In which we predict the hottest catchphrases of the 2020’s

stable genius: person of low intelligence and questionable emotional stability

Example: “Whatever you do, don’t put Larry in charge. The guy is such a stable genius!”

elector: to gain a position of power through a technicality, even though someone else is more popular or more qualified

Example: “Don’s the new CEO, even though most of the board voted for Liz. Somehow he got electored!”

pull a Rudy G: sacrifice one’s integrity and esteem for no apparent reason

Example: “Everybody used to love Rick. But after pulling that Rudy G, they won’t even let him join the West Avery Hills Saturday Morning Bagel Bunch Meetup!”

fake news: something that is absolutely true

Example: “You’re engaged? Girl, are you kidding me?” “No, I swear it’s fake news!”

The greatest [s.t.] in American history: describes a horrible or painful occurrence

Example: “Have you seen The Avengers XXXII yet?” “My god, the special effects sucked, the dialog was stupid, it was an hour too long, and the story made no sense.  It was like the greatest cinematic experience in American history!”

Warren: female

Example: “Jane is so smart and has such great ideas! How come everybody feels so threatened by her?” “Cause she’s a Warren, duh!”

put ‘Kraine on: apply pressure on [s.o.] through extortion or threat

Example: “He says he won’t testify against his mother? Just put some ‘Kraine on the guy!”

let Mexico pay for it: avoid responsibility for a mistake or misdeed

Example: “Hey, I think I dinged that guy’s car door. Should I leave a note on his windshield?” “Nah, he won’t notice it until we’re gone. We’ll let Mexico pay for it.”

Melanize: survive a painful or depressing situation through denial and feigned indifference.

Example: “I know I’m in an abusive relationship, but until the divorce is final I’m just going to sit back and Melanize.”

when the president releases his tax returns: never. Example: Hey, could you lend me 50 bucks? I swear I’ll pay you back tomorrow!” “Yeah, you’ll pay me back…when the president releases his tax returns!

shoot one’s self in the other foot: to make the same horrible, needless mistake a second time.

Example: “Did you stay up last night watching the presidential election results?” “Yes, I can’t believe we shot ourselves in the other foot!”

1. Allow Barack Obama to run for a third term.  Not incumbents in general, just Obama.

2. No universal background checks which infringe on our rights under the 2nd Amendment! Instead, anyone convicted of a crime committed with a gun will share their cell or gurney with the person they got it from.

3. Medicare for all except people who text at stoplights.

4. Transfer the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to the federal prison system and use the empty cells for the people who own JUUL.

5. Instead of the new aircraft carrier the Navy doesn’t even want, every day is National Free Beer and Bratwurst Day.

6. Free college tuition for everyone except psychology and communications majors.  Unless someone can tell me what all those psych and communications majors actually do.

7. Every citizen between the ages of 21 and 71 must spend one continuous 24 hour period a year homeless.  Except for, like, actually homeless people. They can spend the night in one of those empty homes.

8. Jeffrey Epstein will be re-generated from his own DNA. So he can spend his next life in jail.

9. Fossil-fuel corporation execs who have refused to acknowledge climate change will be exiled to rapidly dwindling icebergs.

10. Universal free nachos and margaritas for school teachers, veterans, and the nice lady at the bagel shop who always remembers my name.

11. Congressional Medal of Honor for Martin Scorsese and Greta Thunberg. And also my mother.

12. The ERA. Like, duh.

13. No-strings NEH grants for people who write clever blogs.

NOTE: Yesterday we posted a satirical piece suggesting that ‘Anonymous’, the Trump insider who wrote an op-ed for the N.Y. Times in 2018 claiming that Trump’s inner circle was intentionally subverting the President’s actions for the good of the nation, and who is now about to release a book, is actually Melania Trump. Subsequently we received an email from the real Anonymous, which in the interest of transparency and fairness we reproduce here.

