An open letter to Donald Trump

Dear Glorious Leader of the Free World,

I kneel before you with my unworthy eyes averted so your magnificent radiance does not blind me like it blinded all those people who said the crowd at your inauguration wasn’t all that big. Poor, deluded fools. Your crowd was bigly. Beyond bigly. It was the massivest crowd in the history of crowds. Huger even than your giant moon-sized hands. Anyone who disagrees is telling alternative truths and should be flogged and deported to Mexico.

You must be the only politician ever who, after winning an election, has demanded an investigation into voter fraud. I’m sure you’ll find that Hillary only won the popular vote after she sent Bill to the polling station three million times in different disguises. There’s no way the nasty woman is more popular than you are. You are the popularest person to walk the earth since before the Jesus time.

I am delighted to see that you are devoting your first few days in office to undoing everything the evil Muslim terrorist Barack Obama did in his eight years. The damage that man has done. He wasn’t even in office very long before he ended the 2008 recession. What madness is that? Recessions are good. America does the best recessions. Yours will be awesome.

Then he goes and reduces the nuclear warhead stockpile by ten percent. You should have had him shot for treason right there on the south lawn when you had the chance. Now you have to waste time replacing all those warheads. As if you don’t have more important things to do. Like watching Fox and tweeting.

On your very first day, you removed all that filth from the White House website about climate change. Good for you. Polar bears, like Meryl Streep, are overrated. Your slogan is America First, not Planet Earth First. As you have so rightly pointed out, global warming is a hoax. Science is a hoax. You need to ban science before it gets out of control.

I’m glad to hear the Dakota Access Pipeline is back on. Them Red Indians are just gonna have to suck it up. They have plenty of other sacred burial sites. And they can get their water from the 7-11, like the rest of America. Pipelines, not people, are what make a country great.

Well done on putting an end to that disgraceful Affordable Care Act. You need to replace it with the Affordable We Don’t Care Act. You can even drop the Affordable part. If you can’t afford it, you don’t deserve to be an American. President Donald Trump today signed into law the We Don’t Care Act. It certainly has a ring to it.

I hear your National Parks Service has gone rogue and is tweeting from unofficial accounts. Deploy the flamethrowers and smoke ’em out. Even better, unleash the old Agent Orange (I mean no disrespect here). If it worked in ‘Nam, it can work in Yellowstone. Bring in the snipers. You can’t have your employees disrespecting you. You get enough of that from the rest of the world.

The same goes for your Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s ridiculous that fish get their own service. Fish is a course, for fuck’s sake. It’s an option. They spend their lives lolling about in rivers and lakes contributing nothing to the economy. They don’t even fear us. The same goes for caribou and wolves and things. If they can’t make money or shoot a gun, there’s no point in protecting them.

Listen, you need to do something about that Sean Spicer idiot. For a start, Sean is a girl’s name. You need journalists to trust him and nobody trusts a man with a girl’s name. Look at Marilyn Manson. Tracy Morgan. Robin Thicke. Speaking of thick, Spicer doesn’t strike me as the sharpest tool in your manicure set. Also, he’s weak. He allows himself to be bullied by the press corps. Know what I’d do if I had his job and a reporter asked me a difficult question? I’d take out my gun and shoot the reporter in the face. That’s what I’d do. Then I’d ask if anyone else had a question. You have to be tough with journalists. It’s the only language they understand.

As for your advisor Kellyann Conway, is she even real? I don’t mean to be rude, but it looks as if her head is made from bits of other people’s faces. Her only saving grace is that she’s blonde and maintains a charming flirtation with reality.

Speaking of which, how is Melania enjoying being First Lady? I hope she’s perked up a bit. She certainly didn’t seem to be having much fun at the inauguration. I’d watch that one, if I were you. The Slovenians are a shifty bunch at the best of times and she could turn on you at any time. Smart move keeping her locked up in the Trump Tower. That might not be enough to keep Bill away, though. Did you see the way he was looking at her? Hillary certainly did. He was actually licking his lips. Then again, the old perv is getting on a bit and could just as easily have been imagining her as a giant blue macaroon.

While we’re on the subject, who gave all those crazy women permission to protest on the day after your inauguration? Did they even have permission? This is the problem with women today. We must return to the good old days when women needed permits to get a job or even leave the house.

Obama has let them off the leash and we need to move quickly to rein them in. You’ve made a good start by banning funding for abortions. Maybe this will once and for all get the message across that women’s bodies are not their own. They are ours. It says so in the Bible. Deuteronomy 23:1 “No man whose testicles have been crushed or whose organ has been cut off may become a member of the Assembly of God.” Sorry. I can’t find the bit about women’s bodies.

