being sued by someone he once failed to rescue. That person didn’t want to press charges but her lawyer insisted. The night before the court case that person raised a forkful of lima beans to her mouth. Tinyman winced and ate a slice of bread to clear his palate. She drank a glass of water, spilled it down her chin. Tinyman dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. Tinyman wondered about her, what she must be like, if they could ever put this not-rescuing thing behind them and be friends…Tinyman hadn’t worn the cape in years.

The phone rang a second time.

He stood up from the breakfast table and stumbled off toward—

Back into the kitchen. The evening sun, slanted orange slats. Angular silhouette in the widening trapezoid of refrigerator light. Half loaf of bread. Half bottle of milk. Something dark near the back. A hand with gold bracelet and ruby nail gloss grasps a bottle of mineral water. Clank and pour of milk by Tinyman in shadows. Clank of replaced milk. Trapezoid diminishes. Squawk of bird.

Tinyman in bed reading ripped and tattered notes to Gravity’s Rainbow. Nondescript t-shirt. Striped pyjama bottoms. Black and white TV. Sound turned down. Star Trek rerun. Cigarette smoke. Tinyman takes impatient drag, eyes fixated on notes. Commercials with fast cuts of smiling faces. TV’s vertical hold slips, pictures flip upwards. Drag. Looks at cigarette. Throws it out window. Continues to read for quite some time. Distant sirens. Ruby nail-polished fingers obscure the word Pyncho

Door. Toilet flushes. Door opens. Pyjama bottoms emerge and walk off to the left, pulling door almost shut. Click and trapezoid of light appears across door. A shadow moves across it. Sound of paper being loaded into typewriter.

Sunrise through Venetian blinds. Single bird chirp. Sound of percolation. Ruby-nailed hand with spoon stirs sugar into coffee cup.

Tinyman would only see her three more times in his life. Once when she was falling from a blimp, once when she was in a traffic jam on the Golden Gate Bridge which was about to be demolished by a gigantic tidal wave during the final California volcano, and once when he rescued her from the underground laboratory of an evil etymologist. She seemed detached and bemused by his rescuing attempts. Maybe this behavior would make Tinyman feel that she never wanted to be rescued in the first place, and the whole lawsuit was embarrassing to her. But they would never speak. He would rescue her and she would thank him politely.

Once, when Tinyman was seven, she would babysit him. Neither of them would ever remember this. 

He wrote the poem

Text in the Wind

I been squandered for poor I been poured on the floor I will dissolve like text in the wind I will dissolve like text in the mind I will dissolve like text etched in stone

The TINYMAN Show
Pilot Episode (never aired)

(Triumphant orchestral music)

Who is barely able to switch channels using all his muscles and a sophisticated pulley system?

Who’s as powerless as a stray quark?

Who is less likely to punch me out than the late Walt Disney?

(wearily) Tinyman. 

Tinyman gets up and leaves his apartment. He goes down a flight of stairs. There is a shot of someone watching him through Venetian blinds. There is a shot of a person hiding in the undergrowth with a gun. There is a shot of a car crawling at a suspicious pace. There is a shot of an ordinary fire hydrant ticking. There is footage of vultures circling overhead or at least a placard which reads “footage of vultures circling overhead.” Dense orchestral music crescendos. 

Tinyman was just on his humble way to the local Bread-Eaters Union #152 meeting over behind the bowling alley when the first seven fleets of UFOs swept screaming across the sky. Everyone watched Tinyman’s reaction (none, as he didn’t notice them) and replicated it, feeling secure that if Tinyman, walking with tiny strides down the littered pavement, only occasionally tripping over his too-long cape when the malicious wind whipped it under a shiny boot heel, didn’t appear worried, then there surely must be nothing about which to worry. (Tinyman worried furiously, constantly.) But why do I worry, what is there really to worry about? he worried—just then, the ninth fleet shrieked, tearing through the tops of far-too-high-for-Tinyman’s-taste-anyway skyscrapers. Large steel girders slowly tumbled to earth blasting gaping holes in the pavement around him. Tinyman coughed. For no reason he turned into an alley that was mostly dark as the two buildings, structurally unsound to save lots more money for someone who didn’t need it as badly as the tenants, were leaning together overhead. The 25th fleet obscured the sun anyway.