Dear Garden of Eaton or whatever you call yourself,

I have wrote you This Email because many of you are wondering why would anyone Blow a Whistle against such a Great President?

And the answer is So Simple.  It is because the American People deserve The Truth.  And to Tell the Truth about the Greatest President Ever you need the Greatest Whistle Blower Ever.

Some of you in the Fake News Media have compared me to Daniel Ellsberg and Deep Throat. So unfair! I Blow the Whistle at least a hundred times better than Dirtbag Daniel or Deep Doo-Doo. I hear that from a lot of people.

Garden Of, you made a very nasty post recently where you said that Anonymous was Melania Trump. Not even Close!  Though Melania would be a very classy Whistle Blower. If she ever tried it.  She better not!

I cannot tell you Who I Am but if you think for a minute about who is The Most Awesome Person right now you’ll probably get it!

It is a big responsibility to be this Country’s Whistle Blower in Chief. But sometimes we get so Distracted by the Lying Media’s obsession with a stupid Forest Fire (ok, whatever) or some supposed ‘Ally’ getting Ethnically Cleansed (so fake!), and we forget about the Great Job that our President is doing. And that is where I, the Greatest Whistle Blower in history, can help, by making you Keep your Attention where Attention needs to be Kept.

Plus I have an awesome Book Deal.  It will be the Greatest Book ever.  And don’t worry, I can Blow the Whistle and write a Great Book and be The Greatest President Ever at the same time.

Oops! You weren’t supposed to know that!

Sincerely, #realwhistleblower

[artwork courtesy of Jonathan Eaton]

NOTE: In honor of Anonymous’ forthcoming ‘insider’ book about Donald Trump, we reprise this Facebook post from September, 2018.

FOR MELANIA TRUMP (aka “Anonymous”)
To the tune of “Stand By Your Man” (with apologies to Tammy Wynette)

Sometimes it’s hard to be first lady
Pretending that you love that orange ham
Our USA has bad times
And he has good times
Doin’ things that no one understands

But if you love us you’ll subvert him
No one else can make him change his plans!
And if you love us, then please Mel, help us,
And snatch those papers from his hands.

Stand by your man,
So you can watch his actions
And all his nutty factions
Like freaking neonazis!
Stand by your man
That’s 24 by 7
Hold on to what control you can
Stand by your man

Stephen Fuller Austin (November 3, 1793 – December 27, 1836) was an American empresario. Known as the “Father of Texas”, and the founder of Texas, he led the second, and ultimately, the successful colonization of the region by bringing 300 families from the United States to the region in 1825[.…]Numerous places and institutions are named in his honor, including the capital of Texas, Austin in Travis County, Austin County, Austin Bayou, Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Austin College in Sherman, and a number of K-12 schools. – Wikipedia, accessed 10/22/19.

The short-lived Republic of Texas [the Anglo settlers] created in 1836 provided as much protection for slavery as possible. Texas’ 1845 annexation by the United States was controversial in some parts of the country precisely because everyone knew the Republic had been constituted as a slaveholder’s republic and was full of people who were enthusiastic about chattel slavery. Bringing Texas into the Union would upset the balance of power between the Northern free states and Southern slave states. – Annette Gordon Reed, “The Real Texas”, New York Review of Books, 10/24/19

Texas must be a slave country. Circumstances and unavoidable necessity compel it. It is the wish of the people there, and it is my duty to do all I can, prudently, in favor of it. I will do so. – Stephen F. Austin, 1833

Down here in the capital of the great state of Texas, we like to say “Keep Austin Weird”. In practice that seems to mean maintaining a sense of innocuous, tourist-friendly, non-system-upsetting conformist nonconformity. More Big Lebowski than Timothy Leary. Restaurants with dog-friendly patios. Weird!

And in our mildly progressive, just a bit behind the curve way, we have done some symbolically meaningful stuff. Like removing the statues of Confederate generals and statesmen – you know, the guys who led hundreds of thousands of their countrymen to their deaths in a vain attempt to preserve the institution of slavery – from their places of honor on the University of Texas campus. And renaming some schools (or, more economically, scrambling to find a ‘safe’ personage with the same last name).

