TRUMP TV PROGRAM LISTINGS!

Trump TV is the White House’s 24/7 newly-announced streaming channel that plays curated “greatest hits” clips of past Trump speeches and executive actions, plus some live events.

6:00-6:05           GIVE USA THIS DAY

A daily prayer starts a new broadcast day, as representatives of every faith give President Donald J. Trump their blessings.

MONDAY.  Johnny Hunt, ex-pastor of a large Baptist church outside Atlanta and subject of investigations into adultery charges over an alleged attack on another pastor’s wife, offers up a heartfelt prayer to make it all go away.

TUESDAY.  Father Lawrence Hecker of New Orleans prays for the local victims of priestly sexual abuse, whose damages are capped at around $600,000 per incident under a bankruptcy settlement “point system.”  He hopes his prayers will fill the monetary gap for kids who were put in wrestling headlocks and assaulted after losing consciousness. 

WEDNESDAY.  Rabbi Alan Dershowitz offers a prayer for West Bank Israeli settlers, who are threatened on a daily basis by Palestinians going about their business among olive groves and apricot trees in their ancestral homes

THURSDAY.  Buddhist priest Dogen Siddhartha discusses abandoning a life of pleasure and status in order to live a simple and meditative life in the quest for nirvana.  (Note:  Siddhartha was detained by ICE after videotaping this episode and was deported to Cameroon.)

FRIDAY.  Islamic leader Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah and claimant to Iranian leadership, discusses the Prophet’s conception of the “good life,” including American air support when “the time comes.”

6:05-7:00.          CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM HOUR

Forget the five minutes of religious pluralism you just saw.   What blather!  Re-start the day with an hour of prayer and contemplation of the nation’s Christian roots, going back to George Washington’s baptism in the Potomac, Tom Paine’s proselytizing for Jesus in “Common Sense,” and Ben Franklin’s life-long combat with Satan.

7:00-8:00           SHAPE-UP WITH PETE HEGSETH!

America’s premier warrior gives his fitness tips, including how to administer peptide injections and testosterone supplements.  Watch as he confronts the dangers of roid rage and testicles the size of raisins in the name of better biceps!

8:00-10:00         MEET THE PRESIDENTS!

Take a tour of the White House’s new Presidential Walk of Fame with current and best-ever President Donald J. Trump!

MONDAY.  Andrew Jackson.  His decision to strip the Second Bank of the United States and distribute the funds to crony-packed, state-level “pet banks,” and his forced removal and death march of the Cherokee people led to “Jackson Derangement Syndrome,” as “fake news” media  treated him unfairly, but not as unfairly as they treated President Donald J. Trump.

TUESDAY.  Herbert Hoover.  His deeply held conviction that balancing the federal budget was ‘the very keystone of recovery” in the face of the mass unemployment and shanty town “Hoovervilles,” and his championing a recessionary tax-hike as part of what was called by Hoover-haters the “Great Depression,” led the “fake news” media to treat him very unfairly, but not as unfairly as they treated President Donald J. Trump.

WEDNESDAY.  James K. Polk.  His desire to make America’s “Manifest Destiny” real led him to preside over the annexation Texas, acquire the Oregon Territory, and wage the Mexican War, thus vanquishing a long-traditional American enemy.  This led the “fake news” media to treat him very unfairly, but not as unfairly as they treated President Donald J. Trump.

THURSDAY.  Samuel Tilden.  He won the popular vote in 1876 and needed only one more electoral vote to secure the Presidency, but returns in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon were fraudulently awarded to Rutherford B. Hayes by a “special commission,” giving Hayes a suspiciously convenient 185–184 victory, a stolen election.  It was a shoddy, despicable deal, but not as shoddy and despicable as the deal that occurred when President Donald J. Trump was denied the Presidency after the stolen election on 2020.

