America, in a ritual that it undertakes every four years,
is about to elect a president. Our choices for the highest office in the land
are a man who has done absolutely nothing in two years in the U.S. Senate,
Barack Obama, and a man that has done too much for too long in the U.S. Senate,
John McCain.
How are we to judge a candidate that has not enacted any legislation and must
find it bothersome to roll out of bed and vote, since he does so little of it?
How can we assess a candidate that has voted in so many contrary ways for so
long that he would, if he could, vote against his own legislation? We need a
sure fire test to evaluate these candidates.
We are not looking for a saint to be our next president. A saint won't get us
out of the economic doldrums or blow up all the bad guys that need blowing up in
the next four years. Saints aren't good at math (with the exception of keeping
track of sheep and lambs) or physical exertion (with the exception of hurling
heretics onto pikes). You would never want to cheat off a saint during a
calculus test or pick a saint to be on your softball team. We are also looking
for someone without many scruples. Someone with an oversized sense of morality
won’t get the job done.
We need a pirate as president.
Pirates are quite good with numbers. They must calculate costs and benefits on a
regular basis. They must, for instance, know how many hostages to take and what
the pay out will be for the hostages. This, by the way, is not an easy
calculation as pirates must be on top of the value of different currencies as
well as the going rate for different nationalities. A Euro or Yen is worth just
so many American dollars. A Somali or Nigerian is worth just so many Peruvians.
Pirates are simply wonderful at murder. They can cut, chop, hew and slice better
than your local butcher. They can explode, blast, burst and detonate just about
anything in so many imaginative ways. The most our current candidates can
probably do is shake up a bottle of soda and spray the contents over one of the
demagogues or terrorist chieftains roaming our planet.
Neither candidate has what it takes. Obama is the equivalent of a certain type
of sports fan, the sort of fan that is known -- not so politely -- as a
"jock-sniffer". Obama is a jock-sniffer of leftist radicals, a connoisseur of
the sulphuric set. McCain, for all his grit, has a rusty trigger finger. He has
not fired a weapon of any caliber in anger in a long time and so we must wonder
if he has what it takes to annihilate a multitude of any magnitude. Can he even
assassinate his opponent's character? He has had his chances.
These candidates are our only choices, and so despite their shortcomings, we
must decide which of them would make the better pirate and therefore the better
president.
Could Obama walk bow-legged across a rolling deck? I think not. He could not
even stroll across a patio pigeon-toed after a few beers. That man is just too
cool. McCain has a jaunty walk, and with work he could at least develop a
saunter. Advantage: McCain.
Which candidate could drink more rum? Obama seems like a Chardonnay man through
and through, maybe even a wine spritzer sort of fellow. He would turn up his
nose at rum unless he needed the Puerto Rican vote, in which case he would have
his advisors swig rum like it was going out of style. His advisors do everything
for him anyway. McCain's wife is a beer baroneess, and my guess is that McCain
could go for several tumblers of rum without much prodding, or any other drink
in sight. He did serve in the Navy after all. Advantage: McCain.
Would Obama or McCain look better climbing the rigging? Obama would not climb
it. Again, he has those advisors. They would climb for him. McCain would be up
the rigging in a jiffy, as soon as someone told him that he could see down Sarah
Palin's blouse from up there. Advantage: McCain.
Is Obama or McCain more practiced in deception? McCain may have no idea what he
is saying, but he means it when he says it. Obama will say anything to get
elected, and has changed his positions a number of times. I've got to go with
Obama on this one. Obama appears to be the better liar. Advantage: Obama.
We now come to style. Which candidate would wear a bandana and white gauze shirt
open to the navel with the panache that is so important to a pirate? Is there an
option here? Obama is the essence of style. Granted his bandana would be Gucci
and his shirt Gaultier, but he seems more comfortable with just about anything
European than American anyway. It is unfortunate that he can't run for president
of the European Union. McCain can pull an old undershirt out of his closet and
rip it for his bandana, and maybe pop a few buttons on one of his Brooks
Brothers shirts, but "C'est la vie". Advantage: Obama.
Which candidate would parley better with our enemies? I don't understand McCain.
He speaks in short and choppy sentences, and I have difficulty following his
train of thought. I imagine that he would only confuse our adversaries. Obama,
however, does have a silver tongue and might lull our foes into forgetting that
they hate us -- especially if he promised them a tax cut or universal
healthcare, or any of the other policies that he has promised but will never
deliver because he'll be too busy bailing out the banks.
We have a tie based on these criteria but frankly, as I opined earlier, neither
candidate would really make a good pirate.
The American people need and deserve someone without principles, a real rogue, a
dastardly individual that we can envision walking around the oval office with a
parrot. A scoundrel's scoundrel. We had such a president once, and he would have
made a splendid pirate, and we treated him poorly. We punished him for his
aptitude for evil. We threw him out of office and have not been the same nation
since we did so. Yes, he would have made an excellent pirate, and now he is
gone. He is gone.
Whom else but he could help us in this grim season, in our time of such need?
If only we could bring him back.
Richard Nixon.
©2008
Edward Chupack
Author Bio
Edward Chupack is an attorney for a major law firm. He lives near Chicago. His
first novel, Silver, is available now
from Thomas Dunne Books. To learn more about Long John Silver, please visit www.silverpirate.com.