Black Books-Chapter Four

A fictional account of life in MAGAritaville.

He sauntered onto his private G550, wearing a tight black t-shirt that silhouetted his plump B-cups.

A black cowboy hat was on backwards but none of the sycophants gathered for the short flight from Austin had the balls to tell him.

He told an awkward joke in his strange, clipped manner as if he had learned elocution from a drunk donkey.

More bray than balance.

The emphasis falling on the wrong syllables and cascading into a word salad no one could decipher but were paid to endure.

He walked to his private back lounge where he had a massage table and a Space X employee, a comely trained physical therapist who was about to get propositioned.

“I’ll buy you a horse if you give me a hand job…no, no I’m serious” he said, with what passed for a smile on his pale and unremarkable face.

Disgusted, she rebuked him as a slight crease formed on his Botoxed brow.

He knew he had just crossed another line and it would cost him in court.

His lawyers knew the drill well by now and charged him twice the hourly rate of any other client - which they laughingly referred to as an ‘asshole tax’ in the partner’s boardroom.

His exploits and transgressions had already put several of their kids through Ivy League colleges.

He was off to see the ‘illegals’ Rogan had told him were flooding across the border.

It made him feel like a man of action.

Too twisted to see the irony or abuse he was wielding.

Hell, he had basically snuck across the border from Canada himself and then lied about his degree from Penn.

A man in perpetual motion trying to outrun the stink of his own decidecly average abilities.

His best trick was to find somebody else’s idea and claim it for his own.

South Africa, Ontario, Pennsylvania, San Francisco and now Texas - where he seemed to delight in the worship of tech bros and podcast bullies.

He was uber-wealthy and white and he knew that would count for more than hard work in the land of the grifter.

Texas had welcomed him after he refused to shut down his Tesla plants during COVID lockdowns in California.

Bucking a global pandemic that cost millions of lives so he could keep the money flowing in from his non-union, poorly manufactured vehicles.

The ‘Woke’ were his enemy now - and since he sold shitty products he knew the burgeoning ‘Christian’ right-wing would welcome him.

Mediocrity was their North Star and he was a master at image over substance.

His daddy had made him rich off of the backs of others in emerald mines.

That’s how the white men did it in the South Africa of his youth.

He missed those days and wanted to bring a little taste of it here, a perfect fit for the scabrous MAGA mental phenonmena that was sweeping the southern states.

Forget that he was high as fuck most of the time and had more kids than he could count.

That wasn’t gonna stop him, though in moments of clarity he knew nobody liked him, even his kids, and deep down he knew why.

Like everything else in modern American life the word ‘genius’ had been watered down and stripped of its meaning whilst being ascribed to men as mediocre and vile as Elon Musk.

He was welcomed with open arms by sawed-off little boymen who would never really measure up.

The crypto-bros who dreamed of achieving vast fortunes while clutching Playstation controllers in their moms’ basements.

Creatine-addled tree stumps with the shape and subtlety of human spark plugs.

Most of them looked like someone had spray-tanned a fire hydrant.

Perpetual adolescents for whom UFC became a cultural touchstone, ecstasy and elk meat an elixir.

The dopamine high of dumbassery was big business.

Elon Musk is a genius to guys who think Joe Rogan is funny and Donald Trump is a real billionaire.

What Henry Ford did for automobile manufacturing (himself an odious anti-Semite and budding fascist of his time) the internet did for broken personalities.

It allowed them to be mass produced cheaply.

Podcasts and social media pages afforded meager men the illusion of freedom and a taste of power.

A thousand idiots launched their ships onto the seas of seeming superiority.

Fanning the flames of ignorance with tropes and slurs they learned around the kitchen tables of generations of racist uncles.

Now it was being pumped into the cerebral cortexes of millions of stunted suburban white men.

Hobbled by forces beyond their control, they found it much easier to point fingers than search for facts.

While the cyber-grifters picked their bones like a thousand carcasses strewn across a digital highway to hell.

It circled the world and back again in the blink of an eye and made men wealthy for no other skill than spewing lies.

Hate was a currency now and the bad actors wanted in.

None more so than the aging orange freak and the jackals he called his kids.

Musk was a perfect fit for their fraternity of fraudulence and he phoned into Mar-a-Lago with his broken syntax and his bumbling brain.

Only months earlier he had been summoned in person to Palm Beach.

A trip he was all too eager to take, assuming he would have some sort of upper hand in whatever transaction occurred between the two men.

But now the wolves were closing in and the playing field was leveled by both desperation and dysfunction which hung in the air of the banquet room like the stink on a tuna boat in August, as the garish oil paintings of its owner looked over the proceedings like some sort of ‘Dorian Gray’ in reverse.

Just weeks earlier he had been riding high, assuming the election was all sewn up and he would evade justice once again by returning to a job he never wanted but more powerful men than him had deemed him worthy of, a useful idiot to oiligarchs.

Now he was broken, slipping like the dentures that moved around his mouth and made him sound like Mike Tyson on downers.

It was as clownish a performance as he could muster; millions laughed at the spectacle behind their phones.

They rambled late into the night like two teenagers sitting on the floor of a 1980’s bedroom with a landline handset pressed to their ears.

“You hang up first.”

“No, you hang up first.”

Until they finally skidded to a stop, the chemicals mercifully wearing off in the each one’s addled brains and the sweet relief of sleep once again held promise.

They had not only exhausted themselves - this time they had exhausted a nation.