FRIDAY.  Theodore Roosevelt.  He cleaned up football, initiated the “Square Deal,” attacked monopolies, and created the country of Panama so he could dig a canal there.  He then ended the Russo-Japanese War, in which there were 150,000 deaths, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in contrast to President Donald J. Trump, who ended seven or eight wars—it’s easy to lose count—but has been unfairly denied the elusive honor. 

10:00-11:00      THE DUKES OF HAZARDS

Follow Don, Jr. and Eric as they star in this reboot of the epochal television series.  In this rendering, the boys have their previous conviction for moonshining overturned and they sell their Dodge Charger, the so-called “General Lee,” and instead get an up-model Tesla that they park on the White House Lawn.  In this week’s episode, Bo and Luke hatch a scheme to “moonshine” digital currencies using their hidden still in the woods.

11:00-1:00         LIVE! FROM THE KENNEDY CENTER

Follow our investigators as they look for water damage, small rodent infestation, and examples of art reaching out to the souls of a diverse, pluralist mankind, all of which will be eliminated when the structure is torn down.  This week, a large, unsightly, bronze bust of an unidentified person is melted for scrap.

1:00-3:00                AFFORDABILITY HOAX FIGHTERS

We meet a variety of plain old Americans who are resisting so-called “inflationary” price

increases with characteristic American cunning, putting the lie to the “Affordability Hoax.”.

MONDAY.  Ramon Guerrero is a long-haul trucker who was confronted with diesel prices on their way to $7.00.  His ingenious response?  Driving less!  Ramon is now doing shorter routes, which reduces his income but saves money on gas and gives him more time with his family.

TUESDAY.  Hilda Sonnenschein has watched her electricity rates skyrocket as data centers near her home drain power from the grid.  Her solution?  An electricity-generating bicycle!  “I saw it in a movie when I was kid,” she confesses.  “It works great!”

WEDNESDAY.  Warren Mathis was greeted with a massive health insurance bill after the obligation of young, healthy people to participate in the Obamacare system was ended and its ensuing subsidies were scotched.  His deft handling of the situation?  Go without!  “I’m perfectly healthy,” he says, deftly avoiding a piano dropped from several stories above.

THURSDAY.  Wendy Callahan watched the price of diesel going up and realized that her home heating oil was the same product!  Then, a big idea occurred to her—burning her furniture in the fireplace!  “I really don’t need a lot of this stuff,” she explains. 

FRIDAY.  Fran Feldman’s pre-K day care bill was running to thousands of dollars a month, more than her take home pay!  Her inspired response?  Sell her children!  “Sure, I miss them,” she allows, “but not only did I cut my expenses, but I raised some quick cash as well, particularly for the blonde one.”

3:00-5:00           THE ROMAN FORUM

We return to the Republic that informed our democracy!  A carefully curated, partisan audience votes “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” for the removal of skilled technocrats who obstruct the President’s agenda.

MONDAY.  Thousands of doctors and nurses at the Department of Veteran Affairs retire or are laid off with the approval of our studio audience in an effort to curb unnecessary treatments and procedures afforded our veterans, many of whom served in “forever wars” the Administration opposed until it started one.

TUESDAY.  Our audience cheers as staff who forecast hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other Acts of God at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have been deemed redundant and sent home, given the dramatically reduced frequency of these not-systemic events.

WEDNESDAY.  Measles?  COVID?  Bad lettuce?  Hoax!  Laughter and applause greets the layoff of 30 percent of the largely redundant Centers for Disease Control.  Ten of the eleven division directors are missing.  But really, who needs them?

THURSDAY.   Loud acclaim welcomed the Trump Administration’s 83 percent cut in programs administered by the United States Agency for International Development despite the likely ensuing  declines in neonatal health, malnutrition, and a host of other morbidities and mortalities around the world.  “Maybe,” said one audience member, “but I don’t know a one of them.”

FRIDAY.  Hooting and hollering hailed a thirty percent cut in National Science Foundation spending.  The audience laughed off repeated claims that the cuts would compromise American technological leadership and innovation, with one audience member remarking, “It’s about time those pencil-necked geeks got taken down a peg or two.’”

