Bernie and Ted's Big Adventure

It was Ted's finest hour. There in Cleveland, among the angry and insane, the roving packs of journalists covering it straight, others, like Stephen Colbert, dressed as the character Stanley Tucci played in The Hunger Games, carrying on at the podium in a manner not immediately distinguishable from the rest (who were apparently still sleeping at that hour, asleep or out supporting the Cleveland economy), until he was hauled off the stage ... there in Cleveland, the Republican who came in second place, the guy who doesn't play well with others, Ted Cruz, in his prime-time convention speech, when he was expected to get in line and support the winner, Donald J. Trump, who, when the game was still on, had suggested that he, Ted Cruz, much like the odious Barack Obama, wasn't in fact a proper citizen of this country (a Canadian to Obama's Kenyan), that his father, the Cuban, had somehow been involved with that bunch that had killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas back in 1963, disaffected Cuban ex-CIA types that had eluded everyone from The Warren Commission to the New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison, the real planners, these fellows, for whom the disaffected former tourist to Soviet Russia, (not Bernie Sanders but) Lee Harvey Oswald, was merely a patsy, the guy, The Donald, who had further laid out pictures on Twitter of his wife and Ted's wife, saying, in effect, Which piece of ass would you rather have? His piece of ass? Or my piece of ass?

But this was politics, a bare-knuckle sport, as we are often reminded in this country by the many journalists/entertainers who cover it, a sport and a pastime that goes on endlessly, much like, increasingly, our wars. A distraction, a pageant, however, with a few key moments of punctuation, one of which is the Republican National Convention, held this year in Cleveland, an event that was to be "contested," we were told for many months by the serious journalists, suggesting that maybe, perhaps, given our country's enthusiasm for guns, that there might be some gunplay among the contesting factions on the convention floor, but, much to the surprise and disappointment of many, rather than a contested, hurly-burly convention, the viewing public was presented with a largely orderly presentation of hate and vitriol—less a showdown at the OK Corral than it was a staging of Meet the Trumps.

For which the second-place finisher was expected to do his part—to be one of the Uniters, to just "Say It!!"

But he didn't say it. Wouldn't say it. Vote for Donald Trump!

No ... Instead of encouraging the seething throngs to vote for a man who had insulted his father and his wife, who, worse than any of that, was a New York Values Democrat, Cruz exhorted the crowd to vote their conscience, for which he was booed, if reluctantly praised by many who had gotten used to hating his guts through the years.

My friend JB, for instance, a man formerly in politics, reeking of booze and cigarettes, tears welling in his eyes, leaned toward me (a bit too close, really, uncomfortably close, in fact) at the bar where we were watching all this on a giant screen, and said, "I never figured a miserable son of a bitch like him could ever do something so moving."

"You don't suppose he's just angling for the gold in 2020?" I said. "Now that Paul Ryan has pimped himself out to a huckster."

"2020?" JB laughed, pixelated eyes gleaming. "You just wait until next week."

After another glass of wine and three or four more cigarettes, JB told me that he had it on good authority—a redhead from Harlem, single, with cats, who had no reason to lie—that Bernie and Ted were preparing a run, this fall—

"Get the fuck outta here," I said, pushing the slouching JB up straight on his barstool. "Bernie's even more New York values than #The Real Donald Trump."

"That may be true," JB slurred, "but at least he isn't a Democrat."

"Well, you got me there," I admitted.

"He's a socialist," said JB. "And you know who else was a socialist? Jesus was a socialist. The meek shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers ... what kind of capitalist talks like that?"

I had to admit I didn't know any.

"Anyway, you don't hear too many folks talking about the Lord Jesus Christ more than Ted Cruz does."

Well, I thought, that was sure fucking true.

"If you cut the right wing and the left wing off the bird in the middle, what do you have?" JB then quizzed me.

I had to think a moment. "A bird falling from the sky in a pantsuit?"

"A Status Quo that can't fly," he said, knowingly.

"But you were Establishment, JB. You were the Status Quo."

"I'm just a man like you," JB insisted.

"But Bernie already said he'd support the ticket."

"He said he'd do everything he could to defeat Donald Trump. Not that a lot will have to be done, but that's not the same thing."

A socialist and a libertarian. I was having a hard time imagining it.

"They're both gold bugs," JB whispered, raising an eyebrow. "Neither can abide the Federal Reserve. They got to be friends on the Deep Web. Do you know what I'm talking about when I talk about the Deep Web?"

I wasn't so sure I did.

"Characters," JB said. "Aliases. Game Theory."

"Sort of like Pokemon Go?"

JB's eyes gleamed and glittered. "Do you play?"

"No," I said. "I'm a writer. I live a deprived adulthood."

"I've got um in my house," he confided.

"Ted and Bernie?"

"Squirtle," he said. "And Pikachu. And Charmander. They like to spin in the dryer. If I open the door real fast I can sometimes spot them in there flopping around with my socks."

I laughed. "This is getting a little silly."

"What's your point?" replied JB, who had watched the entire Republican National Convention and planned to watch the Democratic one, too, who had run for office, American-style, more times than I could count right offhand at the moment.

"So, a disaffected coalition comprised of those who resent Big Government AND Big Business."

"You can't say it isn't brilliant."

He slipped off his barstool now, stood up, nearly fell, then settled into a cheerleader's pose, like George W. Bush back in his days at Yale. "Pure Left! Pure Right! Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!!" he chanted.

As crazy as it sounded, it made more sense, if one hoped to win, than courting exclusively old, pissed off white people, men mostly.

"You just wait," JB assured me. "This week in Philadelphia, there's going to be a big surprise."

"Pokemon at the convention?" I wondered. "Pokemon instead of Colbert?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Pokemon don't care about politics. They like my dryer too much."

I glanced at the bartender, who shrugged and shook her head. I said to JB, "Sanders/Cruz: Both Wings without the Bird."

"Pure flight," he said, adding in the manner of someone who'd been tuned in, exposed, for too long, "You just wait. Bernie's no sellout, no pimp for the Establishment. They won't get Bernie to say it, either. Instead, Bernie will bring out Ted and the two will announce the purest party of disaffected purists ever. Bernie and Ted are going to surprise us, you just watch."