Prompt Images
“One word—HOLOCAUST—that’s why!” Ben-Gurion said it with dark gravity. Ahmadinejad of Iran had the proxy for the Holocaust deniers and mumbled the Persian version of, “Well, that’s some bullshit.”
Eisenhower confronted the former Iranian president. “Once Nazi Germany was defeated, I assigned scores of military photographers to record the truth of the matter for posterity. You weren’t there, Mr. President. There was no AI back then, no Pecker-doctored Enquirer photos. That was real film, real footage, real people, real corpses.”
The moderator glanced at the Fuhrer.
Hitler was tucked in the back row. He had been asked to keep his mouth shut and he tried to keep an inscrutable mien. It was impossible to look at him with equanimity.
Trump piped up. “The Holocaust happened. It was a beautiful example of antisemitism. It was the best example.”
The assembled held their gaze a pregnant beat as all seemed to register the same thought simultaneously: Trump’s lips had moved, and he hadn’t lied.
The moderator shot a double take at Trump and continued.
“Here’s another word, David—Nakba. Do you know what it means?”
Bibi, sitting between de Klerk and Mandela, ping-ponged in conversation between the two. He’d accept either into his coalition. The Knesset employed playground rules; no blood, no foul and de Klerk moved well to his right. Mandela had a great first step to his left.
Ben-Gurion, insulted and wounded at the moderator’s question, raised his voice. “Of course! Nakba! Catastrophe.”
“That’s right, it’s the other side of the coin. The displaced Palestinians who were, to put it politely, shown the door after Israel declared its independent state on May 14, 1948.”
“I recognized Israel 12 minutes after that declaration,” Truman’s pride obvious.
Khymani James shouted, “Look, rhetorically, I’m as bad as that guy in the corner—he squinted at Hitler—but I was wrong. I admitted it. Murdering Zionists? Yeah, I said it and I meant it at the time, but I apologized. Let’s move beyond my words. Y’know what I realized?”
The group of dead leaders and lookers-on paid rapt attention.
“This shit is complicated,” James understated.
“Complicated!? Khymani, you are playing checkers. This is not black and white.” Quieting the register of his tone as he addressed the queer, Black activist, Stalin mumbled, “Hey, no offense.”
“My U.S.S.R. was no haven for Jews. I was as crazy an antisemitic schmuck as the little corporal with the stupid mustache. But, do you know what I did in 1948? Military equipment, ordered by the Reich but never delivered and in fine working order, was cached in Czechoslovakia after the war. I greenlit the sale of all that matériel… planes, machine guns, ammo, the whole shooting match (he smiled at his own pun)… to the Jews of Palestine. Israel owes its 1948 victory to me. They’d have gone down in ruinous defeat if I hadn’t seen the three-dimensional chess move that would precipitate a rift between my postwar rivals, Attlee and Truman.”
You could have driven a Tesla Cybertruck through Harry’s open mouth, aghast at Stalin’s revelation.
Stalin continued, his eyes locked on the group of keffiyeh-wearing 2024 campus protesters muttering in defense of their “River to the Sea” sloganeering.
“It is a privilege you can protest at all. Your youth illuminates your idealism but also your
naïveté. The media’s spotlight on your tents and your shouting does not help Gazans, and it surely does nothing to condemn Hamas atrocities. You’re screaming about October 8th and forgetting October 7th. You must appreciate that complexity is the default state of international affairs.”
Karen McDougal, Paula Jones, and Stormy Daniels tittered at “affairs.”
Churchill side-barred with Alito. “See? The protestors prove the point; one is naturally liberal in youth, consistent with heart and empathy, but if one isn’t conservative in old age, one has no brain. What happened to your brain, Sam?”
Stalin grabbed back the floor. “If you were in my country, I’d round you up and send the lot of you to the Gulag.” Solzhenitsyn and Navalny nodded in unison, hollow-eyed.
“Do you remember the ’68 campus protests against the Vietnam War? Of course, you do,” a pompous LBJ drawled at the protestors.