5:00-7:00            MEET THE PRESIDENTS – SPECIAL EDITION!

A tour of the special, other, Presidential Walk of Fame!

MONDAY.  Thomas Jefferson.  He famously wrote the Declaration of Independence, secured the Louisiana Purchase, confronted the Barbary pirates, and fathered as many as six children by his mulatto slave and half-sister-in-law, Sally Hemings, starting in Europe when she was just sixteen.  And yet nobody sued him the way they sued President Donald J. Trump!

TUESDAY.  Warren Harding.  Harding began an affair with recent high school graduate Nan Britton, by whom he had a daughter before being elected to the Presidency, and whom he is said to have pleasured in a knee-buckler in a closet adjacent to the Oval Office while Secret Service men were stationed outside their door, and all the while carrying on with his wife’s best friend, Carrie Phillips.  And yet he was not the subject of an unfair lawsuit, as was President Donald J. Trump.

WEDNESDAY.  John F. Kennedy. “I wonder how it is with you, Harold. If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache,” JFK is said to have told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillian, furthering the “special relationship” built by Churchill and FDR.  Eschewing aspirin, he went right to the cause by having alleged affairs with, among others, Marilyn Monroe, Judith Exner, two White House secretaries, and a 19-year-old virgin on the fourth day of her internship in the White House.  Rather than reveal their assignation, the teen-age girl kept their secret for forty years, which is more than the porn star who is falsely alleged to have carried on with, and paid hush money by, President Donald J. Trump ever did.

THURSDAY.  Grover Cleveland.  Maria Halpin accused Cleveland of raping and impregnating her.  Cleveland allowed cronies to have her committed to an insane asylum (from which she was released after doctors determined that she was not insane).  And yet it was President Donald J. Trump who was unfairly sued for a sexual assault that didn’t happen, although doctors at Walter Reed have certified that, by dint of his remembering five words, he is “not insane.”

FRIDAY.  Bill Clinton.  President Donald J. Trump courageously brought alleged Clinton assignees Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey to his second debate with gender-reversed cuckold First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.  But Clinton was not convicted by the Senate when impeached for lying under oath in the Jones suit and regarding Monica Lewinsky, which is more than you could say about President Donald J. Trump’s conviction in criminal court.

7:00-7:05            NEWS OF THE DAY

Crisp editorial judgment allows us to reduce the evening’s news to five minutes by by-passing “fake news” stories on a “war” in Iran, “devastation” in Gaza, and rapidly rising “prices.”  Look for an ad for the next UFC White House event!

7:05-10:00         THIS EVENING WITH NATALIE CARP

Proto-First Daughter Natalie reminisces about her time spent loyally pursuing the welfare of President Donald J. Trump, including her posting a video ridiculing Barack and Michelle Oama as apes and another depicting President Donald Trump as a Jesus-like, magical healer of the sick.  She’ll also be discussing the intelligence community’s inexplicably denying her a security clearance, as well as her being spirited away in a cargo food container when Air Force One was deemed in danger of a terrorist attack, while such lesser staffers as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent remained on the decoy plane.  “Good times,” says the Trump sycophant.

10:00-6:00         NO TV!  JUST TRUMP POSTS!

It’s time to stop watching television and pull out your phones instead, so that you can be the first to read whatever our President chooses to post on another of his all-night texting benders.  You can’t watch television all day!

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The Death of Satire

“American reality has been so extreme of late that satire is almost impossible.  Anything you could imagine actually happens.  It would stump Jonathan Swift.”

                          `--  Fran Lebowitz

That such a remark could come from someone who was born of the conjugal product of satire and contrarianism has sent shudders throughout the satiric community, not to mention outrage that her self-satirizing trudging, whining, and cigarette smoking appears to be an attempt to corner a market she has pronounced moribund.

