With the Retardican Party

The Dissociated Press sent me to test the waters at the rally last night for President Koom-Posh, former child-star of the popular Mr. Brain TV show. Allow me to share a few impressions from the event, held at a local airfield.

Hovercraft were circling, dropping confetti and Anti-Responsibility, or Antiree, propaganda thickly everywhere. The concerns of the Antiree movement are so small that they fit on tiny, nearly dust-sized pieces of paper. Numerous older folk who had been brought to the rally by Retardican organizers were choking and reeling over, hacking and feebly begging for handkerchiefs. One sufferer told me that the shuttlebus driver had taken away his mask, because of the cameras. Coverage needed to show Retardican unity, the driver said.

I was wearing my mask, of course. It was my own news coverage, I suppose. I feared it would do me little good, though, given the shouting and screaming around me from those who seemed able to breathe and exhale clouds of Antiree propaganda without distress. When President Koom-Posh appeared, he arrived surrounded by the device Retardican leaders have been using lately. It seems perfectly transparent and efficacious, at least when used among fellow Retardicans. These "Bubbles of Delusion," produced by Devotion Under Infidelity, or DUI, an agency run by the President's uncle's wealthiest nephew, have become synonymous with the President's claim to have won the last election, and to have already won the next one.

A great hoorah following Koom-Posh's revelation that an adulatory mirror had told him he looked extremely handsome that morning. Then he excoriated his opponents for their socialism. "They say I have no plan for my second term but I have one," he said, inserting his trademark screech of understatement. "I will end socialism. I have already knocked over environmental barriers to business and industry because the national parks and wilderness areas, even our very land and water and air, are infected with public ownership! Now I will lay low not only Social Security — you see how cleverly they slipped 'Social' into its name? — but also the U.S. military, which is socialistically owned by the state; the VA hospitals, which are socialized medicine; the police, a socialized security force that must become even more anti-social; and the highways, those socialized routes for travel that insidiously have spread everywhere! Who needs them when I can fly here to see you in Air Force One, which is socialized air transport for my use only and which I personally will privatize!"

During the roar of approval I turned to a nearby woman with a small hat-size and enormous chest who was breathing rapidly.

"I thought last time," I said, "that he accused the opposition of wanting to eliminate the police."

"This isn't eliminating! He will make them all private Homely Securitoids!"

"Make them — what?"

"You aren't a believer, are you?"

"Oh, I suspect Koom-Posh has dug himself a deep enough hole."

"Just you wait! He'll dig himself deeper!"

On stage, Koom-Posh accused the Media of counting how many people were being hospitalized with breathing problems, not to mention Covid, after his rallies. "The Media are creating the situation and need to stop the counting!"

I turned to my companion again.

"He may get his wish. The Media will stop counting votes for him."

"That won't matter!"

"It won't?"

"No! He is above that!"

"He is?"

"Yes! Counting applies to everyone else! But he doesn't count!"

"President Koom-Posh — "

"President Koom-Posh doesn't have to count! So he doesn't count! He doesn't count!"

So loudly vociferous was she that others around her took it up. Soon the area was roaring, as well as wheezing, the chant of President Koom-Posh's not counting.

"Am I not counting on you?" came the responding roar from the stage.

"We don't count! We don't count!" roared back the crowd.

The time had come to leave, I thought. My ears were ringing with emanations from Koom-over's Bubble of Delusion and the none-too-tuneful ululations and chantings thickly swirling about me. The police at the edge, however, were letting no one leave early, unless on a gurney. Someone bumped me from behind. Turning to find a policeman there, I felt my mask being ripped away. A baton propelled me headfirst back into the crowd. I gasped, took in a dusty lungful, and passed out.

The next morning — apparently, since the sky was bright with sunshine — I woke groggily to a piercing headache. I held my hands before my eyes, and saw they were chalk-white.

I had frozen to death!

My hands shook so violently with fear at this insane thought that the thick Antiree dusting fell away. The stuff had nearly persuaded me. I stood up, coughing, and looked around at the field covered with corpses — or whatever they were, abandoned on the runway tarmac and surrounding grass. They looked like those ash-covered bodies at Pompeii.

I went to the cordon at the field's edge, still manned by police.

"Why is this fence here?" I said.

"To keep the Media from counting you all in there," said a policewoman.

"But I'm not one of them. I'm not dead."

She squinted at me. I half expected her to ask about my being a believer or not. Then she opened the gate.

"I guess you don't count," she said.

I believe she meant it as a compliment.