Tinyman walks up the same stairs he earlier walked down to the same apartment. A sign on the door says “television.” He walks in. Shot of Tinyman walking back into his own apartment.

And it was South Carolina. The last debate before SuperTuesday! 

Tinyman blushed as the debate staffer clipped his lapel microphone, finding no lapel, to his sweatshirt hood. The candidates stood awkwardly at the Doric podiums trying not to hate each other, feeling within themselves the force, the flow. Bloomberg mentally reviews the fact that he said that he puts cops in minority neighborhoods because that’s where the crime is, and how that’s like the joke about the man who is looking for his lost keys not where he dropped them but where the light is best. He’s sure he can spin it like that and get a natural laugh. ANYWHERE you put the cops is where the crime will be discovered. Am I right? But these are the best of the party who have the money. White people of such diverse backgrounds as Mayor and Governor. White people talking about black people, and in one instance, talking about being white people talking about black people and self-mocking without inviting any black people to the stage, raising hands like schoolchildren competing to be teacher’s pet. What is really at stake? The rule of law? A glorified idea of the Republic? The credibility of facts over lies? Without that distinction, a lot of backsliding can happen in a hurry in the human quest to assemble the great mosaic of truth as a sketch of God’s infinite plan.

Tinyman on stage beside Bloomberg.

“Instead of talking about the past, we need to be looking forward: Martin Luther King said…”

“I’m black,” Tinyman said.

The clamoring candidates fell silent in shock.

“White, I mean,” Tinyman corrected, blushing. “Sorry.”

But in that moment anybody would have fallen for his charm. 

When the question about gun violence came, and all the candidates prepared to be ineffective out loud, Tinyman vomited and ran off the stage. Johnny Werd chased him backstage and returned to whisper in the moderator’s ear. She announced that Tinyman was too scared of guns to participate.

He crawled back on stage during the charter schools segment.

Bernie’s hearing aid fell out and started a fire on his podium but he shouted and gesticulated as he was sprayed with chemical foam. “Tinyman, how would you stop the coronavirus?”

“Stopping the coronavirus is critical.”

“Yeah, yeah. Brilliant. How would you do it?”

“Understand that this is theoretical pending further studies, but—and I saw this in a movie once—I would fly around the earth in the direction opposite its rotation with so much force that the world would reverse its rotation.”

“That sounds devastating to life on earth.”

“Right? But in actuality, what happened in the movie, was that time went backward and Lois Lane undied. So using this, uh, scientific technique we could reverse the pandemic.”

“Who knew? So you then have to fly the other way, right, to get time moving forward again?”

“I­—uh—it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, and I was very young. I’d have to review the, uh, evidence.”

“I have to admit, Tinyman, that’s a better plan than the incumbent has. He has none, and in fact fired all the specialists.”

Tentative applause.

“Tinyman.”

“Next question.”

“I didn’t get to ask mine yet.”

“Sorry.”

“Suppose you defeat the incumbent in a landslide victory, but he doesn’t recognize the election results.” 

“Wait. Wait. Oh—that’s easy to imagine. Okay, go ahead with your question.”

“Are you prepared to use your superpowers to physically remove him from the White House?”

“I—uh—he’s kind of—”

“Fat, yeah. Heavy.”

Johnny Werd couldn’t let the meekness continue. He yelled into Tinyman’s earbud. “The incumbent will attempt that at his own risk. We’re not fucking around.”

Time Magazine Man of the Year: John “Johnny” Werd.

Would a Tinyman presidency fix the system that had allowed this monster to come to power and operate unchecked?

“Noam Chomsky, we’ll turn the question over to you first.”

“Like it or not, we’re in profound trouble. Tinyman is basically a coward as the Guardian reported today. But I’m in favor of cowardly leaders. They pose less threat to the citizens than brave leaders. Same with corrupt leaders. They just want money, not power. Tinyman is not as corrupt as the incumbent but is less dangerous.”

Applause.

