The One-And-Only Calvin Trillin Explains Why Small Hands Will Save Us From A Nuclear Holocaust: The Current Occupant Of The Oval Office Can't Give Us The Finger!

When it comes to drollery, Calvin Trillin belongs in that Hall of Fame. Today, Trillin imagines a nuclear attack warning that created panic in Hawai'i coming home to the USA. The tale involves a cheeseburger and a Duck'n Cover response. In the end, an abnormal digit saves the day. If this is (fair & balanced) black humor that would be worthy of Stanley Kubrick, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
The Button: A Nuclear Fable
By Calvin Trillin

TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

alarm arrive battering bolted button cabinet called cheeseburger defined desk dive door dope ear false floor fox hear house jong kelly kim meeting morning news nuclear nuclear-alert nyeh office oval person picture position president ram reach realized school seconds secretary sent shouted sounded start stupid tillerson tweet type un white

created at TagCrowd.com

When the first nuclear-alert alarm sounded, at approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, the President flipped the switch that locks the doors to the Oval Office with tamper-proof dead bolts and then dove under his desk. His cell phone skittered across the floor during the dive; he was carrying only the cheeseburger he’d been eating. Diving under the desk was precisely what he’d been taught to do during atomic-bomb drills at that military boarding school where well-off parents sent their incorrigibles and slow learners. Within seconds, though, he realized that he was stuck. The Oval Office desk was larger than his desk had been in high school, but so was the President.

Until that moment, the day had seemed like any other day at the White House. Many staffers were in their offices, meeting with their criminal-defense attorneys. Vice-President Mike Pence had been alerted that he might be required to appear in public with the President later in the day, and so, facing a wall on which a mirror and a picture of Nancy Reagan had been placed side by side, he was practicing his adoring smile. Stephen Miller was polishing his response to a newly published book, Twenty-four Personality Types and How to Deal with Them, in which the author, the renowned psychologist Sarah Stewart, mentioned him as the personification of a type she called Aggressive Dork.

That morning, Cabinet secretaries, assembled for a meeting in the Cabinet Room, had been passing the time before the President’s arrival by bantering about which description of the President that had leaked to the press was the most accurate. “I was right on the mark,” the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, boasted, of his characterization of the President as an idiot. H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, argued that he’d been much more accurate in depicting the President as a dope. Rex Tillerson, displaying a scholarly streak that surprised his colleagues, pointed out that Merriam-Webster defined “dope” as “a stupid person,” while “moron,” the word Tillerson had used to describe the President, was defined as “a very stupid person.” The door opened, and they all stood and said, respectfully, “Good morning, Mr. President. You are the smartest of them all.”

The tension didn’t start until early afternoon. It had been days since the President and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, had exchanged words about the nuclear buttons on their desks, but when the picture on the Oval Office television set suddenly went dark—it turned out that so many Fox News employees had to be sent to anti-harassment training that there was no one left to operate the cameras—the President, finding nothing else to occupy his time, resumed tweeting. In a tweet aimed at Kim, he wrote, “Hey, Little Rocket Man, my button is a lot bigger than your button—nyeh, nyeh, nyeh.”

“No, it isn’t, Old and Depleted Hunk of Rotting Flesh,” Kim replied.

“Yes, it is, Bad Haircut Dwarf.”

“No, it isn’t, Orange All Over.”

“If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” the President tweeted

Just then, the President’s chief of staff, John Kelly, alarmed by the tenor of the tweets, entered the Oval Office. He calmed the President by telling him that replacement camera operators were due to arrive at Fox News soon, promising to have the White House mess bring in some extra ketchup for the cheeseburger, and assuring him that he was a genius. Kelly was almost back at his desk when the nuclear-alert alarm sounded.

Within seconds, Kelly was informed by White House security that it was a false alarm, set off by an electrical glitch. Terrified that the President, not having heard the all-clear because of his concentration on his cheeseburger, might respond to the alarm by pushing the large nuclear button on his desk, Kelly ran back to the Oval Office—only to find the doors bolted. He shouted “False alarm!” again and again through the door, not realizing that the President suffers from hearing loss: his right ear is partly blocked, and through his left ear he can hear only compliments.

While Kelly called for a battering ram, the President, from his cramped position on the floor, was indeed feeling around with his one free hand (the other held the cheeseburger) for the nuclear button on his desk. He intended to show Kim Jong Un once and for all whose was bigger. The battering ram was now at work on the bolted door, but the President apparently wasn’t able to hear it. He knew that the button was on the upper right corner of his desk, and he stretched his arm in that direction. He was tantalizingly close, but he couldn’t quite reach it. The door was starting to give way. He shifted his position as much as he could without dropping the cheeseburger. He still couldn’t reach it. He gave up just as Kelly and a Secret Service team burst through the door, shouting, “False alarm!” Thus was the world spared a nuclear holocaust because the President’s fingers were too short to reach his button. # # #

[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine. Since July 2, 1990, as a columnist at The Nation, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column: humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces for The Nation than any other single person. Trillin also has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published “An Education in Georgia,” his account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. More than three hundred of Trillin’s pieces have appeared in The New Yorker. His most recent book is Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff (2012). A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA (English) from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time.]

Copyright © 2018 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves