Part Three of My Christmas Series ‘Pride, More Pride and Quite a Lot of Extreme Prejudice’ (See Part Two Here):
So far, Frussterer has received the news more calmly than his advisors could possibly have hoped. But that’s because he has not yet understood it. Presently he becomes pensive.
“Walk me through events once again,” he says.
“You mean the mistakes with the memo?” says the Intern.
“We don’t make mistakes,” says the President, “we simply create unscheduled learning opportunities, isn’t that right, guys?”
The guys nod.
“Well,” says the Intern, “we got an overestimate from the overestimation office that we thought was an underestimate from the underestimation office. We treated the overestimate as an underestimate and…”
“Woh!,” says the President, “too much information. Just skip to where we run out of oil. I’ve booked a late dinner with the Russian ambassador.”
“The running out, sir? Well, what happened is…. we…er… used it all. Other countries slapped rather a lot of taxes on oil a while ago to conserve their supplies, but we… er … didn’t.”
“We didn’t? Why not?” he asks, then he remembers, the oil companies paid for the election, and most of the previous ones since cigarette companies became political liabilities.
“So, if we ran out, let’s just step up production,” he suggests enthusiastically. “Good old fashion American know-how and a can-do attitude…”
“There’s a time problem, Mr President. The last batch took millions of years.”
“And we sucked it all out of the ground in one hundred and fifty?”
“Pretty much, Mr President, sir, yes.”
President Frussterer thinks for a moment. On issues of great consequence, he is a very deep thinker, full of brilliant philosophical concepts and pragmatic ideas. But –as we have already learned – he is not very good at arithmetic.
“What’s a million divided by one hundred and fifty?” he asks. “All we gotta do is increase the production rate?”
“We don’t actually know how to do that, sir?” says Nayshore.
“We don’t?”
“No, sir.”
“Couldn’t we get some of the boys together… brainstorm. Use good old American know how. If we have the recipe, surely we can figure out a scale up, roll out into more production facilities… franchise like Pizza Hut?”
“The ten million year production cycle is still pretty much fixed, sir,” says Nayshore.
“There’s another problem,” says the Intern. “We’re cutting down most of the organics that would normally form oil.”
“Organics?”
“Trees, sir. We’re deforesting.”
Frussterer scratches his head. He puts his hands in his pockets and puts in a few more laps of bestriding around the Oval office. He may be too dumb to be President, but he’s Teflon when it comes to political blame. He’s got out of tighter holes than this – like that paternity rap when his DNA was all over the baby’s blood sample.
He sits at his desk and starts making decisions. The speed and volume of his voice cranks up. Cups on the desktop rattle. Lights on telephones blink as the superman tries to make twelve phone calls at once, blocking the White House’s lines of communication.
In five minutes, Frussterer’s first response is in place:
The Underestimation Office should be asked to assess the size of the problem. The Overestimation Office should be asked to assess the effectiveness of possible remedies. However, since a million years takes them well beyond the next election, the deforestation problem is really not one which concerns the current administration. This can be ‘parked’, as long as a hopeful picture can be painted. As the old political strategists like to say, “Why deal with a difficult issue today, when someone else can fail to deal with it tomorrow.”
The second – more difficult – issue is laying hands on enough oil to get through the next four, or eight years, depending on how well the re-election campaign goes.
“And how do we do that?” asks Frussterer, leaning back in his chair to appraise his team.
This is of course a terrible moment for all of them. The advisors are being asked for advice. No loaded rhetorical question, no multiple choice with a nod and a wink to the preferred option, no crib sheet, just a simple request to actually advise.
The Yes family seek solidarity in each other, hoping to brave the embarrassing silence, knowing that the first to actually say anything will be lost. Instead, they repeat the obvious:
“We need oil.”
“Somebody else’s oil.”
“We need all the oil.”
“Other countries will just have to make sacrifices,” says Frussterer abruptly, as if the obvious has struck him in a moment of inspiration.
“Yes,” chorus the Yeses.
“They might not be that keen,” says Nayshore, striking a less than positive note.
“Nonsense,” says Frussterer. “I have an army.”
The Yeses are jubilant. They knew that if they waited long enough, that today Nathan Nayshore was sure to say the wrong thing. But what’s this? After the initial ‘nonsense’, the President is actually considering the objection.
Frussterer smiles and closes his eyes, while the Yeses continue to chorus agreement with increasing desperation.
Things will turn for the better, he tells himself. Things will turn for the better. They always do.
This time they don’t…
When Frussterer awakes next morning from uneasy dreams he finds himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin… a gigantic insect…. a man with one testicle…
< ….. to be continued: Part 4 on 18/12/2015 at 1800 GMT>
Forged Truth - Fiction is the only truth 