“And now Laurie Moore, author of The Coming Plague. Professor Moore, do you think Tinyman has the coronavirus? If so, what can be done to save America?”

“Well, you have to bear in mind that the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 2%. That doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you get it. Then it’s a big fucking deal.” 

“Fantastic. And now, Tinyman on what seems to be war between Syria and Turkey?”

“I went to a lot of trouble doing some superstuff to keep Iran from declaring war on us, and I’m exhausted. Now I’ve got to go to Syria and talk Turkey.”

“Well, send us a postcard, Tinyman. Say, why doesn’t one of your more…outgoing colleagues—say, Megaloman—catch Putin and put him behind bars?”

“You’ve got me. Megaloman?”

“President Trump and I admire Putin. Great body.”

“Which way is Canada? How hard is it to get citizenship?”

In Tinyman’s dream, Trump contested the election results and refused to leave office. It was finally up to Tinyman to fix what was wrong with this country and make America, if not great again, at least not a radioactive crater of despair.

Tinyman walked the long walk up to the White House front door. Several red dots played on his forehead from unseen snipers in advantageous positions. “Cut it out, you could blind a guy, you know that?” Tinyman muttered, kicking a pebble.

Tinyman knocked. And waited about 35 minutes. Finally, it was time to take action. Setting his heat vision on tan, he turned the White House black.

If this didn’t bring the First Couple out, then he was prepared to use deadly sarcasm. “You’re so rich,” he whispered, “you’re sooo wealthy. Y’know, I think your children might be the master race, not the old one, the real one. Because you’re all sooo rich.” 

The snipers, now black, climbed down from the roofs and trees and stood behind Tinyman on the White House lawn.

He woke up in his underwear drenched in sweat. America, your emperor has no clothes and is appalling to behold. But is our Democracy also down to its underwear, drenched in sweat?

“Tinyman, shh. You’ve been dreaming.”

And what a dream it was. Taking a press conference on a stage that lit up where ever he stepped in his white platform soles, the piped tights, the utility belt, and hoodie. 

Tinyman on the mic.

“America, I want to cool you. America, I want to soothe you. America, I want your trust, want you to feel what it’s like to trust a government. America, I want voting to be fun. This joke will blow over and never come back. America, we are in one big jacuzzi, and it’s time we relaxed. America, I know you’re angry and freaky, and that freedom is some weird alleyway between conformity and prison. The freedom to go to cool shops, if you can find one. The freedom to write free poetry until you get tired of doing so. The freedom of piercings and tattoos until it’s mainstream and then it’s no longer a freedom. The freedom to ride a bicycle, yeah. The freedom to obey the law, to be irrelevant, to have a beer and put on Dave Matthews. Look, I know I’m not making a good case for freedom, but, my friends, in certain states it is now legal to purchase cannabis and take it straight home without breaking the seal to enjoy hidden in your home, just like before only with dealers with predictable hours. That’s progress. Which is the first word—the only word, actually—in progressive.”

Aria 2 starts similarly, but this time Tinyman is in the woods where he has been summoned to this interview with God’s people. The light is beautiful and seems to shatter on the rainbow autumn leaves slowly. They ask him a pointed question and he cannot answer, so taken is he with this beautiful clearing with the conference table and internet connection that he picks up the projector and starts fondling it, but the bulb is hot and he drops it in a pile of fallen yellow leaves. The flowers around them sway in the breeze, boughs cross the table scattering leaves over the teleconferencing equipment, and he can no longer see his interviewers as the branches blow between them in this sudden gust. He doesn’t know if he has been struck deaf or maybe they asked him a question and there is an awkward silence while they observe him apparently unaware that he is meant to speak. The slamming of a car door not so far away reminds him that he is in the tough gritty real world and that this is an interview with God’s people and his ass is on the line, that these people are taking notes, but it doesn’t seem to help him.

Tinyman had pulled Werd away from the control center and set him on a couch in the corner of the bunker so they could have a meeting to appraise the damage. Tinyman could see Werd was on bad drugs, orange and green, shaking from nerves. “Yes, it’s a high pressure post,” Werd began cautiously. “You could start a nuclear war or something like that. In fact I’m concerned that you might have.” 

