Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
People were right to make fun of Mitt Romney. His pseudonym “Pierre Delecto” is ridiculous. So ridiculous, I figured, that it had to be an anagram, and I wasn’t wrong.
Since the news moved on immediately—who can blame it; what, with the Kurds betrayed, and Giuliani acting like a shakedown artist, and his employer a scuzzier shakedown artist?—anyway, the news moved on from Romney’s Twitter handle, but not me. I spent 20-or-so minutes deciphering, and I’ll tell you why Pierre Delecto is a problem, but maybe also a solution:
Take away the d and the o from “Delecto,” and you get “elect.” Put that o together with one of the rs in “Pierre,” and that spells “or.” Set the d beside the i and one of the es, and what you get is “die.” Leaving us with just three letters: r–e–p. As in, “Rep”; as in, short for “Republicans.”
So Romney’s tweeting disguise isn’t benign and goofy after all because “Elect Rep. or Die” is the kind of thinking that this country, starting with Senator Romney, needs to change. Romney, and Senators Murkowski, Collins, Grassley, and 16 others have got to take up the House’s impeachment case and remove the Tumor-in-Chief from our White House. Pronto.
They’ve got the power. And they must have heard fairy tales as children. And my hope is they understood the morals then, and still do:
Jack and the Beanstalk
How weird is this story? I mean,
no one trades away their cow
for a packet of beans,
not even if they’re Magic Beans
and they might grow a vine
to the clouds,
where there might be a mansion
and a giant sleeping, with a key
to a cage around his neck,
and the cage has a magic goose
laying golden eggs, and the voice says
Go ahead and steal it,
do it now
before the hall fills with honking…
not for beans or money
or supremacist wishes; not us.
We’d know it’s a swindle, right?
We’d hold on to our country and our cow.
Rob Carney’s new book The Book of Sharks is available now from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include 88 Maps, Story Problems, and Weather Report.Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to a new radio interview with Rob Carney, and here’s an older radio interview.
Header photo by welburnstuart, courtesy Shutterstock.