But we have been ignoring the slave-holding elephant in the room.

Wanna hear something really weird? This capital city of Texas is named after a guy from Virginia who bought and sold other human beings, and forced them to labor for his own profit. And he loved slavery so much that he came to the Mexican state of Texas in order expand his slave-powered operations, and to encourage others to do the same.

But, you say (if you are slavery apologist), he just happened to own slaves, like everyone else. And anyway he’s not being honored for his slavery, but for his heroic deeds in founding Texas and in freeing the its people from the despotic tyranny of Mexico.

And what was it about that Mexican tyranny that so upset Stephen F. Austin? Was it the restrictions on his freedom of speech? Was it taxation without representation? Was it blatant corruption in Mexico City?

No, no, and no. What really got Austin’s goat was the fact that slavery was outlawed in Mexico, which was trying to shut it down in Texas.

Funny, we never heard about that part of the story when we learned about the Texas fight for independence in Sam Houston elementary school.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m a little embarrassed about living in “Austin”, Texas. And a little ashamed that no one cares. My fellow Slaveholderians, we can do better! Why can’t we live in (Ann) Richards, TX, (Ornette) Coleman, TX, (Lightnin’) Hopkins, TX, (Janis) Joplin TX (that would be too cool!), or (Barbara) Jordan, TX?

And if we’re still hung up on dead white guys, how about Edmund Jackson Davis, the Webb County rancher who led the 1^st Texas Cavalry regiment – for the Union Army?

Because I’m tired of living in Slaveholder, Texas.

And after we’re all living in Edmund Jackson Davis, Texas, we can talk about Travis County.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has decided to host the Group of 7 meeting next June at the Trump National Doral near Miami, Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, said Thursday, a decision that prompted immediate questions about whether it was a conflict of interest for him to choose one of his own properties for a diplomatic event. – N.Y. Times, 10/18/19

Dear World Leader,

Welcome to Trump National Doral!

Be sure to sign up for our referral program! If your friend, fellow leader or despotic tyrant reserves an entire floor any time in the next 6 months, you can earn a free night’s stay or a jumbo pack of anti-tank missiles to ward off that next Russian invasion!

Enjoy the bottles of natural spring water on your nightstand. The first bottle is free!

We feature a wide array of indoor and outdoor activities, including two 18-hole PGA golf courses, an Olympic-size pool, and deeply humiliating but absolutely obligatory photo-ops with The President!

And when you need to wind down from an anxious day of worrying about whether that peace treaty back home is still holding up, enjoy a perfectly grilled steak at The Trump Roast, or the zany entertainment at sTrumpets! We accept Euros, dollars, and unverified intelligence on our opponents.

Hi-speed Internet access is secure and free, provided in partnership with our friends at the GRU, so you can freely discuss anything you’ve seen, heard, read or just dreamed up about Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, or Hunter Biden! Get your creative juices flowing and go wild!

Tipping is optional here at Doral, but if you feel that our service meets your standards, a cash gratuity will help our cleaning staff feed their children or fix their car enough to pass state inspection. And rest assured that all our staff is completely legal, as far as we know!

On the other hand, let us know immediately if the mint is missing from your pillow.  Someone will be on a one-way flight to Honduras, whether they’re Honduran or not!

NOTICE: we strive to create an environment that is enjoyable for our guests while remaining respectful of our beautiful natural setting.  As you wander the grounds, for your own safety, be alert at all times and keep away from alligators, Burmese pythons, Rudy Giuliani, and massage-parlor madams who may have evaded our security systems.  

We know that a little part of you has died since November, 2016. Here at the Trump National Doral we know what that’s like – we’ve been dying since 2012!