“But you’re the hero of this story, buddy, not me,” Tinyman said gently, easily. Werd seemed to take that to heart a bit, and sat up straighter, asking for coffee. “You need a rest,” Tinyman said, “then there will be time for coffee and calm reflection before we steer this universe home.”

“Calm,” he repeated, “reflection.” 

Werd pulled out a pack of cigarettes and took one. Tinyman took the pack and crumpled it. “No,” he said, “we’re doing this slowly. My way.”

Johnny Werd snapped his fingers: “Grass roots. That’s why they call it that.” Tinyman awaited an explanation but, when none was forthcoming, felt slightly relieved.

So Werd tried to get a handle on what was going on, spending time staring into the screen until his neck hurt. What he saw he did not like. There were now three other candidates. And they were all 78-year-old white men. It was as if overnight everybody in America vanished except really old white men. Some socialist, some fascist, some incoherent, none with a clue how to adapt to life on earth. This was the time when Giant 78-Year-Old White Men strode the continent, their collapsing spines held up by pure hubris. They would outlast birds, fish, mammals, and other reptiles. Some slouched hundreds of feet high. Let’s hear what the old white dudes have to say about the African American community: their political speeches echo across the parched landscape. Sometimes they engage in debate and the desert winds would whisper their evasions all through the savage night. Would Tinyman make them extinct? Can 78-year-old white men of the utmost capability pinch off a deadly tornado in Nashville, city of music, American jewel? They sound like shmoes, like oyster fishermen, their accent rebounds from the crater walls scattering the tiny young things into the underbrush. 

At his first Virtual Town Hall, Tinyman followed Werd’s script. The idea was to throw a net over the disaffected and purposeless Sanders supporters: Bern-outs. 

“There’s a viral grassroots internet network of supporters out there looking for something to support, Tinyman, now just say the thing Sanders said.”

“If elected, I will legalize marijuana. First day.”

“Good, but you don’t pronounce the ‘j’, it’s like a ‘w’, like ‘mehr-ih-wa-na’.”

“Um. Like Mary wanna cracker?”

“Right. Or like Mary wanna grassroots internet viral network of supporters like Sanders had.”

“You want me to say that?”

“Fuck no I don’t want you to say that. Stick to the script.”

“If erected—”

“Try again.”

“If ewected—”

“Cut.”

“If elected, first thing, first day, day one, I will legalize Mary Wanna.”

“Can you say ‘cannabis’?”

“If elected, day one—day one!—I will make cannabis... great again.”

The crowd went wild. Silently, of course, in the form of emojis scrolling upscreen. 

A leaked document from the Biden campaign, probably a forgery, suggested that Joe Biden was “waiting for Donald Trump to kill off all his voters” in mask-mocking outdoor rallies whose stumbling message was, “I’m okay, you’re okay, coronavirus is okay.” And Russia, they’re okay too. To the extremely curious, front page headlines screamed that Russia had been paying Afghan militants to kill American troops. 

Tinyman wasn’t really ready for certain aspects of the most powerful office in what was still hoped to be the democratic world. But neither was the incumbent, and Tinyman was fresh. The media, FOX, SNL, the late night hosts, all had a field day mocking Tinyman, and their jokes were largely on point. Though they lacked the over-written cruelty of the jokes directed at Trump. 

“Tinyman,” Maddow leaned forward, “could you theoretically use your superpowers to end the pandemic?”

“Oh. Like, how? X-ray, er...”

“Geez, well I was hoping you could answer that. Could you make it rain soap for a year?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, hold that thought. In fact, don’t, Tinyman, hold that thought. Don’t do that. We’ll be right back after this.”

“Tinyman, this is why I wanted to talk to you. What if just by challenging Biden on issues he seems impervious to, these ideas, which would otherwise remain unspoken, unthought, could be brought into public discourse, through the Tinyman campaign, or even made into policy? Tinyman, it’s time for a new chapter of history. Does decay have irreversible momentum? Can the Republic be rebuilt, its agencies refunded and restaffed with technocratic career professionals? Or will the next Democratic president fare no better than Obama did in, for example, stopping the senseless War on Terror?”

“Well, but he killed Osama bin Laden,” chimed in Tinyman.

“No, he did not, and you were using telepathy to read my mind.”

“There’s nothing on TV. Not on over 1000 channels.”

“Using superpowers on the campaign trail is a felony. And why commit that felony without gathering intel, using your telepathy to peer into the minds of swing voters, Mitch McConnell, people who think wearing masks is somehow bad, or even Trump himself.”

“Yeah, I could really blow away what they did at the Watergate hotel.”

“The world, Tinyman, is your wikileaks. Imagine how many voters are counting on you to take office and use your unconstitutional superpowers to ease America back onto the world stage.”

“Oh, okay. So you do want a president who could personally kill bin Laden.”

Just then, Werd felt a great disturbance in the numbers, as if millions of numbers had cried out in pain and were suddenly silenced. Biden was now ahead in the numbers.

“Maybe the numbers are your superpower, Werd, maybe you should unleash your superbrain on the stock market, where power really changes hands, instead of this petty charade of a—”

“What did I just tell you about reading my mind? It’s illegal, and it makes me...uncomfortable.”

“I know. Want to know why it makes you so uncomfortable?”

“No. I want to know why you’re trailing Biden in Texas.”

“Watch CNN. I want to know why Trump’s hair is a pontoon, and his face a leering jack-o’lantern.”

“You’re super, dude, figure it out.”

“Just as there are things, John, that lie beyond the reach of scientific instruments—like the soul, John, the soul—there are questions even super-heightened senses cannot resolve. I have used my spectroscopic vision to try to determine the chemical makeup of his facepaint or hair fixative, and come up clueless. It worries me.”

Had Trump been elected president in 1976, they might have shown him the flying saucers. As it was, Nixon was the last president to be read in. Had Trump been cleared for that level of security, he would have leveraged it to build a gaudy hotel on the moon.

Tinyman knew, of course, about them. That they were not from outer space but from the future, having harnessed the secrets of reverse-gyroscopics such that their spinning crafts could accelerate and turn corners at intense speeds. Sometimes he had to scare them away from a crowd.

Werd knew nothing, expect that he was missing a year of his life. He remembers seeing lights in the sky, and then it was July 4, 1977. His parents eventually gave him his room back and things seemed normal, except for the dreams of the shrunken olive bipeds doing surgery on his abdomen.

And what is his chance, indeed: to be brought on as Chief of Staff and help plan to reshape America in Tinyman’s image: strong and repressed. A strong, repressed military. As in chastity-belt repressed. A strong, repressed corporate elite. As in home-detention-bracelet repressed. A repressed military-industrial complex. As in underwater cages surrounded by sharks repressed.

The outlines of a policy document began to take shape. Big stick diplomacy. At least the speaking softly part. 

Werd, you’re 50. It’s time. Use the campaign to speak softly. You’ve added up to so little despite all this stuff, culminating in the Tinyman campaign. Any idea—do you remember­—how many times you were sent for coffee while the others got to stay in the room, preparing secretive tweets? Now, you’re the guy in the room. With the microphone. In the eye of the hurricane sweeping America, in this oasis of privilege, trains and boats and planes. Whatchugonna do to make your dead mama proud? 

To defund billionaires?

To upcycle the military and its community?

For an unarmed black man pleading for his mama and the amped white cop kneeling on his neck to have equal rights under the law?

To restore the rule of law for Trump and his toadies?

To make a white collar criminal occupying the White House be subject to the same legal scrutiny as George Floyd, who may have used a counterfeit twenty dollar bill?

To ensure that Steve Bannon, who was arrested today, is not pardoned? And, in prison, shaves and showers?

To make America lead the world in fossil-fuel-free energy?

To mitigate the projections of the disaster of climate change by policy decisions made in the next twelve months?

To make racial diversity is a fun issue?

Will ivy slither out of Tinyman’s chest pouring heart-shaped mushrooms of pure growth? Will the white supremacists drop their torches, the riot squads their batons?