Of course, the rumored death of satire is laid, as is everything else, at the (small), Florsheimed feet of Donald Trump, whose persistent self-parody has left satirists mowing their lawns, watching Tiger King, and spending time with their children.  And while the Trump Administration will one day end, as would a dentist’s drilling or your neighbor’s lawn mowing on Sunday morning, it has left as its legacy a confederation of climate deniers, racism deniers, election deniers, vaccine deniers, Parkland deniers, open trade deniers, gasoline price deniers, and armed pizza joint marauders.  Is this chaotic bushel of wingnuts fair game for satirists, or are they so predictably abominable they will do away with humorists the way artificial intelligence does away with work? 

Satire’s been counted out before.  When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for finally ending a senseless war he had pursued ardently and spread illegally, the eminent satirist Tom Lehrer pronounced “satire was dead.”  More than a mere statement of disgust, Lehrer backed it up with conviction, and wrote only a handful of unimportant songs thereafter, the most memorable of which was “(I’m Spending) Hanukah in Santa Monica.”  It should be unsurprising Adam Sandler’s best moment turns out to be derivative.

But Lehrer underestimated satire’s resilience.  On the ropes after Kissinger’s Prize, satire bounced back, from Gerald Ford’ spontaneous liberation of Eastern Europe in a Presidential debate to Jimmy Carter being attacked by a “killer rabbit” to George (Daddy) Bush not knowing how a supermarket scanner worked to Bill Clinton’s assignee masturbating with a Cuban cigar (and Brett Kavanaugh’s and Ken Starr’s lurid fascinations with it) to George (the Kid) Bush’s impromptu invention of nouns, verbs and intelligence reports, not to mention Gwyneth Paltrow’s Vagina Candle.  If satire is dead today, it might have died of an overdose. 

But is satire really dead?  Let’s ask the people on the front lines, the lampooners and the lampooned.

“Oh, it’s a very real thing,” said Milton Whirlybird, Executive Director of the Fire-Starting Space Laser Coalition, a fictitious industry group.  “There was a time when the simple mention of my fabricated name or the ridiculous premise of my preposterous industry association would not only produce a titter but a laugh, even a guffaw, but would launch a premise good for 1,200 always-excellent words by Monica Hesse on the Washington Post features page.  It all but writes itself: Do space-based lasers have to file environmental impact statements? Is their logo Mrs. O’Leary’s cow?  Do they shut down for Shabbos? Did Elon Musk build it?  But now it seems like either a vapid trope not worth the sentence or a hasty dismissal of the fact there was a psychotic in Congress saying this shit.”

“it’s a very bad situation,” says Wolf J. Flywheel, a Colonel in the National Tin Foil Hat Militia.  “I think a lot of satirists figured they’d lost Trump back in 2020 but during the January 6 incident it looked as if we had thrown satire a lifeline, if you overlook the throw-up-in-your-mouth aspect of it.  But then they started killing cops, which drains a lot of the humor out it, no matter what the set-up.  A joke like ‘What did one Capitol insurrectionist say to the other Capitol insurrectionist?  Let’s go hang Mike Pence!’--too soon?  On the other hand, you could try a subtler approach: for example, If they actually had hanged Mike Pence, would Mitch McConnell have voted to convict?”

And if Trump has killed satire, it’s only because he’s made it too easy.  The Internet now abounds in people replaying Trump speaking incoherently, falling asleep in the Oval Office, making ridiculous stuff up off the top of his head (although Reagan afficionados may resent that their man does not get credit for this pioneering technique), being prodded to wake up by a female assistant with a buzzer switch in her clothing, and farting, each presenter expressing smarmy superciliousness as they read their copy, which inevitably says only, “Watch this.” 

And worse…AI, particularly the images, which can be described as mimicry, facetiousness, slime, self-righteousness, sanctimony, or smugness, but is it satire?  Still, an image of Trump in a diaper is sort of amusing, even if it aims for the easy laugh.  Like an Ann Telnaes cartoon.

