No, not the bivalves. Though I love them. I’m talking about “the world is my oyster” and the dangers of naming as general manager of the world’s largest grocery chain a man who has evidently never been to a grocery store.
My grandfather was a carpenter, a handyman, a fix-it guy. He replicated an 18th century workbench that he left my dad, along with all his tools. When I was growing up, Dad went to the hardware store in our small village to get washers or brads or something he needed for a project.
Dad didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps, instead became the first to go to college and go on to get his doctorate and become a college president and many other things. As an adult, one day I took him to the new Home Depot and he was flabbergasted by the range of stuff one could buy. All right there, under one roof! Wow! He had no idea.
Donald Trump has probably always had a full larder, filled by servants. He never had to look at the price of anything or decide a week’s meals on a budget. The fact that he only equates beef and bacon as “groceries” demonstrates only his mastery of a fast food menu.
Now, he’s been elected general manager of the largest grocery store in the world. He has no clue that the bacon and beef he’s so fond of come from farms. That only two countries in the world can successfully grow vanilla beans, an item practically every country in the world wants and needs. Or that it’s tough to grow great coffee beans and aside from Hawaii, the USA can’t produce enough to satisfy a nation with a coffee crush. Bigly. More than his affection for Diet Coke.
This might explain why he wants to give every Greenlander $100K to switch allegiance from Greenland to the USA. He only wants to give Americans a $1K cash award instead of health insurance that won’t even cover a month’s premium, wait, it’s not even allowed to be used to pay the premium, only out-of-pocket costs which will cost more than that if your kid breaks his finger playing hoops with his buddies in your driveway.
What’s on the menu today, Stephen Miller? Greenland? Panama? How about Canada, gotta get me some maple syrup for those pancakes. Nicaragua, nah that’s so last week. The oil companies can fight that out, “my” military did what I wanted so now everyone’ll play ball. I need a new shiny object for today. Whose lives can I ruin today, Stephen?
This week I’m using the last greens from a frozen garden to make a vegetable soup with farro, frozen tomatoes from the summer crop, and a couple cans of cheap Navy beans that have been in the pantry for a while. Trump has someone buy him a steak, cook it and he never sees the prep, cooking, clean-up or leftover management operation. It’s “one and done.” Out of sight, out of mind.
Trump tweets and others spend months planning to decapitate a despotic regime, invading another country’s inviolable territory to benefit his mega-donors. Then he has a party to watch the invasion on TV, brags about it at a press conference, and now his wiki bio is padded with “Acting President of Venezuela.”
Done, what’s on today’s agenda, Stephen? Let’s go to a small town in Iowa and roust people out of bed in the middle of the night and shoot them if they ask to put on clothes before they’re stuffed by masked men into an unmarked vechicle and deported to El Salvador without so much as a phone call.
Fellow Americans, we are all in the crosshairs now. Literally. ICE is not just after violent criminals who are in the USA illegally. They’re the tail-light police, the free speech police and they won’t take no in terms of a valid US passport for an answer. One wrong move and you’re shot in the face for shopping at Home Depot. And over your dead body they’ll swear that you were a socialist lefty pig who is part of a large anarchic conspiracy to make one Donald J Trump look bad.
I recall going to Mass as a child after Vatican II, when we stood, looked to our left and to our right, reached out with our hand and gave the sign of peace. Now is the time for Americans to look out our doors, smile at our neighbors and share a sign of peace. We’re in this together, all races, creeds and sexual orientations. This is our clarion call. We’re better than what the Trump regime thinks we are. We’re smarter, tougher and have the Constitution and laws of the land in our favor. We’re Americans. Call your Senators and Representatives and say as they did in “Network,” “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Yours in freedom, Dee
Cooking with Dee 