Hibiscus Close-up

Yes dear friends this post is yet another treatise on the Donald, but before I launch into it and probably turn you all off, let me give you my news. I went to a concert last night at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. As part of its annual summer time Whitaker Festival, this concert was free to attend. I went to the gardens in response to a Team Kaldi’s invite, from Stew and Nancy. I was sitting on the fence about going and when I finally did decide to go, I had let too much time slip away. The event was billed as a potluck, so I decided to bring the only thing that I had in the house, beer. I figured that beer would be a big hit with a bunch of thirsty bikers. As it turned out Stew, Nancy and their friend Linda were the only other people there and they were all drinking wine. Still, as Nancy pointed out it was a rare, at least in Saint Louis, beautiful summer’s evening. I had a good time speaking with them. The music was somewhat forgettable, in part because we continued to talk over it throughout the concert.

Trump 2016! Lisa Simpson 2020!!

I don’t know when exactly the Donald’s presidential campaign story first exploded upon the news cycle, because it was already going great guns, when I first emerged from my vacation inspired, self-enforced news blackout. I guess that the story hit a crescendo when Trump captured the #1 spot in presidential polls among GOP hopefuls, making him truly the face of the Republican Party and its hair too. If the Donald is a viable candidate then the movie, “Idiocracy”, is now a documentary. Now God forbid that the Donald ever gets elected, but in a show of its prescient power, the long running TV cartoon show “The Simpsons” once aired an episode entitled “Bart to the Future” that had Lisa become the first female president. She became president after Trump had bankrupted the country. Brother Bart became her secretary of Keeping It Real.

Now the candidacy of Lisa Simpson is not without a few constitutional hurdles. On first inspection, she is only an eight-year-old girl and the minimum age for the US Presidency is 35, but she has been eight since the show’s inception in 1989, making her actually old enough to be president in time for the 2016 election. I’m sure that she would make a great president and I might even support her over Hillary, but there is just one minor problem, Lisa is a fictional character. I don’t know of any particular clause in the constitution that specifically forbids fictional characters from holding elective office. Plenty have made it on the ballots before. Some of our best presidents have been fictional characters. There is Michael Douglas’ role in “American President” and Harrison Ford’s “Air Force One”, for example. We here in Missouri have proudly elected a dead man and Lisa is way more animated than he was, but I’m sure that Scalia would have no trouble garnering five votes to disqualify her. So, what we need is the passage of the 28th Amendment, allowing fictional characters to hold public office, which would have no trouble passing amidst the convulsions of a Trump Presidency. That would then make Matt Groening the Master of the Universe, a job that he is already way overqualified for and the country could begin to heal…