The satirist must aim higher.  “A satirist’s range is limited not by her imagination but by her stomach,” says Prof. Buck Bellson, Director of the Center for the Study of Very Angry People at the University of California, Cinders.  “And while the January 6 rioters being described as tourists, or RFK, Jr. discrediting life-saving vaccines, or J. D. Vance accusing immigrants of eating dogs and cats, or America getting shamed by a bunch of bearded religious nuts in the Persian Gulf, excites the satiric imagination, they also turned a lot of stomachs, and now you have to be careful.  It’s almost like telling Boko Haram jokes.  Satire sees the truth and then exaggerates, and how do you exaggerate that?  It would be like saying, “Holocaust toll revised to 7 million.”  I think absurdity has some kind of Absolute Zero and we’re already there.  Besides, let’s say it out loud--plenty of the satirists are scared shitless of the insurrectionists.  After all, the mob has an arsenal of military-style weapons and…well, most of the satirists are Jewish.”

Satirists everywhere admit they are feeling the squeeze.  “Let’s be truthful--we rode Trump like a share of GameStop and in 2020, we had to face the consequences,” said Cuthbert Twillie, an expert in on-line wit.  “What the hell was funny about Biden, his age?  His little microblackouts?  His handing the Presidency back to Trump because his old lady didn’t want to leave the mansion?  Biden’s biggest satiric vulnerability was once his hair plugs.  Hair plugs are easy--you can set them up with a ‘two kinds of people’ joke, like ‘There are just two kinds of people--people who think hair plugs are ridiculous, and the douchebags who have them.’  Then maybe you can take the premise somewhere, like how Biden has been receiving strange radio messages through his hair plugs, instead of through the fillings in his teeth, right?  But then you’ve got the punchline problem--what are the radio messages saying?   Because all I can think of is ‘stop racist policing’ or ‘end family separation.’  It’s like driving for a couple of hours and ending up in a cul-de-sac.”

The current environment also strains the dominant theories of humor, which works to the advantage of fringe groups such as the Improvised Biology League, according to their spokesman, Joe Strawman.  “James Thurber is said to have been walking down the street when he saw a woman walking her dog while carrying a bag of groceries in each arm, when the dog suddenly fell over dead and the poor woman could not figure out a way to carry both the two bags of groceries and the dead dog.    Thurber broke out into laughter and realized laughter was the reaction you had when you could not bear any other reaction--that the underlying reality, whether it was a deranged puffin like Jack Donaghy exercising actual social and economic power on 30 Rock, or General Ripper blowing up the world because sex left him weak, was too terrible to contemplate.  Or consider my organization.  For example, we are against measles inoculation, so right away the reader is looking to a joke for relief from the discomfort that somebody could be as stupid as we are.  Maybe we could have a funny slogan like “Don’t Let Antiquarian Quacks Like Edward Jenner Change Your Chromosomes!” or “Don’t Let Them Turn You Into Sheep.”  But you’re going to have trouble there, because most of our readers think Edward Jenner won the Olympics and then had sexual reassignment.  Or maybe something in our defense, like how we’re against inoculating for smallpox but our minds are open about big and medium size pox.  But it all seems like pretty thin soup when compared to how batshit crazy we really are.  And that’s before we get to the Hasids.”

Egbert Scarecrow, a spokesman for the Stop Body Cameras Now! coalition of ICE agents, prefers renowned drama critic Eric Bentley’s views on the origins of humor in his classic Life of the Drama, “which built on Jonathan Swift. Bentley saw comedy as structured around the interaction of knaves and fools,” he says.  “Knaves attempt to victimize fools, but in the end are victimized themselves--e.g., the salesman is going to victimize the farmer’s daughter but is himself victimized, perhaps by a shotgun or a threshing machine or woodchipper or, in more contemporary tellings, the daughter being a Lesbian.  In a drama, the “hero” is a fool who bests a knave but there’s nothing funny about it--at best, it’s a slasher movie, or with some luck, Promising Young Woman.  But in satire, the knave’s comeuppance is played for laughs.  For example, look at Trump.  He was the classic knave, buffoonish in a sociopathic way, but now his knavery is being rewarded with his comeuppance as he sits, broke and in Allenwood as the Senate votes overwhelmingly to convict him, his supporters abandon him en masse, and his most radical supporters--Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and so on--are pursued to the ends of the earth and imprisoned by law enforcement and have all but disappeared.  Oh, wait.  None of that happened.  You see?  That’s not satire--that’s sarcasm.”

