Ishmael Reed: The Terrible Threes

“They said on the news that Reverend Jones and Jesse Hatch and them were holding meetings to decide what to do next. They’re trying to get their friends in Congress to give them power until Clift can be found. Said that everybody is out looking for Clift. That’s a laugh,” John said. His voice was touched by bitterness and disgust.

“Grandpa, what happens if they can’t find him? Does that mean that Jesse Hatch can still be President?” John didn’t respond.

“Soon as it was announced that Clift had disappeared the plane that Jesse Hatch was on turned around and headed back to Washington,” Esther said. “I’ll bet Vice President Scabb is happy. He wants to run.”

“Ain’t he the one responsible for all that crack and heroin coming into the country?” Jane said.

“Nobody knows. The press is afraid of him. He’s been the head of a lot of secret organizations in the government,” John said.

“What do you make of all of these people seeing Saint Nicholas? Just drunk?” Esther started to laugh.

“You should see the way Reverend Jones be rehearsing his preaching. Say he has to be in shape for his return to the pulpit when his mission to save America is through. He’s always listening to Reverend Franklin’s sermons and watching videos of Al Green, James Brown, and picking up pointers. Sometimes he take the rug off the floor and starts practicing sliding across the pulpit and doing splits,” Jane said. They laughed. “Said that when he returns to preaching he’s going to get a drummer like them Pentecostals use.”

“When are the Terribles going to end?” John finally said.

“Reverend McBee said that the Terribles will afflict America till she quits her wicked ways. That America’s Babylon and that Babylon will fall,” said Esther.

“Hey, why’s everybody so serious? This is supposed to be a day of joy and celebration,” John said, trying to manage a smile.

They kept drinking and talking, and telling stories about the old days, and gossiping. The grandchild was underneath the Xmas tree talking to his doll. His Black Peter doll.

On Christmas Day, the Washington Sun’s front page carried the following stories:

The Haitian maid released the late Admiral Matthew’s letter. Her lawyer said that she had left her country because her religion, a religion of the people, had been abused by the unscrupulous elite to punish their enemies instead of being used to heal and to give every peasant godlike powers, and that a jingoistic inner circle had fought against the restoration of democratic values. She had grown fond of the United States and didn’t want the same thing to happen here. She didn’t want the United States to become Big Haiti where the Bill of Rights was trampled by men in touch with the negative forces of the heart, and didn’t want an off-the-shelf operation consisting of oligarchs to rule in the name of democracy. She said that the release of this letter was her Xmas present to her new fellow citizens.

Dear (Name illegible)

You know that I’m a stand-up guy for my country. Hell, everytime I see old glory go by I break out in goose pimples. And so when the old man, General Walter Scott, invited me to join his administration, I stopped what I was doing, put my money in a blind trust and me and the missus took off for Washington on the first flight available. Though alot of his enemies said that that invasion of Dominica was staged so that his party would win the election, it made me proud to be an American again. It was a recovery from the sellout of Central America by the Bolshevik 100th Congress and that left-winger Reagan’s peace treaty with the Russians at Reykjavik, the greatest betrayal since that crippled son of a bitch Roosevelt gave eastern Europe to the commies at Yalta. I wouldn’t have joined anybody else because in my opinion the Washington politician is in the same category as those leeches the grunts used to suffer in Vietnam. You know how I felt about that war. If they’d left that war to the navy we would have won. A few warheads launched from underneath the sea outside of Haiphong harbor would have done the job. Nuked Ho Chi Minh and his crowd to kingdom come. You know what Ike said. Asians haven’t the slightest regard for life anyway, so nuking them would have been like mashing a bunch of ants. But the Harvard and Yale educated bastards in Washington were holding us back.

It was the army that lost Korea, and if it hadn’t been for the reds, the army would have lost World War II as well. If it wasn’t for the navy and the air force guys, the Japs would have invaded the United States and we’d all be working for them by now.

I’ll tell you, they had some weird characters in the White House. There was this Vice President Dean Clift — the guy was so dumb that I don’t think he knew what century he was born into. They only put him up as vice president because the old man wanted to close the gender gap by putting up somebody with a pretty face. It worked. Soon as the selection was announced the broads opened their legs and lubricated. The old man’s advisors were right. All they had to do was put Clift’s face on their night tables, and the women would forget about the old man’s promise to charge all women guilty of having abortions with murder, and his threat to place all feminists under house arrest, which is the way it was before the nineteen sixties.

The Scott/Clift ticket went up 15 % in the polls from the women’s vote, leaving the traitor commie big-spending flag-burning scum on the other ticket in the dust. Just goes to show that women think with their cunts.

The King of Beer. This guy was also plainly nuts, and was always sidling into Washington on his private plane late at night. He thought that the Indians had put a curse on him for violating some sacred spring. But the scariest of them all was Reverend Clement Jones. He was one of these premillenarians, I think you call them. Talked all the time about the rapture or some such thing having to do with the end of the world. He had some influence over old man Scott who was ninety years old when they elected him.

My wife hated Jones. He once asked her to leave a reception for wearing too much makeup. You know, she used to be a show girl, but that part of her life is behind her. He’s lucky we were in the White House. I started to floor the bastard. This son of a bitch was out of his mind, and he had brought a kid named Bob Krantz in with him, a kid with a lot of likeability, but he didn’t always seem in possession of himself, as though his mind were a million miles away. The day that I arranged to talk to General Scott about these fruits, I saw on the news that the old man had died in his sleep. Never will forget the scene at the White House. Why, those sons of bitches were all celebrating, and saying rotten things about Dean Clift, the new President, and how he was pussy-whipped by his wife Elizabeth, and how he would spend all of his time changing clothes while they ran the country, and how Dean Clift was so dumb that he thought that the Civil War was fought in Canada and that the South had won. I mean, granted, the guy wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but he was our president and I thought we should rally around the guy no matter what.

I admired Elizabeth. She saw to it that her husband wasn’t humiliated all that much. She’d write letters to the Washington Sun when some of these smartass liberal columnists would ridicule the poor bastard. But between you and me, they were right. He spent all of his time in the family quarters watching television and movies. She and Reverend Jones got into it about this soothsayer that Elizabeth was always consulting. He wanted to drive her out of Washington. You know the rest. She died while lighting the White House christmas tree. I’m convinced that Jones had something to do with it. They liquidated the secretary of defense, I know that for a fact.