by Edward Chupack
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Author Bio
Edward Chupack is an attorney for a major law firm. He lives near Chicago. This is his first novel is Silver: My Own Tale As Written by Me
with a Goodly Amount of Murder.
To learn more about Long John Silver, please visit www.silverpirate.com.
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America, in a ritual that it undertakes every four years, is about to
elect a president. Our choices for the highest office in the land are
a man who has done absolutely nothing in two years in the U.S. Senate,
Barack Obama, and a man that has done too much for too long in the
U.S. Senate, John McCain.
How are we to judge a candidate that has not enacted any legislation
and must find it bothersome to roll out of bed and vote, since he does
so little of it? How can we assess a candidate that has voted in so
many contrary ways for so long that he would, if he could, vote
against his own legislation? We need a sure fire test to evaluate
these candidates.
We are not looking for a saint to be our next president. A saint
won't get us out of the economic doldrums or blow up all the bad guys
that need blowing up in the next four years. Saints aren't good at
math (with the exception of keeping track of sheep and lambs) or
physical exertion (with the exception of hurling heretics onto
pikes). You would never want to cheat off a saint during a calculus
test or pick a saint to be on your softball team. We are also looking
for someone without many scruples. Someone with an oversized sense of
morality won’t get the job done.
We need a pirate as president.
Pirates are quite good with numbers. They must calculate costs and
benefits on a regular basis. They must, for instance, know how many
hostages to take and what the pay out will be for the hostages. This,
by the way, is not an easy calculation as pirates must be on top of
the value of different currencies as well as the going rate for
different nationalities. A Euro or Yen is worth just so many American
dollars. A Somali or Nigerian is worth just so many Peruvians.
Pirates are simply wonderful at murder. They can cut, chop, hew and
slice better than your local butcher. They can explode, blast, burst
and detonate just about anything in so many imaginative ways. The
most our current candidates can probably do is shake up a bottle of
soda and spray the contents over one of the demagogues or terrorist
chieftains roaming our planet.
Neither candidate has what it takes. Obama is the equivalent of a
certain type of sports fan, the sort of fan that is known -- not so
politely -- as a "jock-sniffer". Obama is a jock-sniffer of leftist
radicals, a connoisseur of the sulphuric set. McCain, for all his
grit, has a rusty trigger finger. He has not fired a weapon of any
caliber in anger in a long time and so we must wonder if he has what
it takes to annihilate a multitude of any magnitude. Can he even
assassinate his opponent's character? He has had his chances.
These candidates are our only choices, and so despite their
shortcomings, we must decide which of them would make the better
pirate and therefore the better president.
Could Obama walk bow-legged across a rolling deck? I think not. He
could not even stroll across a patio pigeon-toed after a few beers.
That man is just too cool. McCain has a jaunty walk, and with work he
could at least develop a saunter. Advantage: McCain.
Which candidate could drink more rum? Obama seems like a Chardonnay
man through and through, maybe even a wine spritzer sort of fellow.
He would turn up his nose at rum unless he needed the Puerto Rican
vote, in which case he would have his advisors swig rum like it was
going out of style. His advisors do everything for him anyway.
McCain's wife is a beer baroneess, and my guess is that McCain could
go for several tumblers of rum without much prodding, or any other
drink in sight. He did serve in the Navy after all. Advantage: McCain.
Would Obama or McCain look better climbing the rigging? Obama would
not climb it. Again, he has those advisors. They would climb for
him. McCain would be up the rigging in a jiffy, as soon as someone
told him that he could see down Sarah Palin's blouse from up there.
Advantage: McCain.
Is Obama or McCain more practiced in deception? McCain may have no
idea what he is saying, but he means it when he says it. Obama will
say anything to get elected, and has changed his positions a number of
times. I've got to go with Obama on this one. Obama appears to be
the better liar. Advantage: Obama.
We now come to style. Which candidate would wear a bandana and white
gauze shirt open to the navel with the panache that is so important to
a pirate? Is there an option here? Obama is the essence of style.
Granted his bandana would be Gucci and his shirt Gaultier, but he
seems more comfortable with just about anything European than American
anyway. It is unfortunate that he can't run for president of the
European Union. McCain can pull an old undershirt out of his closet
and rip it for his bandana, and maybe pop a few buttons on one of his
Brooks Brothers shirts, but "C'est la vie". Advantage: Obama.
Which candidate would parley better with our enemies? I don't
understand McCain. He speaks in short and choppy sentences, and I
have difficulty following his train of thought. I imagine that he
would only confuse our adversaries. Obama, however, does have a
silver tongue and might lull our foes into forgetting that they hate
us -- especially if he promised them a tax cut or universal
healthcare, or any of the other policies that he has promised but will
never deliver because he'll be too busy bailing out the banks.
We have a tie based on these criteria but frankly, as I opined
earlier, neither candidate would really make a good pirate.
The American people need and deserve someone without principles, a
real rogue, a dastardly individual that we can envision walking around
the oval office with a parrot. A scoundrel's scoundrel. We had such
a president once, and he would have made a splendid pirate, and we
treated him poorly. We punished him for his aptitude for evil. We
threw him out of office and have not been the same nation since we did
so. Yes, he would have made an excellent pirate, and now he is gone.
He is gone.
Whom else but he could help us in this grim season, in our time of
such need?
If only we could bring him back.
Richard Nixon.
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