So, is sarcasm the new satire?  Instead of wit, have we descended to smarm and unction?  “Absolutely,” says Melville Poptopowitz, Professor at Yeshiva University’s School of Creative Writing.  “Believe me, we get it.  Joseph Smith said he found a pair of golden Egyptian plates buried somewhere with strange writing he translated with the help of the Holy Spirit and a smooth, egg-shaped stone, which makes as much sense as trying to figure out what’s going on in Interstellar with a pair of salad tongs.  And then he gave the plates to the Angel Moroni for safe keeping, which has a few good jokes in it--Oh no, Moroni, my buried, golden plates were written in Egyptian, these are in Cuneiform.  Or will angels give you back your buried, golden, Egyptian plates if you’ve lost your claim ticket?   Good jokes, but are they genuine satire or a literary beating of a dead horse?”

“There is a difference,” offers Dudley Righthead of the Institute for Correct Thinking, an entity that appears towards the end of essays to deliver the point.  “Kant felt human dignity was innate, that it could not be earned or forfeited.  That’s the dividing line.  Sarcasm dispenses with human dignity, satire makes its point because it rises to its defense.”  And how is the reader supposed to know the difference?  “Oh, it’s easy.  The best satire leads the reader to a wistful, almost prayerful, how true! reaction that feels like intellectual endorphins.  Sarcasm leads the reader to want to hit somebody.”

Or, as the satirists you meet each day at Starbucks, or doctor’s offices, or on smartphone help lines after an hour’s wait tell you, “Have a great one.”  In the face of everything we’ve discussed in this essay, that might be the greatest satiric remark of all.

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Candy From a Baby

It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby: Just repeat it to yourself and listen to what you’re saying.

Really? That easy? So…that makes it…OK?

The first time I heard it -- this idea that taking candy from a baby (such as myself) was somehow easy or simple, or perhaps without consequence -- I was horrified. It was so mean-spirited, so cruel. But then – well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m about ten months old now, and most afternoons the au pair takes me to the park and gives me a lollipop to keep me quiet while she gabs on her phone. If Mommy knew the au pair was giving me a lollipop she’d go batshit (which I’m not allowed to say for reasons I don’t get), but she doesn’t – she just gives me to the au pair in the morning and disappears. “Mommy’s going to go make law,” she says, and then I don’t see her until she comes home with cartons of take-out at suppertime.

I like lollipops, except the red ones, which taste like Tylenol. But one day, I’m in the stroller and these two older boys, seven or eight years old I’d guess, come over and give me a little of the koochie-koo thing under my neck, and while the au pair is on the phone and not watching, one of them suddenly lunges and grabs my lollipop! The two of them take off, laughing and shouting, taking turns licking it, and one of them says to the other, “See? I told you it was easy! As easy as taking candy from a baby!”

What? Taking candy from a baby, really? Is that a thing? Is it supposed to be OK because it’s easy? Why not just put a sign on my back that says, “take candy away from this little bitch, no problem.” So, I was sitting there, confused and a little devastated, when suddenly another kid stoops down next to me, and before I can flinch, he says “Hey! I feel you, brother.”

The kid is about the same age as those other boys, but he seems much nicer and he’s got this flaming red hair. “I know what you’re going through,” he says. “Did you ever hear the expression ‘beaten like a red-headed step-child?’”