They did not.
“Know the difference? Those hippie longhairs had the moral high ground. Dammit, I was not gonna be the first U.S. President to lose a war, and I lost that moral high ground. They were right. The Vietnam War was wrong, plain and simple. But those protests didn’t elect Gene McCarthy. Tricky Dick over there won and expanded the war to Cambodia. But… I was with you in the end. Grew my hair long too. Google it. Look at the pix.”
LBJ glowered at Nixon.
“Offered the VC a better deal if they waited on you, huh? I shoulda turned you in, you duplicitous bastard. It wasn’t the Roberts court back then, Dick.” Johnson emphasized Nixon’s one syllable nickname.
“Your seditious ass woulda gone to jail.” Nixon sneered, Kissinger squirmed in his seat, and Machiavelli munched on popcorn, enjoying the political theater.
Lincoln, his successor, Andrew Johnson, and Kamala Harris became embroiled in a loud debate over Johnson’s dismantling of Reconstruction that Lincoln opined, with the benefit of 160 years of retrospection, had propagated the stickiness of “the lost cause,” the creation of a permanent underclass, and the notion of reparations. MLK nodded in agreement. Jefferson Davis rose to speak.
Several gentlemen in MAGA hats, a case of Bud Light at their feet, became agitated as Trump fist-pumped them on while Biden listened and tried to appear empathetic. Both soon dozed.
“Sit down, Jeff! Boys, boys,” admonished the moderator as the current VP raised a tweezed eyebrow. “Settle down. We’re here to talk, but also to listen. Let’s keep it civil.”
Trump turned to Roy Cohn and they shared a shit-eating grin over the word, civil. George Carlin caught their malevolent exchange and made a mental note to consider “shit-eating grin” in a standup bit.
Thunberg boomed. “BOYS, BOYS! Yes, that’s right! Haven’t you noticed all these so-called statesmen are just that? Men! You’re ignoring the bigger picture here!”
Hitler could no longer contain himself. “Are you implying my quest for Lebensraum was kleine kartoffeln? What so-called bigger picture?”
Greta ignored the quintessential fascist and continued.
“It’s the planet, stupid!”
Carville and Clinton snickered at the activist’s co-opting of their campaign strategy’s most famous slogan. Al Gore shushed them.
“Primates, ants, competing dolphin pods—there are many examples in the animal kingdom of intraspecies acts of aggression, even murder. But Homo sapiens has raised it to a butcherous art form.” She looked at Stalin, Hitler, and Truman. The 33rd President of the United States complained, “What are you blaming me for?”
Thunberg dismissed him. “Look at your buddy over there.” Oppenheimer locked eyes with Truman, tipped his porkpie hat, and mouthed the words “Told ya,” at Harry Truman.
“Military science, you call it. This is hubris! The hundreds of millions who have died over the millennia at the hands of those who consider themselves superior because of their more righteous god or their skin color or simply because they had bigger ships and brought guns to a knife fight is barbarism, not military science,” said Greta.
“Keep it up. Keep waging your battles… stupid, petty, useless battles… and you will lose the war. We will destroy this planet if we continue to pay mere lip service to the climate crisis like a five year old picking at her broccoli with a spork.”
George H. W. Bush chirped, “I don’t like broccoli either.” No one acknowledged him.
Senator James Inhofe tried to appear defiant as he shook the snowball in his hand in Thunberg’s direction. Confused, he looked at his cold, empty, wet hand.
2:00 A.M.: Exhaling, he blunted his joint in the ashtray. He had banged out a thousand important words and pushed away from the keyboard. He enjoyed reading history and devouring news of current events, looking for the analogies, Twain’s rhymes. The weight of it all made him feel small, insignificant. All he could do was write…maybe someone would publish it but not enough people would read it, fewer still would appreciate it. Cynicism morphed to depression as sleep took him. He dreamed of the Rangers winning the Stanley Cup and the Knicks getting past the Celtics.
END
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