What’s up with the Netherlands? Apparently they’re setting up an overseas abortion fund to counteract your ban. If you’re going to bomb your enemies alphabetically – and there’s no reason you shouldn’t – you might as well start with Amsterdam. Knowing the Dutch, they’d probably enjoy it.

Smart move making Steve Bannon Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel. I beg your pardon, National Security Council. Ignore the critics. It’s not as if you’re modeling your administration on the Third Reich. It’s just good ol’ Bannon. How much damage can one Nazi really cause?

Anyway, I have to go and lie down for a bit. Just a quick request. Can you come over here and give some of our people a lesson on how to fight an election? These jokers had millions to run a covert smear campaign against the opposition but then spent all the money on expensive clothes and imported whisky. They couldn’t even afford office supplies once they’d finished stuffing themselves on donor money. Amateurs.

Getting the fox to guard the hen house

The Trump campaign has pledged to nominate a hunter to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, aggressively fight lawsuits by anti-hunting groups and control predators like wolves.

Guess who is top of the list. That’s right. None other than Donald Junior. Here’s a letter I wrote to Trump’s delightful boys not too long ago.

Hey boys!

Just wanted to congratulate you on your successful hunting trip to Zimbabwe. Our papers have been full of pictures of you guys holding up dead leopards in a pink mist of vapourised waterbuck. You’re real heroes in these parts, let me tell you. There has been a bit of criticism, but it’s coming mainly from white bunny-hugging do-gooders who think wild animals are there to be photographed instead of destroyed like the vermin they are.

Bloody liberals.

I see you managed to bag three of the Big Five. Well done! But what stopped you from going for a full house? You got the buffalo, elephant and leopard, but missed the rhino and lion. And you call yourselves Trumps? Just kidding. I’m sure it’s not your fault. I bet the organisers of the hunt failed to tether them securely and they escaped before you could drive up and shoot them in the face.

Donald Junior, I particularly enjoyed the picture of you holding an elephant’s tail in one hand and a knife in the other. You can even see the legs of the elephant lying on the ground to prove that you got it off the animal and not from a curio shop. I bet you also cut off its trunk and poked it through your zipper and pretended you had a giant willy. I certainly would have.

I liked the shot of you guys posing next to a crocodile strung up from a tree. It reminded me of those old pictures from your Deep South. Now that the darkies are off-limits, croc-lynching could be the next big thing in Alabama. Wanna be partners? You gun ’em down, I string ’em up.

By the way, did you know that we also have a Small Five that are tremendous fun to kill? Meerkats are my best. If you’re quick, you can run up and kick them before they bolt for cover. Your brother, Eric, could have waited in an imaginary end zone to catch the flying ‘kat. Touchdown! American football, Africa style. What’s not to love?

Another of my favourites is the tortoise. Hunting tortoises is usually done when you have a hangover. I’m sure you had lots of those on your trip because the only way to survive in Africa is to drink heavily while firing blindly into the night.

So what you do is set up your chair within shouting distance of a reliable servant – you don’t want to run out of Bloody Marys – and wait for a tortoise to come along. Put your foot on his back to stop him from getting away. This is where it gets tricky. He will have retracted himself, making a clean head shot impossible. Don’t shoot him in the shell if you plan on using him as a paper-weight. They shatter easily. Rather take a leaf out of your father’s book. Cut off his lights and water and starve him out.

You said the local villagers were overjoyed at getting the meat from your hunt. And why wouldn’t they be? Leopard carpaccio garnished with a sprinkling of civet cat and drizzled with crocodile jus doesn’t appear on the menu in the Matetsi area all that often.

When I read that the hunt organisers were called Hunting Legends, I thought they were offering legends like President Robert Mugabe. Now there’s a trophy you should have on your wall. But I suppose he would put up too much of a fight. Not that you lads aren’t bok for a fight. Far from it. A kudu is a hell of an adversary. You were just fortunate to come across one that was drugged. To be honest, a lot of the game in southern Africa is on drugs these days. They also lack any real work ethic and spend most of the day sleeping. Smelly freeloaders. No wonder we kill them.

You were also lucky to have survived shooting a tusker. Many elephants, particularly in Zimbabwe, are known to explode without warning and, even from a distance of 300 metres, you could easily have lost a leg. Or worse, had your hair messed up. Gel is hard to come by in the bush.

I’m not much of a hunter myself, but I think I know why you boys enjoy it. For a start, Eric is a girl’s name and he has a lot to prove. And your name is Donald Junior, and yet it is Eric who looks more like your father. No wonder you’re angry.

You said the money you paid for the hunt will be used to fund nature conservation in Zimbabwe. I presume by “fund nature conservation” you mean “arm Zanu-PF veterans”. That’s okay. We understand code in these parts. No names, no pack-drill. Whatever the hell that means.

My wife says you’re both latent homosexuals. But as my Uncle Pervy used to say, “Better latent than never.” Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that I beat her soundly for her insolence.

