It started out like every other morning: I spent most of it sleeping. Then it all changed. I woke up and for the first time I noticed how messy my room was; clothes, mostly t-shirts and jeans, lying every where. Not one suit, tie or even a white shirt. As I started to cover my eyes, I (luckily) followed my middle finger and noticed a few garments hanging neatly in my closet all separated evenly, two inches apart: a blue suit coat, matching pants, a starched white shirt, and a red tie. I felt a surge of pride grow inside me when I saw that on the jacket's lapel was a small flag pin (I swear I could hear Rush Limbaugh making a racist remark with Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin harmonizing in the background). Tears marched from my eyes, but I quickly made them retreat, for I am an American male, we don't cry-- it just uses fluid that could be made into testosterone.
I jumped out of bed (on the right side, of course) and instead of running off to the shower, I did what I never had done before (without being told to): I made the bed! Yes, the bed, but I didn't only make it; I changed the sheets, disappointed that I couldn't find any that had thread counts over 200. At first I was disoriented, but somehow felt stronger, more self-assured, like I couldn't possibly be wrong about anything. I took a shower, not caring how much water I used, whether my soap was made from chemicals that would seep into the ocean and kill everything but the legs of an oil rig, and dried off using a towel made cheaply in China. It was then that I knew what I had to do it. I wanted to do it! It was the right thing to do! I shaved off my moustache and beard. I had never felt more like a real clean-cut conservative American. At first I was disappointed in my shaved head, but then realized that in a day or two a circle of hair would grow around the perimeters and I'd look like someone who had the stuff to break a union, render the FDA impotent, bankrupt a financial institution and still give myself a million dollar bonus.
Back in my bedroom, I eased into the suit and tied a perfect Windsor knot. I went into the kitchen, made a cup of instant coffee, scrambled a pair of white eggs (from caged chickens), fried bacon (cut from hormone enhanced pigs) and two slices of artificially enriched white bread. When I was finished I left the dishes in the sink to be cleaned up by an illegal alien I would hire later that day, and of course, pay only in cash. I walked up to the corner and bought a New York Post, which I read cover to cover, sucking up and believing every word as if it was Christian fundamentalist gospel (which except for the newsworthy girls in bikinis and strip club ads, it is).
As I marched up the street looking for something to obstruct, I felt the word "No" forming on my mouth. I passed bums, no longer feeling sorry for them. Now I just felt that they were lazy and should be gathered up and starved to death. A car backfired and I smelled the gas fumes which triggered a brilliant thought: we could take all the starving bums, give them guns, and put them in the Anwar Province (Alaska) and let them kill all the wildlife for food. Once they wiped the animals out, burned the trees for firewood, we could air-drop booze, which they would eventually kill each other over, and then (with the natural habitat destroyed) we'd be able to drill right through the bums' unproductive bodies for oil.
I walked another block and passed a woman in a wheel chair and I thought: if we had universal health care maybe she wouldn't have become crippled and she, and maybe thousands of others, wouldn't need wheel chairs that would put hundreds of wheel chair builders out of work, and then they would consume our tax money collecting unemployment insurance, which would close up small business everywhere. Quickly, I began to hate handicapped people and all they couldn't stand for. My transformation to an American Republican God was almost complete.
I crossed the street, turned right, walking by three foreclosure signs and thought; now that will finally discourage those people from thinking they deserve to live the American Dream. I wasn't being insensitive of their plight: I feel that we should help them buy houses, but only if they'll live next to nuclear power plants and let us use their back yards for radioactive dumps.
I walked for several blocks when I began to worry that I might be late. So I flagged down a cab and stepped inside. The driver, who was from a country that liked to wear their old bed linen on their head (the thread count not even close to a 100), asked me in some form of English that could only come off a tongue used for eating food that should be fed to goats, "Where are you was going?"
"To work," I said.
Sounding like a midget vomiting, he said, "Where is that?"
I started to tell him, but what came out even surprised me. "I don't know."
"You don't know?" he said using words that sounded critically broken in any language.
Then I started to stutter, "I-I-I don't have a job."
"Then you want the unemployment office," he said like his vocals chords were strings on Ravi Shankar's sitar.
As he spoke I reached in my pocket, pulled out my wallet and rummaged through nothing. "I don't have any money."
The cab driver looked at me, said words that weren't even distantly related to English, but I understood. By the time I leaped from the cab, it was already in motion.
I was flat broke: I'd spent my last quarter on The New York Post. I didn't have a job. I didn't have any money and left The Post in the cab. I suddenly felt very sick. I stumbled a few blocks to the hospital emergency room. Before I could tell the nurse my symptoms, she asked if I had insurance. I checked my empty wallet and like a true Republican I said, "No." Then I passed out.
I woke up, ready to plead my case to the nurses and doctors, tell them that I'm an American, I pay my taxes and that every American has the right to health care. "What about the Hippocratic oath?" I screamed, slamming my fist down. That's when I felt the 100 thread count sheets, and for a minute I thought I had turned gay and was in bed with the cab driver. Then, before I thought too seriously about moving to San Francisco and getting married, I looked around, saw my messy room; wrinkled jeans, the empty suit-less closet, yesterday's New York Times on the floor. My heart slowed, I relaxed, inhaled, filling my lungs with the reassuring smell of sweat from my one-size-fits all-causes T-shirts, relieved that I was still a Democrat who believed that someday soon, because of President Obama, that we, the (American) people, without a (Republican fabricated) doubt, will have universal health care.