What If He Goes on the Lam?

Pulling a Reverse-Sherman

            An Italian man told me once that his village was the one where Mussolini, having been overthrown, was caught as he tried to fly the coop. Il Duce was being spirited away, hunched down in the back of a truck surrounded by nondescript supporters, when a member of a partisan search party shouted:

            "Melone!" Mussolini's great big melon of a head had given him away.

            It's hard to hide your head when it's so distinctive looking, and you don't know what it means to have shame.

            Yes, the current prime minister of Italy is named Meloni, and appears to have autocratic tendencies, but never mind that. I'm thinking tonight of an American punkinhead.

               Trump is the reverse of William Tecumseh Sherman, who when urged to run for president in 1884 sent a telegram saying, "I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected." (Some early improver changed that, for the ages, to the snappier "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.")

            If not nominated, Trump will keep on running anyway. If defeated, he won't admit it. If arrested, he won't . . .

            He won't what? Have to acknowledge it? Because he will have swung some kind of deal? Thanks to certain documents he has up his sleeve?

            Or will he take a powder?

To where? Russia? Is there golf in Russia? Or even Diet Coke?

            North Korea? Not a good fit for a fat cat. Even Kim Jong Un has slimmed down.

            West Virginia, then? He'd have to share biggest-asshole status with Joe Manchin. Or Wyoming? Trump’s approval there (as of this May) is 62 percent, same as in Alabama. But what kind of shady business opportunities would Trump have in Wyoming? Leveraging sheep?

            Don't let it be Alabama. Please. Talk about rekindling fires.

            Jefferson Davis, in flight after the Confederacy’s fall, was allegedly captured wearing (over his guy clothes) something belonging to his wife. Can’t see Trump fitting into anything of Melania’s. But might he cloak himself in civil war? After January 6, we can just about hear him doing it.

            That would truly be a reverse-Sherman. During the civil war that we did suffer in this country, Sherman wrote to his wife, "I regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash -- and it may be well that we become so hardened."

            Hardened enough to get the horror over with. Which he and Grant did. But it was hell.

            Fourteen years later, Sherman addressed the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy. "I've been where you are now," he told the verging-on-manhood cadets, "and I know just how you feel. It's entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.

            "Suppress it!"

    HIDY-HO, LET’S SHOOT OFF A LIMERICK

                               Are we nearing the end of the saga

                               Of that marvelous shit Mr. MAGA?

                                           Or will the man prove,

                                           By some dastardly move,

                                That both he and the U.S. are gaga?