(Reuters) – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two foreign-born businessmen associated with U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, were arrested on federal charges they conspired to funnel foreign money to U.S. political candidates, prosecutors said on Thursday[….] Parnas and Fruman were arrested on Wednesday at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Vienna. – “Factbox: The Criminal Charges Against Giuliani’s Associates”, N.Y. Times, Oct. 10 2019

Our advice to spies, saboteurs, double agents and finks of all stripes: once your cover gets blown and you need to get out of Dodge in a hurry, go ahead and splurge on a round-tripper. Nothing says “Arrest Me” like a one-way ticket to Vienna. Which is worse, 10-20 in Leavenworth or taking shit from the office manager about the expenses on your corporate Amex?

Steve Eaton, Oct. 6 2019

1. Glaciers

2. An intellectually (at least) independent Hong Kong

3. Birds, fish, honeybees and butterflies

4. Seasons. Like autumn. Autumn was nice.

5. Civility

6. Public discourse

7. Civility in public discourse

8. Letters. With paper and stamps. And words. Lovely, thoughtful words.

9. Complete, like, sentences? with subjects? and verbs? and shit like that?

10. Conservatives, of the old-fashioned optimistic, technology embracing, Chamber of Commerce type. If they every really existed.  It all seems so quaint now.

11. Immigrants. (Just look around.  Do you really want to be stuck with what we got?)

12. The feeling that, over the long haul, we can and will make this a greener, less violent, better educated, and fairer country and planet for everyone

And five things we DON’T miss

1. Statues of Robert E. Lee and schools named for Stonewall Jackson

2. Bad coffee

3. All-white-male space missions, Supreme Courts, and whatever else

4. Having to go to “the mall” to get anything

5. A world without recycling

We discourage simultaneous submissions. – The Sun literary magazine (and others)

Given acceptance rates and reading periods, it would take the average writer 250-500 years to publish a piece using exclusive submissions. – Erika Krouse, writer, from her website, http://www.erikakrousewriter.com

Dear Mr. Blankenship,

Thank you for allowing us the privilege of considering the short story, “Now or Never”, for publication by 26^th Century Review. After careful consideration, we have decided that this piece is not a good fit for our readers.

But don’t give up! We’re certain your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather would not want you to! It would have been like totally exhausting for him to think of all those words!

While the story still resonates even after the Big Nuclear Misunderstanding of 2038, the Great Florida Submersion, the disappearance of the world’s lakes and rivers, Holocausts II-V, and the brutal repression, resurgence, and re-repression of science, we feel that the style is too early-third-millennium, though its language is remarkably authentic. Its many “words” and “phrases”, not to mention “complete sentences”, will confuse most of today’s readers, or possibly all three of them.

A professional editor can help you remove obstructive adjectives, adverbs and minor plot lines to create a more immediate literary micro-experience.  We encourage you to re-submit this story after making these improvements. If you’re no longer around, we look forward to hearing from your descendants!

Sncrly, the eds.

Steve Eaton, September 2, 2019

The Garden of Eaton is located here in the Great State of Texas, somewhere between Falfurrias and Pflugerville. And we love our Texas (meaning that we love its people, our neighbors) despite the fact that it has got to be the scariest and stupidest state in the Union.

Scary, because as horrible recent events demonstrate, you can’t go to the mall, or attend high school, or go to church, or drive down the highway without the very real possibility of taking a bullet. You see, down here in Texas, anyone with a fragile ego and dodgy mental health who’s been dumped by their wife or girlfriend (Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church, 26 dead, 20 wounded), or who has racist fantasies (El Paso Wal-Mart, 22 dead, 24 wounded), or who has been bullied in school (Santa Fe, Texas High School, 10 dead, 13 wounded), or who has just been fired for acting a little nutso on the job (Midland/Odessa highway, 8 dead, 24 wounded) is free to load up on semiautomatic assault rifles, pistols, and shotguns and as much ammo as they can carry, and go human-hunting to their sick little heart’s content. And goodness knows we have no end of racists, dumped boyfriends, bullied high school students, and fired employees, and no end of guns and ammo down here in the Lone Star State. At least I’m not worried about climate change anymore. I’m too worried about making it home from the grocery store. And more importantly, about the little kids next door making it home from school.