Well, no I hadn’t, but I was appalled! Was it really OK to beat red-headed step-kids, like it was OK to steal candy from babies? I wanted to ask, but I can’t talk yet. Still, the red-headed kid seemed to understand what I was thinking and whispered to me, “Your au pair is gabbing on the phone. Come with me, she won’t notice,” and before I knew it, he was wheeling me away.

In a very short while the red-headed kid had wheeled me away to some kind of a small shed – a clubhouse really – with a bunch of folks inside. “Hey people, here’s the candy baby,” he announced, and there were smiles and warm welcomes for me from everyone there – it seemed they had expected me!

“We’re delighted to ha’ you with us, li’l’ fella,” said a fellow in a pea coat and a little white hat, whose speech was slurred like Daddy’s is when he has too much “booze.”

“Candy Baby, allow me to introduce the drunken sailor,” the red-headed kid said.

“An’ I can ma’age my money jus’ fine!” the sailor exclaimed, then shook his head to clear it.

“Where am I?” he said, then burped loudly. “Drinks are on me!”

“Pardon our friend,” said a fellow with a broad smile whom Fate had deprived of one of his arms and was holding a pot of glue with the other. He wore a painter’s hat and had a large brush tucked into his apron.

“And this is the one-armed paperhanger,” the red-headed kid said by way of introduction. “How’s it going, Mel?”

“Not too busy,” the one-armed paperhanger said with a pleasant smile. “Have you met Clarence yet?”

I looked around to see who “Clarence” might be, when I noticed the head of a fish poking out of a barrel. “I’m Clarence,” said the fish.

“He’s the fish in a barrel,” the red-headed kid said, although he was sort of grown-up-splaining, if you ask me.

“And I feel for you, kid,” the fish in the barrel said, “but frankly, if I had some candy, I’d give it to whomever wanted it if they would just stop shooting at me.”

The fish had a troubled expression you don’t see often in a fish. “Before they put me in this barrel, I was the fish out of water. Man, that was a drag! You know, a person’s uncomfortable somewhere and they say they’re a ‘fish out of water.’ And it’s supposed to be like oh! that explains it -- it’s OK that they’re uncomfortable, because there’s an explanation, so you don’t have to do anything about it. No one ever asks how they got out of water, or how to get them back into the water. Now, in my case, one day some guy came along, picked me up, and splash, he throws me into a barrel. Sweet relief!, I thought, finally! But then, bang bang bang, and it struck me -- as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

“My first concern was for my safety, of course, but then I realized-- how stupid is this? First, shooting a fish in a barrel isn’t that easy, unless you’re short-rodding with a Winchester, but otherwise, the fish swims around in the barrel, and if it’s the standard 42 gallon barrel, and if it’s not a very big fish, like a spot or a crappie or a bluegill, then it might be harder than…well, harder than stealing candy from a baby,” he said, nodding to me sympathetically. “And not only is shooting fish in a barrel not that easy, but it ruins the barrel, shoots the damn thing full of holes. I suppose the people who were shooting fish in a barrel saw the light and started taking candy from babies instead.”

The assemblage nodded in agreement and a woman stepped forward to introduce herself. She wore a long, tattered black dress with black shoes, her hair was an unkempt mess of black and gray, and she was decidedly unattractive, with a green tint to her complexion, and a variety of wart-like growths on her face. “So, dearie, do you think I’m ugly?” she asked me.

What a question! I was glad I don’t know how to talk! Luckily, the red-headed step-child interrupted. “Come on, now, Heloise,” he said. “He’s a baby! How’s he supposed to answer a question like that?”

The witch took the correction in stride. “Well, that’s what they all say – someone’s ugly as a witch, as if Joan of Arc of some of those Salem girls weren’t hotties!”

“Yeah, but they weren’t really witches, were they?” Mel, the one-armed paperhanger noted.

