Santa, Godzilla and Jesus Walk Into A Bar: Chapter 1: No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

This might be my favorite Xmas story I ever wrote; if you've read it before, maybe read it again. If you haven't, then here's the first installment of the story, from back in 2011:

"Santa,
Godzilla,
and Jesus
Walk Into A Bar"
a/k/a The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told.

(By me.)

No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

And only one orphan was harmed in the telling of it.

On the street in front of Nick, who makes UFOs for a living – it’s a long story, and there’s no time to explain it right now because we’re only moments away from something really important happening --  was a tiny brass trumpet.

It was dirty.

It was covered in soot and laying in a puddle of slush next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and looked as though it had a lipstick smear on it, on the wrong end, and maybe some teeth marks, too.

So naturally, Nick picked it up and was just seconds away from blowing into it when the door to the bar he’d just been told to leave opened up behind him and he heard the voice of the man who’d told him to leave, saying:

“Okay, okay. So here’s this one: Santa, Godzilla, and Jesus walk into a bar…”

and Nick paused with the dirty lipstick-smeared horn up to his mouth and listened because with a set up like that who wouldn’t, and then that important thing you were told was going to happen but you already forgot about it happened:

A body slammed to the ground in front of Nick, falling into, as it happens, the exact same puddle that Nick had just pulled the trumpet out of. How’s that for irony? We’re only just getting started, too.

Sirens immediately started up all around Nick, and from both ends of the street – he was in the middle of the block – came cop cars racing towards him, almost as if they’d been waiting for just this.

(They had been.)

Nick squatted down and looked at the body in front of him. It was a large man, laying on his stomach.  His face was turned to the side, his eyes closed. Somehow, the fedora the man wore, which Nick hadn’t noticed until that moment, had stayed on when the man had fallen to the puddle from wherever it was he’d fallen from.

All the buildings on the street being three stories or shorter, Nick didn’t bother looking up above him.  The man had fallen straight down from the sky, Nick knew, because it had happened right in front of his eyes.

“We’ll take care of this, sir,” said the surprisingly sexy cop who was suddenly standing in front of him. Nick blinked up at her, and saw her eyes narrow in a fetchingly cute way.

“Where’d you get that horn?” she said.

Nick looked down at his hand, still poised near his mouth.

“It’s a trumpet,” he said.

The cop reached for her waist, and Nick made his second regrettable decision that day, the first being “admitting to the bartender that he had no money before he ordered.”

He ran.

The third regrettable decision he made a second later when he looked back and saw the sexy lady cop lifting up the dead bum’s jacket, and noticed the dead bum had wings.


PART TWO COMING SOON. Or if you want you can buy the entire story all at once here. 

Good thing Obamacare fixed health care...

... so we never have to think about it again, right? NOTHING TO FIX HERE. Keep that in mind when the GOP -- soon to be NUMBER ONE IN PEDOPHILE SENATORS!! -- threatens to tear down Obamacare, too. What we had before was terrible. Obamacare is terrible. What we will have next is terrible.

Here's what got me started thinking about this. From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

A reminder: George W. Bush was our worst president ever.

Democrats recently decided to become even more Republican than they were already (and than they have been since Bill Clinton first moved the party significantly to the right in the 1990s, helping create our current world, in which two major political parties compete to see who can be more cruel to the middle class and poor.)

That rightwards-and-downwards shift by Democrats is reflected in numerous ways, most recently in reports that Democrats were now more approving than ever of George W. Bush, the worst president in United States' history. It's not true that a majority of Democrats have a favorable opinion of Bush now (only 48% do) and the way the question was asked ("Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Bush?") doesn't demonstrate approval of any specific policy or policies Worst Ever pushed through, but still.

But still.

So some reminding.

Bush is credited with a $1,300,000,000,000 tax cut as one of his first achievements in office. Those tax cuts left unchanged the taxes paid by people earning between $17,000-$68,000 a year. They were a subsidy, at the expense of that lower middle class, to the top earners, who saved a minimum of $25,000 per year on their taxes. That's minimum. A person earning $374,000 per year in 2001 has in his or her pocket an extra $325,000 by 2012 as a result of Bush's tax cuts. A person earning $68,000 per year then has no extra money now.  Those tax cuts repealed the estate tax, allowing the rich to pass on their wealth without any taxation.

The deficits created by the Bush tax cuts (which never produced the surpluses predicted, because: economics) will account for fully 1/3 of the national debt by next year.  Bush and the rich borrowed from the poor in 2018 to finance a spending spree that caused the economy to crash in 2008 and left our current government impoverished. Again: $1 of every $3 the federal government owes today is directly because of the 2001 Bush tax cuts. (The economy began to grow faster after the tax cuts were phased back out in 2012.) (But in exchange for phasing taxes back up in some cases, other things such as the capital gains tax cut were made more permanent.)

Bush started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter without any reason and the former without any reasoning. 20,000+ Americans have been wounded in Afghanistan, 2,800+ killed. The numbers are just under 32,000 wounded and just over 4,000 dead in Iraq.

The Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina was more callous and less effective than Trump's response to the three hurricanes this year. Bush refused to agree to the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. US greenhouse gas emissions rose steadily from 2001 to 2007.

Bush's administration engineered bailouts of numerous businesses that caused the financial crisis. They turned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into guarantors and rescuers of businesses, allowing risky investments and commodifying people's mortgages so that to this day people are foreclosed on by lenders with little risk to the lender and lots of loss of homes to people who did not cause the problem but are suffering the fix. The federal government took over a major insurance company and made low-interest loans to businesses to guide them through the financial crisis, deals that supposedly were anathema to the Republicans but which we know were not, because Republicans use government to benefit the rich while Democrats use government to benefit themselves (and they are also the rich.)

When Richard Nixon died he was given a state funeral and honored by genteel comments from everyone. People forgot that he was a criminal who only avoided prison because the man he gave the job to pardoned him, and people forgot that Nixon ordered peace talks to end in Vietnam so that he could be re-elected. 22,000 more people died before that war ended, all on Nixon's watch. He got a state funeral and honors for killing 22,000 young Americans. But at least it used to take a person dying before we forgave his sins and pretended everything was all right. George W. Bush pushed America into a ditch -- a ditch dug by Bill and Hillary Clinton and one that is being filled in above our heads by the Trumpocalypse, true, but it was Bush that put us here.