Hell of a week

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

IT FIGURES THAT what might be the worst week of the year should end with a Black Friday.

In the Increasingly-Less-United Kingdom, Scotland’s highest court found that Boris Johnson, the occupant of 10 Downing Street, allegedly misled the Queen when he told her he was proroguing Parliament not to prevent Parliament from obstructing his hard Brexit, but to prepare the Queen’s Speech.

This happened, it seems, because Bozo could not find a single civil servant who would risk the legal jeopardy of putting his or her own name to a bureaucratic statement that all was in order, the only thing the court needed to avoid having to conclude that the prime minister had allegedly lied to Her Majesty.

Over in the Increasingly-More-Dis-United States, Fat Nixon’s gall expanded to fill the yawning credibility gap he created with his most recent excess.

Following his hilarious-if-it-weren’t-tragic black-Sharpie-extension of the path of Hurricane Dorian to Alabama, to “prove” he had a basis for his mistake over the storm’s trajectory, Fat Nixon used Wednesday’s 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to repeat his boldfaced lie that he was at Ground Zero on that terrible day, helping the first responders somehow, though graciously refraining from calling himself one.

Even more galling – and proportionally worrying – the Israeli prime minister on Tuesday vowed to annex more of what ought to be Palestine, if he should win next week’s general election; you could call it a mandate to precipitate Armageddon.

In seemingly end-times like this, I try to cheer myself up by throwing reality out the window and settling back into my own imagination, where any number can play, and I can myself play spin-the-bottle with Madonna, Halle Berry and Salma Hayek while watching Aishwarya Rai wrestle in jello with Penelope Cruz.

So I take one hellish aspect of the week – the 9/11 anniversary – and try to make it less bad by imagining what might have happened if, everything else being the same, the attack happened, not in 2001, but today. This could be the exchange on the Oval Office hotline.

Phone rings.

Trump: Hello?

National Security Adviser: Sir! Two planes have been deliberately flown into the World Trade Center. The top floors of both towers are burning.

Trump: Is this Mickey D’s? I ordered my lunch half-an-hour ago! Where are my 14 Big Macs and 14 supersize fries and a Diet Coke?

NSA: Sir! Our intelligence services all agree this is a terror attack on our homeland!

Trump: The FBI doesn’t know Jack Shiretrit. The best thing I ever did was fire Lying Jim Comey. Why didn’t they investigate Crooked Hillary? Nobody understands terror attacks better than me. Guns don’t kill, bullets do.

NSA: Sir! It appears this is an Islamist attack!

Trump: Why didn’t you say so? Firetrucking towelheads! This is why we should have built the wall. I wanted to build a sky-wall around the World Trade Center, you remember me saying so. Tweet that out now.

NSA: Sir, this is an emergency!

Trump: Wait, is this Bolton? Didn’t I tell you to get your stupid fat moustache out of Dodge and DC!

NSA: Sir, the South Tower has crashed. People are leaping to their deaths from the upper floors of the North Tower.

Trump: Wait! Have the Fake News sent out camera crews? Tell them I’m there, helping. Tell them I’ve rescued more people than anyone else. Tell them I rescued more people than Obama! Firemen love me.

NSA: Sir! The South Tower has just collapsed. A mushroom cloud of dust is blotting out the sun. It’s like the end of the world!

Trump [after ten-second pause]: You’re rehired, Bolton! This is the best news I’ve had all year!

NSA: What? What madness are you saying?

Trump: Wow! Trump Building at 40 Wall Street has just become the tallest structure in New York City! Russians will pay top dollar for the top floors! What a great day! I’m going to tweet an executive action annual public holiday on September 11 from now on.

NSA: Sir! Thousands of people have died!

Trump: Firetruck ’em. They were all Jews, probably. Pity Jared didn’t work there. Actually, you’re fired again, Bolton. Ivanka will take over your job. I never liked any of your songs, anyway.

BC Pires is advocating the renaming of the World Trade Center site after the current Oval Office Orange-utan: Ground Brain Zero