He had a point, but it didn’t slow the witch down. “Well…no matter. Because no sooner did they start in talking about how witches were ugly, it got worse -- cold as a witch’s tit! Frankly, when did my tits become a topic for public discussion, a point of thermal reference for the masses? And frankly, how do you know? It’s not like anybody’s checked my mammaries, or is ever going to, unless they want to go through life sitting on a lily pad and eating flies! Besides, every creature with breasts in all of Creation is a mammal, and they’re all warm-blooded, so you have to wonder where the idiots who say this stuff were during high school biology! Next thing you know they’ll be denying evolution.”

“Thank you, Heloise,” the red-headed step-child said as the witch sat down. “I now want turn to Oswald, who has a brief presentation I asked him to prepare.”

An ox waddled into the center of the room and spoke. “I appreciate our red-headed friend asking me to do this research,” the ox said. “Partly, of course, because of the dumb as an ox business, which every ox – and every farmer -- knows is simply used to justify putting a yoke on us and making us drag heavy stuff through paddies. It’s the same old stuff cruel people always fall back on – blame the victim. I’d like to see them try that on a carnivore,” the ox snorted contemptuously, then put on a pair of reading glasses and extracted some notes.

“There’s this thing on the Internet called Google N-grams – they tell you how often words are used in English-language published works. So, for example, it will tell you how often the words ‘taking candy from a baby’ appear,” he said, looking at me quite pointedly. “And by 2011, the expression ‘taking candy from a baby’ had become four times more frequent in written English than it had been in 1985, just a quarter of a century before. The same for ‘fish in a barrel,’ too, four times more frequent,” the ox said, shaking his massive head as he took off his glasses and put his papers down.

“There is a societal outbreak around us, an outbreak of meanness, of cruelty, of callousness." thje ox said. "And it victimizes all of us – not just the candy-less babies, the fish in barrels, the red-headed step-children, but the people who reduce themselves by using these expressions, as if they have no faults of their own. People don’t respect other people any longer – they just laugh at their fellow creatures as they try to feel better about themselves. It’s part and parcel of a more unequal, devil-take-the-hindmost society. We treat things – wealth, investments, possessions – better than a beating heart.” The ox stopped and ran his foreleg and hoof under a sniffly nose – he was close to tears. The red-headed step-child consoled him with a gentle pat on his hump, but the ox was upset. “Where does it stop?” the ox cried unhappily. “When do we start treating each other with dignity and respect?”

There was a round of silent nodding in response to the ox’s plaintive complaint, when the red-headed step-child told me he needed to get me back before I was missed, so we made our apologies and he rolled me back to where the au pair was sitting, still gabbing on her phone. He whispered to me he’d be checking up on me and not to worry, and just like that, he disappeared.

I felt happy I’d made some friends, but more importantly, now I knew when other people were mean, the target of their malice – whether me, or the witch, or the ox, or the paperhanger – didn’t merit the callousness with which they were treated. It was a liberating revelation. But at the same time, I was unhappy folks like the step-child or the witch or the fish had to go through life that way. I wouldn’t be a baby for very long. But they would be as they were forever.

As I thought about it, sitting in my stroller, I guess I started making that face babies make. You know the one I mean – our eyes open up wide and get moist but no tears run, our nostrils flare wider than you thought they could, our lips turn from pink to purple and start to quiver, and we generally look like it’s about to be a bad day in Pompeii. Suddenly the au pair notices me and gets all attentive. “Look at you!” she says. “Is something wrong? Would you like some milk?” And she takes out a sippy cup filled with milk and hands it to me. I regarded it for a moment and then an inspiration hit me, and I threw it down on the ground.

“Now look what you’ve done!” the au pair said exasperatedly.

I looked down at the spilled milk and was about to cry over it, when I had a change of heart. Don’t cry over the spilled milk, I told myself! Don’t play into their hands! Don’t give them the satisfaction!

So I proceeded, instead, to take the loudest, smelliest, messiest poop I had ever taken. “Oh, Jesus!” the au pair shouted, and put away her phone to start wheeling me home for a diaper change. “I can’t believe the mess you’ve made!” she bleated.

I smiled discreetly as she did. If you want to change the world, you start with the weapons you have.