bewildered children that remains in one’s ears, long after the giggler himself has dived off the high board or driven away in his sports car. For this is Trick E. Dixon’s state and these are Trick E. Dixon’s people. Here he is not just the President, here he is a friend and a neighbor, one of them, a healthy child of the sunlight, of the beaches and the blue Pacific, a wan who embodied all the robustness and grandeur of America’s golden state. And now that golden child of the Golden West is gone; and Californians can only giggle to suppress their sobs and hide their tears. Peter Pious in Los Angeles.” Next, Ike Ironic, in New York City.
“No one ever believed that Trick E. Dixon was beloved in New York City. Yes, he lived here once, in this fashionable Fifth Avenue apartment building directly behind me. But few ever considered him a resident of this city so much as a refugee from Washington, biding his time to return to public office. Nor did New Yorkers seem much impressed when he assumed the powers of the Presidency in 1969. But now he is gone, and all at once the very deep affection, the love, if you will, for their former neighbor, is everywhere apparent. Of course, you have to know New Yorkers to be able to penetrate the outer shell of cynicism and see the love beneath. You had to look, but you saw it today, here in New York: in the seeming boredom and indifference of a bus driver; in the impatience of a salesgirl; in the anger over nothing of a taxi driver; in the weariness of the homebound workers packed into the subway; in the blank gaze of the drunks along the Bowery; in the haughtiness of a dowager refusing to curb her dog on the fashionable Upper East Side. You had to look, but there it was, love for Trick E. Dixon… Only now he is gone, gone before they could, with their boredom and indifference and impatience and anger and exhaustion and blankness and haughtiness, express to him all they felt so deeply in their hearts. Yes, the bitter irony is this: he had to die in a baggie, before New Yorkers could tender him that hard-won love that would have meant so much to him. But then it is a day of bitter ironies. Ike Ironic from grief-stricken and, perhaps, guilt ridden Fifth Avenue in the city of New York, where he lived like a stranger, but has died like a long-lost son.”
Reports coming in from around the nation confirm those you have just heard from our correspondents in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, reports of people too stunned or heartbroken to be able to respond with the conventional tears or words of sorrow to the news of President Dixon’s assassination. No, the ordinary signs of grief are clearly not sufficient to express the emotion that they feel at this hour, and so they pretend for the time being that it simply has not happened; or they giggle with embarrassment and disbelief; or they attempt to hide beneath a gruff exterior, the deep love for a fallen leader that smolders away within. And what of the madman who perpetrated this deed? For that story, we return you to the headquarters of the FBI in Washington.
“That’s right, we’re pretty sure now it was a madman who perpetrated this deed.”
“And the Scouts? The knife? The Louisville Slugger?”
“Oh, we’re not ruling out any of the hard evidence. I’m talking now about the brains behind the whole thing. More accurately, the lack of brains. You see, that’s really our number one clue everything else aside, this was a pretty stupid thing to do to the President. There he is, the President, and they do a stupid thing like this. Now if this is somebody’s idea of a practical joke, well, I for one don’t consider it funny. You’re not just stuffing anybody into a baggie, you’re stuffing the President of the United States. What about the dignity of his office? If you have no respect for the man, what about the office? That’s what really gravels me, personally. I mean, what do you think the enemies of democracy would think if they saw the President of the United States all curled up naked like that. Well, I’ll tell you what they’d think: they couldn’t be happier. That’s just the kind of propaganda they love to use to brainwash people and make Communists out of them.”
“Do you think then that the assassin was an enemy of democracy as well as a madman?”
“I do. And as I said, a practical joker. Fortunately, we happen to have a complete file on all madmen who are enemies of democracy and practical jokers, and they’re under constant surveillance. So I don’t think there’s going to be any trouble finding our man, or madman. And even if we don’t find him, we’ve got the Boy Scouts from Boston who confessed to this thing in reserve, so I’d say, on the whole, we’re in much better shape than we were last time, and are really just waiting a go-ahead from the White House…”
“We are privileged to have with us in the studio one of the most distinguished members of the House of Representatives, a leading Republican statesman, and a friend and confidant to the late President. Congressman Fraud, this is a sorrowful day in our nation’s history.”
“Oh, it’s a day that will live in infamy, there’s no doubt about that in my mind. I am, in fact, introducing a bill into Congress to have it declared a day that will live in infamy and celebrated as such in coming years. What you’ve got here, as Chief Heehaw at the FBI was saying, is a real lack of respect for the office of the Presidency. What you’ve got here in this assassin is a very disrespectful person, and, I would agree, probably a madman to boot.”
“Do you have any idea, Congressman, why the White House continues at this late hour to refuse to confirm the story of the assassination?”
“I think it goes without saying that we’re in a sensitive area here, and consequently they want to move cautiously on this whole thing. I think they want, first off, to gauge the public reaction here at home, and then of course there is the reaction around the world to consider. On the one hand you’ve got our allies who depend upon us for support, and on the other hand you’ve got our enemies who are always on the lookout for some chink in our armor, and if you keep all that in mind, then I think you have to agree that in the long run it is probably in the interest of our integrity and our credibility to cover this whole thing up. I would think that some such reasoning as that is going on behind the scenes at the White House right now.”.”Has the First Lady been notified?”
Oh, of course.”
“What was her reaction?”
“Well, she was understandably quite overcome in the first moment. But, as you know, she is a very decorous woman, even in moments of great emotion. Consequently, her immediate reaction was to note that the manner in which the assassin went about the assassination was in extremely bad taste. The baggie aside for the moment, she thinks that at the very least the President should have been slain in a shirt and a tie and a jacket, like John F. Charisma. She says there was a suit fresh from the dry cleaners in the closet at the hospital, and that it really shows that the assassin was a person of very poor breeding to have failed to recognize how important it is for the President, of all people, to be neatly and appropriately garbed at all times. She said she just had to wonder about the upbringing of a person who would forget something like that. She said she didn’t want to blame the assassin’s family, until she knew all the facts, but it was clear she felt there probably could have been a wee bit more attention given to good grooming in his house when the assassin was growing up.”
“Congressman Fraud, there has been some speculation that the President’s assassination is a reprisal for the destruction yesterday of the city of Copenhagen. What do you think of that idea?”
“Not very much.”
“Can you explain?”
“Well, it just doesn’t make any sense. The President himself went on television, after all, and explained to the American people the situation in Denmark and why we might have to destroy Copenhagen. Now he didn’t have to do that, you know — but he did, because he wanted the people to have all the facts. So I just don’t see how you can fault him there. And, I must say, in praise of this great country, that except for a few elderly people out there in Wiseonsinand they of course turned out to be of Danish extraction, and obviously didn’t have any objectivity on this matter at all — but except for those few irresponsible demonstrators out there shouting dirty words in Danish, the overwhelming majority of the people of this country have taken the destruction of Copenhagen with the wonderful equanimity and solidarity we have come to expect of them in matters like this. No, I just can’t see where somebody is going to assassinate the President for a sound policy decision such as this one, and that even goes for a madman. No, he had the mandate of the people here, lunatics included.”
“And the mandate of the Congress as well?”
“Well, of course, as you know, there are unfortunately a very few Congressmen and Senators — '
guess you could call them headline seekers who will go so far as to try to make political hay out of the bombing of a little Godforsaken village out in the middle of nowhere, some crossroads nobody has ever heard of before and surely after the bombing will never hear of again — so I leave it to you to imagine what such politicians are going to do with the nuclear destruction of a place like Copenhagen. In their behalf, however, let me say that even
