As Pres. Donald J. Trump prepared to deliver an address to the nation this last week, I thought about snacks.
I’m an American. If there’s an event, and that event is televised, you have to have snacks.
Kentucky Derby? Mint juleps. Super Bowl? Everything is for the Super Bowl, but don’t try to do it without chicken wings. Your guests will get mad.
The only sport I watch is boxing. If I know I’m going to watch a fight on television, I go out and buy salami and cheese. Then I get some beer. Crackers, too. I get crackers. You don’t want to let your attention wander during a good fight, so I like a snack I can eat in one bite, without taking my eyes off the fighters.
So, when Trump decided to address the unruly mob that is people like you and me, which is to say Americans, I started thinking. What kind of snacks should I get for the speech?
“Oxycontin,” a friend of mine suggested, but Oxycontin isn’t a snack, and, if I started start eating them during the Trump speech, I might get addicted, and die of an overdose before the next election. Plenty of people in the town where I live died of an overdose in the first few weeks of this year.
The overdoses are gonna stop when we get The Wall. (I’ve decided to capitalize it.) That’s what Trump said. I think if you cut off every gram and grain of drugs coming into this country, there would be a boom in drugs you can make at home. The junkies don’t sneak over the border every day. They live here.
Tacos, I thought. I should have tacos for the address to the nation.
No. Tacos, enchiladas, guacamole and salsa might appeal to my sense of irony, but I don’t trust irony, not really. Irony is the sense of humor most popular among snotty 13-year-old girls and 30-something men who have never been in a fistfight. It’s weak, irony is. I like my humor big, crude and American, like a plate of chitlins or a border wall.
For a brief period, I considered a buffet of foods from all of America’s despised ethnic and religious minorities, which would have included chitlins, bagels and shish kebab. It would not have included pizza or egg rolls. Chinese and Italian people stopped being seen as dangerous a few decades ago, but we “regular Americans” used to be scared to death of both. Anyway, I was going to watch the speech alone, and I didn’t want to be eating leftover gefilte fish for a week.
I am definitely a “regular American.” My last name is French, and, when I was a kid, there were plenty of people in my family who spoke English badly, or not at all. They’re all dead now, though. That’s when you become a “regular American,” when all the foreigners in your family are dead.
I do a two-hour talk show on a local radio station, and the day of the speech, I was tired of talking about Donald Trump, so I came home and took a nap on the couch. When I woke up, I talked to my wife for a while, and ate roast beef for dinner.
I hadn’t bought any snacks!
My wife pointed out that we had cheese in the house, but event-specific snacks have to be bought for the event. They can’t just be snacks you already own.
So, what did I eat?
I had a can of beer and a cigarette. The cigarette was done before the speech was over. The beer lasted a little longer, but not much longer.
Of course, a can of beer and a cigarette are not “snacks,” not at all, but I’ve decided to call them snacks, which makes them snacks, which is the shortest summary of Pres. Donald Trump’s address to this unruly mob of Americans.
Marc Dion, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a reporter and columnist for The Herald News, the daily newspaper of his hometown, Fall River, Massachusetts. For more on Dion, go to go to www.creators.com.
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