UNSENT MAIL
DEAR DONALD TRUMP, WHERE WERE YOU WHEN ARMSTRONG LANDED ON THE MOON?
My name is Fizool Timepasswala. There’s a Drafts folder in my head with unsent letters to so many Very Important People. My letters usually get written (in my mind) when I take Milton for a walk, poop bag in hand. Milton always offloads, and I think it’s time I did, too.
Image credit: HISTORY IN HD on Unsplash.
Dear Donald Trump,
Was that all a dream?
I woke up this morning in a cold sweat. I had dreamt that you had become the 45th President of the United States by getting almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.
Incredible. A victory for democracy. Hysterical Republican crowds were cheering, Make America Great Again! Make America Great Again!
You were a magician of sorts, too.
You had somehow managed to convince them that being the first nation in the world to have landed a man on the moon (actually two) was not great enough.
That being the nation that gave the world the first practical car that people could afford – Model T Ford – was not something they should still be proud of (just because the Japanese and the Germans and the Koreans are also now making them).
Your countrymen, the Wright brothers, made the first airplane flight; engineered the first submarine (John Holland in 1900) and the machine gun (Dr Gaitling during the Civil War); the Internet in the 60s and the cellphone in 1973...all those were nothing compared to what your White House would achieve, you had suggested.
All those iconic beautiful, tall buildings in NYC (including some with your name on them), they are the envy of the whole world. Of course, there are tall buildings these days in Dubai and Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, but they are also-rans, the United States of America is the unrivalled first prize winner in nation building.
Which is why everyone I know in India and elsewhere is doing their darndest to get an American work visa.
Still. Yet, still the crowds in your rallies bought your claim of American inferiority, and that you would somehow set it right in four years.
Everyone was ecstatic – everyone except the silent majority that had voted for Hillary. (But they knew they would get another chance in 2020 which they did, and put it to good use.)
Donald, now that I have taken two sips of my morning coffee, my head is clearing a bit.
It wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare. For four loooong years.
A Donald Trump impersonator at the White House, Washington DC. Image credit: DARREN HALSTEAD on Unsplash.
Every day, you lied. It was “a tsunami of untruths”, but some people bought them any way. (There’s always a buyer, if you have something, anything, to sell, my Dad would say).
You made bombastic claims about yourself.
You made friends with the likes of Vladimir Putin (who is probably trying to extract a late revenge for the collapse of the Soviet Union, were you unaware of this?).
You sliced America into bits and pieces of vitriotic hatred. Whites. Blacks. Asians. Immigrants. Job stealers. Us. Them.
You promised to bring back jobs from China and India although the businessman in you ought to have known from the start that it was not doable, not in this century, that ship sailed long ago. But you knew if you peddled it persuasively enough, they would buy it. And they did. Poor souls.
Make America Great Again! It’s fool’s gold, Donald. You conned your countrymen.
America is a great nation. It’s a great nation with a great neighbour. That’s where I live, a day’s drive from the White House from where you will be evicted on January 20.
You are fired, Donald.
Happy New Year, world!
Yours in great relief,
Fizool Timepasswala