When will the chaos end? How will Tinyman save the Postal Service?

Don’t you know, in this new dark age, that we’re all light?

Tinyman didn’t get the numbers. Biden was the nominee. 

Then the headlines were all COVID-19, as the nation quickly snapped into lockdown under the leadership of Donald Trump, and then snapped back out and in and broke and leaked and sagged and hundreds of thousands of avoidable coronavirus deaths began to dot the map of the United States. Tinyman pulled his hood drawstrings and hit refresh on his browser. Now the dots were a flood.

Johnny Werd, hoping to land in politics somewhere announced the Grassroots Viral Internet Campaign, and waited for it to go viral. Again, they were not news as the execution of George Floyd and nationwide non-socially-distanced demonstrations exerted a popular pressure seldom felt in government circles, and the statues of Confederate Civil War heroes began toppling. Werd drunk-texted Tinyman to go knock one over but Tinyman put .38 Special on Amazon Prime music on his leftover campaign phone and played it until his phone died and received no more texts. 

Unmarked government vehicles filled with unidentified government agents wearing no insignia have been yanking peaceful protesters off the street. 

“Could this be how it starts?”

Oh Werd, it already started.

“I guess it starts whenever you stop denying.” 

This election could stop it, most of it, and put some polish on the rest.

“Like calling the officers with no insignia Peace Officers.”

Why not call anything anything?

“I’m calling him out.”

Better men have already done so. It doesn’t seem to matter. Decisive language such as an impeachment rolls off of him. His antennae don’t quite reach the surface.

The brownshirts, the blackshirts, the secret police. It goes by many names.

As she does when confronting encroaching totalitarianism with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze, Rachel Maddow has Timothy Snyder back on her show. The time to protest is now; protests work, he says. 

Those who know history are doomed to think we are repeating it. But can we apprehend heretofore unknown terrors. Like the obliteration of the entire system of truth, a disruption easily exploited by Russian disinformation hackers and the social media sites who are as complicit as Trump and his bank? This “fake truth” would appear to make the Enlightenment foundation of the Declaration of Independence into a quagmire incapable of supporting the edifice of a tripartite government. If whatever the leader says is operant truth and real truth is noise, then the framing documents mean whatever Alan Dershowitz says they mean.

To the Barbarian Dough Boy, discourse is an irritating buzzing he can’t follow and just wants to be rid of.

Werd assessed and reassessed. Life from now on, with climate change and the aftershocks of the Trump Presidency, would be a series of overlapping catastrophes affecting the poor disproportionately worldwide. Until the air became unbreathable, the soil unarable, the pollinators extinct. And a few old white men with nobody to leverage power against would die last, sealed in a bubble, desperately trying to freeze their brains so they could never die and suffer the consequences of their own brutality against the earth, against their fellow humans. This was the amusement park known as Mar-a-Lago: Trumpworld. Remind yourself that the American representative democracy has always been like a roller coaster that was never tested for safety.  Red, white, and bruised.

“This is numbing!” Jake screamed at the Democratic National Convention from the edge of a margarita before Werd flicked him off his salty perch and into the strawberry tequila. Werd was going to suck it up and vote Biden and it was a sore spot with him.

Tinyman stood on the suspension bridge, electricity ratcheting diagonal, perverse, obtuse, unorthodox, inexplicable, X-like, lit by kilowatts of fluorescence, incandescence, mercury arc-lamps, halogens and blistering coils. Tinyman was no sleuth whatsoever. Tinyman was atop the suspension bridge, lit, and nobody noticed him. A thousand cars burned colored streaks through the night, the monoxidation of the city, dizzying. He wobbled and grabbed a cable for support. Any other superhero would have played the thing like a standup bass. Tinyman could tell by the traffic something was up. He was trying to tie a hardcover copy of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems to his ankle and leap off the bridge. What can we learn from Tinyman at 100 seconds until midnight? How to cope? How to avoid causing harm, how to be a weaker Buddha? How to embrace becoming dust. He jumped but of course survived and walked ashore but couldn’t get the knot untied and so ended up walking home dragging a soggy book behind him and no taxi would stop for him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2020