He steps into the damp November air and descends to the tarmac of Ben-Gurion Airport. The Tel Aviv rainy season has begun. God has sketched a featureless sky of phosphorescent pencil. The earth receives its languid tears. But Charles-Edward Crusher, son of the President-elect, has arrived. The sun will soon emerge in Israel.
Tag Archives: Donald Trump
The Presidential Apprentice s01e03
The Presidential Apprentice “You’re hired!” s01e03 11/22/2016
TEASER
FADE IN:
NEW YORK MONTAGE
ORANGE MENACE (V.O.)
New York is a tough place, and that’s why I love it. I also love a good show. In this town everything is show business. You want to make it big? Then learn how to put on a show. I’m talking real drama. I know show business, and look where I am today. The White House!
FLATLINE
America: Open for Business
America’s rich diversity streams to the tower for an audience with the orange menace. President-elect Crusher receives the variegated entourage with evident pleasure. He is charmed by the oil billionaire. The Hollywood billionaire is amusing. The media billonaire cajoles. The hedge fund billionaire tells a funny story involving a scandalous politician and a Rockaway restaurant. The real estate billionaire performs an indecent but also competent impersonation of George Soros. The technology billionaire speaks mostly of golf.
– “We’ll have to get on the course,” says the orange menace.
– “Let’s,” says the technology billionaire.
The Spirit Works Through Him
The orange menace sleeps his usual seventeen minutes but does not sleep well. He wakes with the mist of a terrfying dream thick upon his brain.
Yes, Mr. President, Yes
Geld Times journalist, Barry Leed, has spent the day on a metal bench in the Crusher Tower lobby. The waiting’s been in vain, not just for him but for the pool of journalists that engulfs him. There has been no sign of the orange menace, nor of his chief strategist, Shive White. The few insiders who do arrive emerge from limousines and are hurried to the elevator, like a leaf floating on a current. A door opens and they appear, another opens and they are gone.
The Orange Menace Chooses His Cabinet
Each morning the orange menace rises at 4:20, refreshed by his standard seventeen minutes of sleep, and prepares for the day.
His eyes open to the copula and take in the ceiling fresco. Apollo is crossing the sky in his four-horse chariot. The gods are young and beautiful and shimmering white. They turn their gaze to him. The orange menace tosses in his sleep but each day he awakes to a heroic world. “Good morning,” says Apollo. “I have been waiting for you.” The orange menace lifts himself from the goose down pillow and sits on the edge of his bed, puts on slippers. He is on the move.
Introducing Mr. Leed
Geld Times journalist Barry Leed is an unacknowledged hero. Although he failed to anticipate the triumphal rise of the orange menace, he retrospectively writes of its inevitability. There’s nothing about this shocking election victory that Mr. Leed cannot explain. “It’s obvious to me what happened,” he says. “Hardly a surprise, given the clear and abundant facts.” As for what lies ahead, Mr. Leed can explain this, too. He is a restless watcher of President-elect Crusher, a restless fact-checker, and a restless defender of democracy.
The Return of The Orange Menace
The orange menace returns to his city of Geld in triumph. He is the anointed one. From atop his fortress he scans the southern coast.
– “My city,” he says. “The everperning gyre, of depravity and appetite unbound, subjugated to my warrior will.”
Hilari
The monstrous sun rises over the tableau, another da capo round of the daily quotidian’s diurnal recurrence. Hilari pauses her work of harvesting to savour a morsel of the dawn. Amor fati, she grumbles, of the eternal recurrence. She returns to the harvest.
The Office of Official Optimism
Bim Kerbler is a Junior Associate in the Office of Official Optimism, Division “C” (Quotations) Unit 42 (Inspiration) sub-sector twenty-nine (Cats). His particular area of assumed expertise is words.
A New Dawn (pt. 1)
In the beginning the mouth the tongue in trough formation wet pressing to palate pinching at the pill a pharyngeal propellation with proprioceptive reflex viz contraction of orbicularis oris and adduction of labia yielding the involuntary spasms of peristalsis the bolus inching oesophagusward bypassing trachea via shunt of the epiglottis all egress occluded etc as we take our leave of the nasopharynx, the levator palatini, the oropharynx, and so on.
The story of Catharine
When Catharine was a child, her parents told stories. Some were written in books, others improvised or recited from memory. Catharine’s mother would sit on the edge of the bed in lamplight, reading. “Why?” asks Catherine: for every story, Why. Sometimes her mother knows the answer, sometimes she invents. Catharine makes pictures of her mother’s words. The pictures come to life as dreams, embellished by the hopes and fears of a child.
The angry man rises
The bar in this small central Pennsylvania town is like many others. A few tables, a mounted television, branded tap handles, metal tube stools. I order a draught and scan the snack menu, turning my attention to the TV because it’s impossible not to.
Life Lessons from WhatsApp
HERE AND THERE, you’ll come upon a real-world story that is at-once inspiring, improbable, crazy, ironic, incredible – and that almost didn’t work out in the perfect way that it did. It’s not just rare, it’s Donald Trump good hair day rare. It’s me being told by my partner to pick up three things at the corner store and not forgetting two of them rare.
This, my friend, is the story of Jan Koum, inventor of WhatsApp.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 