One day late but irrelevant nevertheless

An Independence Day Carol

 

by Michael Dare

 

After a long day of oppressing the masses, George W. Bush is visited by the ghost of Ken Lay on the 4th of July. Lay's leg is chained to bags of pennies equal to the amount of money he stole in his lifetime. Lay tells Bush that his chain is even longer, pointing outside to thousands of ghosts of dead crooks flying by, moaning and groaning while firmly attached to endless chains of their booty. Bush notices the ghost of Richard Nixon chained to the tombstones of every soldier killed in Vietnam during his term, and an iPod strapped to his head playing his 18,000 hours of White House tapes over and over. Bush asks Lay if there's any way he can avoid this fate, and Lay tells him to dismantle his taping system, and late that night, he will be visited by three spirits.

 

After destroying all the recording devices he can find, Bush falls asleep at his desk in the oval office. He's rudely awoken by the rattling chains of the Ghost of Independence Days Past, who gives him a brief history of the founding fathers and their battle against the tyranny of King George, reading to him the declaration of independence and making him understand the significance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Tiny Tim hobbles along on his crutches. Bush awakens to find himself alone. He falls back asleep.

 

He's then startled awake by the Ghost of Independence Days Present, who shows him the current spirit of the declaration of independence in the world, the struggling poor vs. the ruthless masters. He sees the poverty and suffering of the oppressed and the direct link to his policies gone awry. Tiny Tim is about to die. Bush wakens again to find himself alone in the Oval Office.

 

Finally, he's visited by the Ghost of Independence Days Future, where gangs of fiery rebels fight off the clones and robots of the massive armies of the New World Order in a devastated post-apocalyptic world where everything is radioactive, there is no God, and any adherents to any religious faith, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jew, are hunted down and slaughtered for causing all this mess. Tiny Tim is dead at the feet of a mammoth statue of Bush, pushed over and beheaded.

 

The next morning, Bush wakes up with a smile on his face and a vow to do better. He is a changed man. He buys Tiny Tim a brand new motorized wheelchair and massively funds stem cell research. He pardons all prisoners of political or victimless crimes, withdraws all American troops from everywhere, reinstitutes taxes on the rich, doubles the death tax, disbands the DEA and CIA, gives all American car manufacturers one year to switch from the internal combustion engine to ones that work on water or air, recalls all voting machines and goes back to paper ballots, backs a bill making all campaign contributions of any size illegal, signs the Kyoto Protocols and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, cancels the Patriot Act, cuts all funding to Israel until they adopt a mandatory "Adopt a Palestinian" Day, cuts the defense budget in half, spends the difference on universal health and car insurance for all Americans, and marries Dick Cheney in the world's biggest gay wedding watched by 99% of all TV viewers around the world.

 

After leaving office, he devotes the rest of his life to Greenpeace, the ACLU, and the dismantling of all nukes, aircraft carriers, and tanks. In his later years, he and Dick are often seen walking hand in hand daintily removing all remaining land mines on earth with Tiny Tim's discarded crutch.

Bush had no further intercourse with Spirits. He sidetracked a massive portion of defense spending into the creation of bigger and better fireworks displayed across America on the 4th of July, letting the people see their taxes go up in smoke right in front of their eyes instead of in a foreign land. It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Independence Day well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One! Now get out of my way!

 

The End