Dear Dirty America

The president’s approval rating is at a dismal 41 percent. One a rare cloudy Los Angeles day, that seems rather high. Despite Obama’s high disapproval rate, many Angelenos are still stuck on him. Why do these people support him? Maybe it’s his nice teeth. His clear skin. His ability to read lines off a teleprompter and speak them in an intriguing manner. His way of descending the stairs extending out of an impressive Air Force One.

When we gathered at my spiritualist’s basement apartment for our weekly Wednesday night lesson on the astral realms and divine realities, a man with a pinched nose and wire-rimmed glasses sitting against the wall said he’d like to expatiate upon the prior week’s lesson, which had delved into karma. The spiritualist had left the questions of karmic consequences open, and the man in glasses wanted to get clarified a personal experience.

His wife had wanted the window open in the bedroom because she suffered from premenopausal hot flashes. Yet, the cold Los Angeles nights had recently left he man shivering in bed next to his snoring wife. To make matters worse, every time he woke up, the room was cold as a witch’s you know what.

“So, I closed the window,” the man said rather exasperatedly. “I shut it after she fell asleep. In the middle of the night I could feel her sweating through her pajama top,” he told all seven of us gathered at the feet of the spiritualist. The man admitted he hated his wife’s pajama top as it caused no sexual desire whatsoever and the arousal between them was next to nothing since their first child had been born over seven years before, but that was a topic for another week.

He’d felt justified in closing the window, because for once in many nights he’d slept comfortably and she seemed not to notice until the next morning, when she’d witnessed the window had been closed. Suddenly, the wife had recalled how hot she’d been all night.

“When I went to the kitchen to squeeze fresh orange juice for breakfast, I found an empty bottle had shattered on the floor. It must have fallen off the cupboard in the night. But bottles don’t simply leap off the edge of a kitchen counter ledge–”

—like JPMorgan Chase investment bankers leap off the ledges of high rise buildings in major cities around the world, I added under my breath to my friend Marlin.

“–and one of the pieces, a very sharp one, cut through my slipper and sliced my big toe halfway open. I still have stitches in it,” he said, and glanced at his right foot.

The man wanted to know if that was what the spiritualist might call “instant karma”. The spiritualist rubbed the two dozen or so coarse blonde hairs sprouting from his chin and said nothing. That was his policy toward stupid stories. The man stuttered through a few more sentences, trying to incite the spiritualist to talk, trying to impress our ruddy-cheeked spiritualist enough so he’d find it necessary to answer.

But he didn’t. He wouldn’t.

I jumped in to save the man. Here’s a thought, I said. What if President Obama, at the time of his passing, goes back to the astral realm. When the council shows Obama’s soul its life on planet earth, and this will take an exceedingly long time because of all the energy and lives of people he’s touched and destroyed, the council of Elders will then decide how Obama’s soul shall proceed.

Of course, I reminded everybody in the room, his soul won’t be called Obama. It’ll just be a soul. Obama will be nothing more than the name associated with the man who did the final wheeling and dealing of America to a global elite in a way George W Bush could never have.

Due to the savagery of his life on earth, he will have to reenter the planet’s circle of life, but he will not be a human. He will surely be downgraded to something like a lion, I said. That way the president can, with no guilt and with no irritating public opinion to worry about, prey on those weaker than him over and over again. In fact, it’ll even be considered virtuous by humans.

photo by Luca Galuzzi – www.galuzzi.it

Look at the lion hunt. Look at the lion chase down the weakest, slowest, sickest in the herd of ungulates. Watch the lion chomp into the neck of the baby antelope. See the lion rip out the windpipe of the wildebeest. Admire the lion strutting through the prairie grass, flicking his tail, and turning his head from side to side as if he were marching across the stage of a famous talk show.

Would that be fair karma? I asked the spiritualist. I hadn’t realized the man with the glasses had walked to the door. “How dare you denigrate the president like that,” he said. “And after all he’s done for you. He brought the economy back to life. He passed the healthcare act.”

“I thought a lion was generous,” Marlin said.

You’re right, I told the man, Sizzler’s and Chi-Chi’s are hiring again, so that’s an improvement. He’s fast-tracked the Trans-Pacific Partnership so America’s wages can free fall and we can lose all our natural resources to foreign interests. Also, the Internet as we know it will be fully run by the world’s biggest companies. And, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing two and three times the amount they’d been.

Our spiritualist made a big display of sighing and acting agitated. His recliner squeaked as he shifted his bulk from one side to the next. He hates to talk politics since metaphysics is his field of expertise. That’s a legitimate line of thought, too, when you consider how our spiritualist lives. His basement apartment is bare. Only one chair on which he sits. Stained, worn carpet that looks like the crust on top of a forgotten bowl of morning oatmeal nicely balances the grimy white walls of his living space.

There are only cardboard boxes stacked around the room. There is an open doorway into a kitchen that looks like a rat’s nest, and one other doorway, always closed, where there is a toilet and a tiny showering space.

The man in the glasses, I never had caught his name week after week of Wednesday night meetings, slammed the door behind him.

Anger issues, I told Marlin. Hopefully our dear spiritualist can help him out.

“This is an awfully cramped apartment for a hothead,” he said.

Our spiritualist waved us all out. He was going to work on spiritual things for the rest of the evening, since we’d tainted his living space for the night. While the six of us walked to the door, I turned to ask him, Was I at least partially correct about the possible karmic opportunities of Barack Obama? That he would live out all his violent, prideful psychopathic tendencies as a beast of the wilderness before he could take another crack at being a human being again?

“Why not?” our spiritualist said in his nasally voice. “It’s as good a theory as any.”

“What about a squirrel?” Marlin asked him. “Could Obama reincarnate into a squirrel? Then he knows what it’s like to be preyed on by predators and be mostly helpless?”

The president does have a squirrel-y quality to him, I said. That’s true.

Our spiritualist grabbed his stick, which is a five foot tall dead branch with thin streamers the colors of the rainbow stapled into the top of it,  and pounded it on the floor. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

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[Official White House photo by Pete Souza; broken bottle by Ildar Sagdejev (Specious)]