The Mighty Mulligan Revisited!

While some literary pursuits should best be forgotten, I think it better to remember the road one has travelled, even as one seeks the better future path. But who can forget the Mighty Mulligan that knew it in the halcyon heyday when liberal Republicans like William Weld and Lincoln Chafee still roamed the earth? I wrote four copious volumes of conservative political satire in the spirit of the Rockefeller liberal wing of the GOP (nearly 500 pages single-spaced). Though the readership was large and eclectic, not a soul stirred when opportunities for wider publication were explored. Then came George W(allet) Bush and Richard "The Heartless" Cheney, along with the chickenhawk neocons and raving hillbillies (like that nitwit from Alaska, who bewitches not every man), and RINOS (Republican In Name Only) like myself were hunted into extinction. No mercy was given. It was the water board and the secret prison for the lot of us. I asked for lemonade in the simulated drowning; they gave me gall to drink and took away my Eisenhower memorabilia, including my vintage collection of I LIKE IKE buttons. I had no choice but to quit my idle habit as a political satirist, and I was accepted as friend by the liberal Democrats, thronging masses, and thoughtful people who still believed in the Constitution. When Dubya played Xerxes to his father Darius with the second invasion of the Middle East, I turned exclusively to sermons and novels. The time for giggles was over. Even my trusted intern Muffy graduated from UVA and went off to law school at old W&L in Lexington. When I was a child, I thought like a child. But now I am a man, outnumbered like the Greeks at Thermopylae, yet sharpening my steel, imagining the next thrust and parry, down to the last Athenian and Spartan, Democrat and RINO united. And we all know how things turned out there. I had to lay down my pen and go to shooting. But oh for those frolicsome days of elitist whimsy when the Mulligan was teeing it up, again and again, seeking the gentle, tolerant, and always charming middle ground of the political fairway. Yes, that was my toad less trammelled. I mean road less travelled.

The day I made the solemn walk to Town Hall to leave the Republican Party was one of the slowest and saddest in human history. Now I am but a little (i). An independent. A party of one by the window, finding solace in my blue point oysters, and twirling the olive in my dry Beefeater martini (actually I prefer a twist). On that slow Kentish perambulation in my New England village, I thought of the long walk of the death row inmate (in red states and Islamic countries), the fall of Rome, the last ride of Barbaro, and the day the Giants and Dodgers went west together. I thought of the day the music died. Jesus wept. Now I am the only independent in America still reasonably happy with President Barry Obama. In these days of a global village, it is so wonderful to have a president who was born in another country (wink). I can't wait to get their Christmas card to see what Michelle and the girls are wearing this year.

Clothes make the woman.