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Con men and snake oil salesmen have always been with us, both in literature and, sadly, in life as well:

The Bible has plenty of terrible duplicitous jerks who fancied themselves the answer to all man’s ills and who never hesitated to push their schemes off on whoever was stupid enough to listen! I’d name them if I had any biblical knowledge, but alas, I do not….I do know that snake oil and the urge to sell it are as old as mankind and his desire to profit from it.

Of course , Charles Dickens’ “Uriah Heep”from COPPERFIELD and “Fagin” FROM OLIVER TWIST come quickly to mind. Mark Twain’s “The King” and “The Duke” from THE TOM SAWYER/ HUCKLEBERRY FINN adventures are two scamps who sharply personify the worst and greediest of town-to-town carpetbaggers. Our lousy leader Trump would be well cast in either of those two roles, for sure.

In fact, it”s because I listened in to Trump’s address to Congress the other night that I came up with my newly coined:

TAR’N’FEATHERISM!!!

Shakespeare of course excelled in duplicitous villains, “Iago” from OTHELLO chief among them. Aside from being Shakespeare’s lengthiest speaking role, that slimy conniver might well have been taken care of offstage in the manner i am suggesting, but since The Bard tended to keep all juicy punishments out of the audiences’ view (and therefore more securely in the imagination) , we may never really know how his secretive sidekick was taken care of. One can only wish…..

But the practice I am officially naming -TAR’N’FEATHERISM- is one I would like to firmly place in the portfolio of public punishments, and I would like it to begin tomorrow , unless it can be arranged for today!…This very afternoon ,in fact.

My fantasies are wide-ranging when it comes to inflicting pain and more pain on the
Mon(b)ster who is ruining our country, and in fact i have begun an entire series of chapters about a slender young Russian female assassin name Nemesis Rassov (Nemi for short), whose assignment is to rid the world of all things MAGA….she later turns out to be Melania in clever disguise…..I lie awake nights inventing tortures.

It soothes me.

Think of it: good old flaming hot tar, freshly melted to peak temperature, poured on the tender skin of the man-child Trump? Sad to say ( who is the monster now?) it makes my mouth water at the very thought ! Then, add prickly, mean and sharply plucked feathers on top of that tar? Trump, squirming from the utter discomfort, the impossibility of getting the wretched stuff off his skin….he will be trapped, as he has us all trapped by his smothering, cruel and indescribably ignorant verbiage in hour-long speech after speech….hour- long, did I say? How about 100 -minutes-long ranting? My teeth ache from my fury. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget the “running out of town on the rails” part of the ritual….we do …in fact, we MUST, run the tar and feathered scarecrow politician as far out of town as we can send him, right? Leaving him to de-tar and de-feather himself in exiled solitude. No McDonalds for him.

Anyway, you get my drift.

America! The land of TAR’N’FEATHERISM! Long may she wave…I envision the Statue of Liberty smirking with satisfaction, a bucket of hot tar held aloft.

Be assured…I am smiling with glee at the very thought.