BEN TROVATO CUT & RUN
Dear Joseph Robinette Biden Jnr, What are the odds of your inauguration and my column falling due on the same day? It’s like hearing the Queen has offered to sacrifice one of her corgis if Harry and Meghan return to the fold.
People say you only won because Donald Trump set the bar so low. That’s not true. Trump got the smartest of his idiot sons to steal the bar, give it a coat of cheap gold paint and sell it off as bullion. There is no bar and there hasn’t been one for a very long time in that good ol’ country of yours.
Speaking of bars, I am in one right now and plan on staying here for your first 100 days. This is such a good/bad day for the world that I think everyone should stay drunk until you show us that you are not an unhinged megalomaniac posing as someone’s mild-mannered grandfather.
Quite frankly, I’m not convinced you are the right man for the job. Sure, you won’t need to keep asking the cleaners where the bathroom is. You lived there for eight years. But that was four years ago and a man of your advanced years would be forgiven for having forgotten a few things.
Hang on. It seems vice-presidents don’t actually live at the White House. Are you telling me you spent two terms under Barack Obama and at the end of every day you went home to a shack on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory? No wonder you don’t like black people. Or telescopes. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m in Costa Rica and people are carrying on as if there’s no tomorrow, which there might well not be if you haven’t remembered to change the nuclear codes.
The fact that you won/stole the election worries me. I’m sure you will agree that America has a history of coming up short in the good judgment department, stretching right from the Pilgrims, through the murders of Martin Luther King and John Lennon to the election of that gibbering tangerine atrocity.
So what did the electorate see in you? It couldn’t just have been a Democrat/Republican thing. You have a law degree, but that seems not to have counted against you. Hillary also has a law degree. Are you even American? I’m not saying you should show us your birth certificate, but I think you should.
The name Joseph means many things. Most well known is the Joseph who was the husband of the Virgin Mary. People not of the Christian faith have for centuries remarked on Joseph’s extraordinary level of trust, undoubtedly a good thing when it comes to maintening harmony in the home.
Furthermore, “race of Joseph” was a phrase coined by Canadian author Lucy Montgomery in her 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables. Mystified critics have, for the last 200 years, put it down to her gender. “Nobody understands what women mean,” wrote Barton K Lynch of the Grimsville Enquirer.
I have to say, Joe, your middle name does worry me. Robinette? I’m no hornythrogroper, but when I see that word I think of a baby bird. Also, it makes me think of an apprentice girl robber. Robinette and her merry thugs.
Perhaps your mother was hoping for a girl she wanted to call Robin and then, when you appeared, your father added the nette part to assert himself. Seems unlikely, I admit, but then again, Trump. Am I right? Autocorrect wanted to change that to “Am I right-wing?” Autocorrect is clearly owned by Adolf von Zuckerberg or Antifa or a bunch of vegan yoga freaks having each other’s babies in a commune in weed-growing Oregon. Goddamn hippies. I hope you know what you’re doing, Biden. Napalm is too good for the likes of them.
I see you’re a Jnr. Condolences. Out here in the jungle, we don’t dabble in diminutives. Our fathers don’t call us after themselves. Mostly, they don’t call us at all. We prefer it that way.
One of your first acts, even before rejoining the Paris climate accord and allowing Muslims back into America, should be to colonise Costa Rica and send the waiters to boot camp. Or preferably to me. I’ll give you my GPS coordinates. The bar service here is terrifyingly slow, and I say this as someone who comes from a country where slow has been official government policy since 1994.
Apart from that, you have to tell the CIA to leave Central America alone. At least until I get back to Cape Town. There is nothing here for you. No oil, gas or minerals, apart from the Coke you ship in, which goes rather well with the delicious Flor de Caña rum that has just arrived at my table. Interfere with that dynamic and I will round up my ... ah, what the hell. That won’t work. You have the blood of the Irish in you and are impervious to threats.
You ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and again in 2008, thereby disproving the definition of madness while ultimately proving that luck does indeed run in threes.
If I believed in the old magic, which I do, I’d say you are half Leprechaun. I won’t guess which half because there are certain matters that should remain between a man and his wife. But the symbols. Ah, Joey boy, the symbols. Forget the shamrock. There’s a plant that never did anyone any good. And for the love of the sweet baby Jesus, rename the Pentagon. Call it the Pentagram. And replace the Department of Homeland Security with the Department of Druids.
I think you will find that the 74 million people who voted for Trump will be looking for a new spiritual home. Offer them paganism, Mr President. Encourage them to worship the stars, the seasons, the weather. They’re dumb enough to fall for it.
You must be devastated that Trump is boycotting your inauguration. Devastated like a teenage daughter hearing that Uncle Pervy can’t make the family reunion.
You are untouchable, comrade. You don’t even care about that clip on the internet of you weirdly sniffing the hair of girls and women. I have sniffed many things in my life but, unlike you, none of them ever inspired me to run for high office. Kudos to you, my friend. Or enemy. Let’s see how it goes, shall we?
Rename the Pentagon. Call it the Pentagram