Sorry to have failed you yesterday, my life of leisure having been too much to overcome. Actually, it was more the making sure my 10 year-old had completed his homeschooling for the day and had eaten something more than just crackers and toffee, coupled with Thursday night football on a Tuesday...(another sign we’re living in the end times).
At any rate, I regret that the muses were left to their own devices for an entire day, and I do worry that they will eventually give up on this old poet and find refuge in some new poet with more talent (or maybe less talent, but more likelihood of utilizing it). So, I’m back at it today in between Uber rides, today’s poem being patched together between pick ups and drop offs.
It stems from this word “authenticity,“ which Billy and Jeffrey Brown discuss at the 2:00 minute mark of this video.
The First Asian American President of the United States
Jimmy Wong was born
of a Chinese dissident father
and Vietnamese mother,
and he was a real inspiration
to Asian Americans of all ethnicities,
having made his fortune
with a wildly successful
chain of “Chinamese” restaurants
called the Pho King Wok.
Jimmy had grown tired of the typically
racist American electorate, so he divorced
his Japanese wife and married
his high school sweetheart, Bonnie,
a blonde-haired, blue-eyed
All-American volleyball player from Malibu.
They had two small, curly-haired daughters
and a boy on the way when he hired
his crack team of advisors
who suggested he embrace the stereotypes.
So he campaigned around the country
in his 1980 Cadillac Seville
with its red and gold paint job
and 24 karat, wire rims
handing out fortune cookies
with fortunes that read:
Pho King vote!
And his partner in the restaurant business,
The Coca-Cola Company,
sponsored his campaign
and gave him his official slogan,
“Refresh the World. Make a Difference.”
He won his first term by a narrow margin,
eking out a victory in Florida and winning
Pennsylvania by the slightest of margins.
But he won a second term by a landslide
and, although he had lobbied for a change
to the Official Seal of the President
from the two-taloned eagle
to the more innocuous
waving Lucky Cat,
and had taken to pardoning
the Thanksgiving duck,
leaving all the American turkeys
to fend for themselves,
he was widely revered
as the most authentically
American president in recent memory.
