I Have No Presidential Aspirations

"The forgotten paintings on velvet re-surfaced to haunt the candidate..." NEWSWEEK March 20, 2016

At least I thought I had none. Recently my dogs, Zoloft and Cymbalta, have come to me not with my slippers and the London Times, but with a proposal, a scheme if you will, that they wish to run on the unsuspecting populace. They are bemused by the possibility of husband & wife presidencies: Bill Clinton and Hillary. Of course, father & son presidencies were done early on with the Adams, Pere et Fils, and the Bush imbroglio was only notable for the fatuousness of the son, and not for the succession of their presidencies. It seems that son & father might be a bit more unusual, say if Sonny Blutarski were to become prez for a brace of terms, later to be followed by old man Blutarski. Anyhow, Zoloft and Cymbalta have a proposal. What instigated this idea of theirs was my slip one day of reading the news and expostulating that the world was going to the dogs! I sensed a sudden silence, as if the regular panting which formed the background cosmic noise to my life had stopped. (She-who-must-be-obeyed does not form background noise. She is - how shall we say it?-the singularity of my Universe? The Big Bang, if you will, around whose circumference the quarks and anti-quarks tiptoe lest they wake her.) Their tongues had retracted into their mouths. They no longer looked carefree. They no longer stared adoringly at my rumpled figure. In fact, I seemed to notice a distinct narrowing of their eyes as they stared at me with an intense scrutiny, interspersed with condescending snorts.

It is their idea that I should run for President. No,no. Not because I have any good qualities or good ideas. Heavens no. They know me better than that. They wish me merely to establish a presidency on my own. Now whether I serve one term or two matters not. It doesn't matter whether I even serve out one term. All they want is that I be elected and be sworn in. Then after I have left office, at some future date one of them...or both...shall run for President. Upon their successful election to office, we shall have established the owner & dog succession of presidencies, or- as they like to say it- the succession of Dim Bulb & His Canine Handlers. It seems like a lot of work for a small pay-off. Being congenitally lazy, I demurred. They came back with razors of arguments, such as the "world going to the dogs" thing, exposing my own shallowness and my inbred "Anthropism": a crime they explained as Homo-centric racism versus the other animals. Well, I was guilty. I suppose I'll have to throw my Deerstalker into the ring. There may be problems. I asked them how they were going to handle those old paintings on velvet that Cymbalta posed for when he was young and on the streets. They dismissed my fears as...well, the babble of a lazy blogger! Blast!