I must say, though, Eric, you do look pretty damn sexy with that leopard draped over your shoulders. It brings out your eyes. And Donald Junior, seeing you straddling that dead buffalo makes doggie style seem positively Christian.

Y’all come back again, ya hear!

Guns don’t kill people. Arseholes kill people.

Don’t get me wrong. You won’t catch me hugging any bunnies, but that’s largely because I’m afraid of them. It’s not funny. Leporiphobia is a real thing. I don’t come around to your house and laugh at your phobias, but I will if I have to. Actually, no, I won’t. I will come to your house with spiders and snakes and black men wearing balaclavas and force you to confront your fears. I might also laugh.

So, anyway. We have established beyond doubt that shooting deaths are caused by aresholes with guns, whether it be the paranoid 26-year-old arsehole who killed nine people at an Oregon college or the 28-year-old arsehole who killed Reeva Steenkamp.

Then there are the tens of thousands of people around the world walking the streets today who have shot and killed people. Some of them even got medals for it. They are soldiers, former soldiers and that guy at the end of the bar who you really don’t want to bump into. Are they all arseholes? Of course not. But mostly, yes.

I like the idea of guns more than I like guns themselves. They’re a bit like women, really. And I don’t mean loud and capable of going off for no good reason at all. I mean you feel invincible when you have one, but take it away and you spend your nights in the foetal position crying yourself to sleep.

Guns are weirdly supernatural. I don’t understand how they work. I also find television and electricity weirdly supernatural. Did you know that Superman is the only person who can travel faster than a speeding bullet? It’s no wonder we haven’t seen him in ages. He probably overshot Hillbrow in the 1960s and has been trying to find his way back from the Andromeda galaxy ever since.

The idea of being able to kill someone sitting on the beach a kilometer away is one that I find strangely compelling. You needn’t even have to stand up. Simply put your beer down, rest your rifle on a small child’s head, aim and pull the trigger. Bam! One less person on the beach.

History has shown that hostile forces tend to gather at the seaside. The Germans killed thousands on the beaches of Normandy. Of course, you’re going to need more than a sniper rifle if you hope to match figures like these. And you’re going to have to wait until December.

Google spits up 381 million results if you search for “guns”. I googled “sex” and got 1.6 billon results. Then I got distracted. Later, I googled sex and guns and got 96 million results, one of which was a story out of an American town called Blacksburg. “A small community in Virginia mourns as a man dies after having sex with his revolver.” It got worse after that. The next few results pointed me to sites about Guns N’ Roses, a band that toured Europe in the late 1940s, precipitating the early surrender of the Nazis.

I prefer knives to guns. When you’re not stabbing someone, you can use it to put Marmite on your toast. Try doing that with a gun.

Perhaps I need to learn how to love guns. Embrace them. Not in the way the guy from Blacksburg embraced his, obviously. Besides, I’d have a hard time inserting my … never mind.

I’m not a complete stranger to guns. When I was a kid my father would take me and his Walther PPK pistol down to the mangroves near Blue Lagoon. The first time it happened I thought he was going to kill me. Especially when he sat down and polished off half a dozen beers. Instead, he lined up the empties in a row. Then he put the gun in my little hand and told me to pretend the tins were communists. If this was a rite of passage, I failed miserably. “Go a bit closer,” he said every time I missed. Eventually I had the barrel pressed up against one of the cans. It was like an execution.

If I do get a gun, I’ll probably order it from America. You get two-for-one Tuesdays, plus a Happy Meal voucher, and they all have their serial numbers intact. I found Springfield Armory online. I liked the sound of it because the Simpsons come from Springfield. If it’s good enough for Homer, it’s good enough for me.

According to their website, in 1777 George Washington “ordered the creation of Springfield Armory to store revolutionary ammunition and gun carriages”. I won’t bore you with the details of what happened between then and now. There’s a saying that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I failed to learn history and got 17% in matric. I was damned if I was going to repeat it.

Their website says, “Let us help you find the firearm that fits you best.” Fair enough. Who among us hasn’t seen a toddler struggling to load her AK-47 and thought, “If only she had gone to a shop that cared.”

They have seven categories of guns including competition, concealed carry, home defence and short to long range. We don’t mess about with categories in South Africa. We just go a township and ask around. Or take one off a sleeping policeman.

I was immediately drawn to the concealed carry category because I have always liked hiding things. This probably explains my two failed marriages.

They offer 19 handguns. “Whether you’re looking for the most possible capacity or the deepest possible concealment, you can find it here.” I suppose one shouldn’t expect impeccable grammar from arms dealers, but how deep is the deepest possible concealment? And if we’re talking womb or lower bowel, how would you get it out in a hurry?