Stupid, because the people with any power to do anything to start mitigating the problem evidently lack the imagination and/or the desire to do anything except make guns and ammo more easily accessible. In fact, new laws making guns easier to get and harder to restrict were adopted the day after the Midland/Odessa massacre. Stupid, because the politicians who enacted those laws were freely elected by us, the people of Texas. (Though to be clear, “us” in this case does not actually include me.) Stupid, because we live in a state where gun store shelves were emptied of weapons and ammo by panicked buyers after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election. Stupid, because our gun freaks love to parade around the state house carrying M16 rifles and flags picturing a cannon with the words daring some phantom enemy to “come and take it”. Stupid, because when the NRA paints any common-sense gun law as a threat to personal liberty and as a slippery slope that will end in outright gun confiscation, we simply believe them.

How’s this for stupid? One of the new laws means that landlords cannot prohibit their tenants from keeping guns on their rental properties.

Now, we have lived in Texas, on and off, since 1966, including many long stretches in apartments and rented homes. And we know, through press reports and personal experience, that there are many stupid reasons that a landlord will not rent to you. It may be because you are African-American, or Asian, or a full-time student. Or because you cannot prove that you make as much money as your would (not)-be landlord would like.

But we have never, ever heard of a landlord interested in even knowing whether a tenant owned a gun.

But, theoretically, I suppose it could happen. So now there is a happy Texas state legislator who can go back to his or her district at election time and proudly proclaim that they protected their constituency from those evil hordes of socialist intellectual big-government landlords who wouldn’t let them keep a Kalashnikov in the closet.

And our governor has defended these new laws as keeping communities safer.

It would all be very funny if it weren’t for actual blood pooling in the aisles of the church, the classrooms, the Wal-Mart, the highway. It would be hilarious if it were not for the two-month old baby boy in El Paso who will now grow up an orphan. It would be a riot if it were not for the 17-month baby girl now in a hospital after being shot in Midland-Odessa.

I predict our governor will mumble some hypocritical nonsense about helping those with mental health issues – hypocritical, because he manages a state that, according to two independent rankings, sits about 40^th in the nation in mental health services, a state whose government has shown a lot of enthusiasm in not spending public money on health services. And hypocritical also because mental health care and gun control are not mutually exclusive, as Abbott well knows.  

And Texas will remain a beautiful but scary and stupid place to live and raise a family in.

Hey, Denmark? Yeah, United States here, how ya doing? Got a minute? If you’re like in the middle of supper we can do this later, or whenever’s good for you!  OK, I know you’re busy, I’ll keep it short.

We just want to say we’re really really sorry about what happened last week.  And embarrassed. And ashamed. And actually a little angry! We have talked about this! He is not supposed to do that! No, we appreciate that, Denmark, but it’s not OK! He’s a big boy now!

You know how it is, you try to keep an eye on the kid but sometimes you get distracted by another mass shooting or Dancing with the Stars and when you turn around he’s playing with the grownups’ iPhone or talking to Alexa. And before you know it nuclear winter is raining down on the next-door NATO ally or you’re wondering why the UPS guy is dropping off Greenland at your front door! Hey, we don’t remember ordering that, ha ha! But seriously, he can be pretty hard to control! Mexico called the police on him a couple of times already! God, we’re tired.

Anyhoo, the plan is, he’ll be moving out in another 18 months or so, so it won’t be a problem any more. Fingers crossed, ha ha! Love the fjords, by the way, awesome! Or wait, is that only Norway?

Let us know if he causes you any more trouble, but I think you’ll be fine for the mo, he’s across the street in China’s yard now.  Oh Lord, what’s he doing to their cat? Sorry, gotta go!