The multi-purpose category has 25 handguns to choose from. “Perhaps you want something to put on the nightstand after spending the day with it on the range. Or maybe you want something that you’ll shoot as often as you carry it.” I don’t understand what any of this means. I want to be able to pull the trigger and have a piece of lead ejected at 1000m a second. That’s all that matters. Forget all this talk of nightstands. You don’t want your gun reminding you of bed – you want to be reminded that it makes living things dead.

Home defence, or defense as they say, because Americans can’t spell, has 26 options. “The good news is that Springfield Armory produces several ergonomically pleasing and feature-rich firearms with plenty of capacity and power.”

This is good news for victims. Imagine the indignity of dying in a pool of your own blood after being shot with a firearm that was less than ergonomically pleasing. What a horrible way to go.

It’s not all handguns, of course. “When it comes to long-range sustained fire, you can do no better than the M1A.” Sounds a bit too close to MIA for my liking. There’s only one situation I can think of when an ordinary person might need a weapon capable of long-range sustained fire and it involves Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I’m disappointed that the shape of guns has barely changed since they were invented. Look at the range of bubble guns in toyshops. I saw one the other day shaped like a seahorse. Why can’t we do the same with real guns? I, for one, would be far more inclined to arm myself if I could buy a pistol shaped like a mongoose or a dolphin.

Come on, gun people. Let’s put the fun back into fundamentalism.

Lastly, I agree with those who say that mental illness is to blame for all the mass shootings in America. The National Rifle Association alone has five million mentally ill members. In 2013, a proposal on gun control was torpedoed when 45 mentally ill senators voted against background checks and a ban on assault rifles. Half of America’s adult population opposes stricter gun control laws. That’s 120 million mentally ill people right there. With that many crazy people on the loose, no wonder everyone wants a gun.

South Africa has never looked more sane.

We need guns to prevent dolphins from taking over the world.

 

Sum Ting Wong

They were calling it Black Monday. Racists. If anything, it should have been called Yellow Monday. It is, after all, the Chinese who are causing this global financial meltdown. Okay, so it’s more of a slowdown than a meltdown. And they’re not really yellow, but Lemon Chiffon with Papaya Undertones Monday lacks impact.

If reports are to be believed, and there’s no real evidence to suggest that news stations are deliberately exaggerating the seriousness of the situation to crank up their ratings and keep their in-house economic analysts with their grim faces and expensive suits leading the prime time bulletins so that … I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.

So this happened. The rand, that tawdry old whore, limped in well after midnight covered in scratches and smelling strongly of 14 to the dollar. That’s what comes from sleeping with capricious currencies called Yuan. You think they care. You think they will call you in the morning. But they don’t. Recovering with indecent haste from their fiscal hangover, they lower your credit rating and shamelessly move on to their next desperate victim. Beijing has slipped the world a giant roofie and nobody knows what to do about it. America is so far up its own superpower ass that it doesn’t even know it’s been date-raped.

Well, China, America might be scared to offend you, but I’m not. You and me, we don’t do business. Well, we did last Wednesday night. But know this, comrade, a polystyrene box of sweet and sour pork will never make us trading partners.

I’m getting sidetracked. Let’s get back to the terrible events of Lemon Chiffon with Papaya Undertones Monday.

“In Shanghai stocks were down 8.5% and in Japan the Nikkei was down 4.6% with the global selloff spreading to Europe where the Stoxx 600 is down roughly 4.7% and in the US S&P futures are down 3.4% an hour before the opening of trading in New York.”

The more I read, the less I understand. The experts are relentlessly bludgeoning us with brutal words like carnage and bloodbath. Blind panic is clearly the émotion de la journée and remaining calm is not an option. We all need to set aside ten minutes a day to allow ourselves to be filled with dread and confusion.

The gibberish continues unabated. “The rand has been particularly vulnerable because of South Africa’s weak fundamentals.” What does this even mean? Is Jacob Zuma one of our weak fundamentals? Is it us, the sheeple? We don’t need this kind of open-ended speculative guilt. It makes us feel jumpy and vulnerable.

There might be trouble later. On my way out to forage for weapons, I made the rookie mistake of glancing at the afternoon paper. “The Fear and Greed index compiled by CNN Money has dropped into extreme fear territory, which suggests that it is time to accumulate equities.”

There’s an index measuring fear and greed? Fantastic. The graph looks like my ECG after an all-nighter with Swirling Eddie and his hot cousin Ton-Ton McCute.

If CNN Money is right, we need to start accumulating equities as quickly as possible. I don’t know what an equity is or even what it looks like. Should I take a dozen or a thousand? Will they go off if I don’t keep them in the fridge?

It’s all too much. These monsters of money keep using words like contagion and collapse to scare us into selling our stocks and shares and first-born children, but they don’t scare me.

There are only three words that scare me – President Donald Trump.