Barack Obama: The Man Who Sold The Gun

Short satire on the "assassination fever" surrounding Barack Obama

 

The Man Who Sold The Gun.

 

It was while watching that rally, that giant, inexhaustible sponge for oratory, that I could feel the first stirrings of a new cell of history, the very latest in a generate vein of the epoch. On the night it occurred to Senator Barack Hussein Obama that he was irrevocably the Democratic presidential candidate, I had a more personal realisation, but it was one inextricably entwined with the fate of the future president, and even though he had no idea who I was, I believe he knew what I was thinking too.

 

A president takes the oath of office before cheering crowds, following a successful motorcade notably more positive in tone than the one engaged in by his predecessor. The first black president regarded with the barely impassive eyes of a legislature keen to see what the new era might bring with it. He places his hand on a Bible, already dead in the minds of everyone watching him, both the hateful and the supportive.

 

Well before his inauguration, the comparisons with the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy were ensconced in the minds of commentators and political observers alike, reinforced almost hourly by the over-active imaginations of journalists eager to embalm themselves in history alongside their dead leader, as though they were slaves volunteering to be buried alive with a Pharaoh. Every major writer in the country was seeking to be the man who knew it would all happen, or the author of the legendary op-ed that dared to create a controversial fictional timeline of the impending conjunction of the great new president and the lone gunman in all of his clichéd, fragmented neurosis. An assassination fever was boiling all over the country.

 

It was noted by sartorial observers that the public at large were going to great lengths to be seen wearing their finest clothing when situated close to President Obama. More than the formal wear suited to meeting the most powerful man on earth, the wardrobes seemed to emit stabs at timelessness, attempts to appear stylish through the ages. Men were seen in bespoke suits, and women togged in their best cocktail dresses. Later photographs of the president among these people gave off the impression that the man was engaged in a prolonged bacchanalia in some mobile, eternal speakeasy. This behaviour could perhaps be attributed to their desire to appear as iconic as possible should they be caught in the periphery of the timeless image of a clench-faced Obama holding his chest, they in permanent proximity to the exact moment of death, fame in world newspapers, immortality in the special editions of current affairs magazines. Faces of shock, ice-water shock, practiced with an addicted regularity, to ensure the guaranteed striking of that forever posture of distress or instant vengeance when the shot that would be heard in academia and popular culture for decades to come was finally reported.

 

The 9/11 generation, seeking a tragic and defining event with a human face, a happening with a handsome, organic centre, were largely underwhelmed by the clean, cold geometry of the 2001 attacks and the subsequent stories of innovative deaths without precedent, and soon their vicarious anguish at that violent intersection of civil and aeronautical engineering had quickly spent the emotional octane of the moment. The demanding and attention-deficient “generation Y” were already forgetting the collapse and subsequent destruction of the buildings, and needed a more powerful, humanised event that said less about the possibilities of concrete and turbine engines, and more about the power of pain with a face. John F. Kennedy, on his day of immortality in Dallas, Texas, had willingly provided a human counterpoint to the remote archive footage of nuclear blasts that had haunted a generation, and now the time had come for a new saviour to retrieve humanity from a distant and immeasurable death, President Ronald Reagan apparently failing to die in the line of his duty. As always, it was a race by humanity to overcome the psychological wounds inflicted by science.

 

The death of President Barack Hussein Obama was recorded by Federal Pathologist Dr. Vladimir Putin as occurring at 8.17pm Eastern Time, June 7th, 2008, the moment Hillary Rodham Clinton began her concession speech. This prudent measure was taken by the Dr. Putin in order to avoid the precedented conflicting time-reports as experienced in the aftermath of the assassination of JFK. The doctor’s time is now the officially accepted figure. President Obama was therefore technically dead during his period of office, creating a legislative nightmare. Were the bills he signed into law still valid? Were we still at war with Norway and Kenya? What of the enormous nuclear rearmament programme instituted at his behest less than forty-eight hours after his assumption of power? Was his assassin, Barack Hussein Obama, of Portland, Oregon still responsible for his murder, given that the death of the President had occurred over ten months previous to his pulling of the trigger? Legal scholars would never be short of funding again as the debate roiled on, careers destroyed, reputations immortalised in its furious theoretical wake.

 

The various state judicial systems experienced, in the months after his official nomination as candidate for president, an upsurge of identity reassignment applications, in a turn of events that should have been reported to the relevant federal authorities as suspicious, instead of being written off by junior bureaucrats as harmless, perishable crankery. Due to the notoriously fractious nature of the judiciary, a branch renowned for interdepartmental skulduggery on a par with Russian business-crime syndicates (who, ironically, provided much of President Obama’s campaign finance and security), the 589,261 Barack Hussein Obamas, 821,476 Lee Harvey Oswalds, 326,021 John Wilkes Booths, 226,408 John Fitzgerald Kennedys, 722,244 Robert Francis Kennedys, 504,042 Hillary Rodham Clintons, 149,896 Jeremiah Alvesta Wrights, 619,072 Malia Ann Obamas, 577,123 Jim Crows, 197 Strom Thurmonds, 782,769 Osama Bin Ladens, 926,356 Albert Arnold Gores, 113,450 Ronald Reagans, 306,782 Mahmoud Ahmedinejads, 812,756 John McCains, 4843 George Washingtons, 728,856 Richard Bruce Cheneys, and 4,329,789 George Walker Bushs were not flagged by any known central database, the analytical apparatus of which was anyway being used predominantly on names of Middle Eastern extraction. With the exception of the interviewing and subsequent release of 72 Mahmoud Ahmedinejads by an overstretched FBI, no action was taken.

 

I did not know that this demographically subtle shift in nomenclature was gaining momentum as I stood near the war memorial in Washington D.C., a giant javelin posed to tear at and spill the sun from sky. It seemed to have a will of its own, to intercede in the programme of events and spear President Obama, another death claimed for its carved flanks. Nor did I know that the charismatic speaker warmed by victory that day was actually dead due to an act of sensible clerical expediency. Had the great crowd assembled there that day to see the 44^th President of the United States of America known that he would be recognised as dead as a matter of public record on the date of his coronation as Democratic candidate, I doubt it would have altered the turn-out; the mass psychosis that prevailed over America on June 7^th of the previous year meant that any Barack Hussein Obama, dead or alive, would be forever interesting. America’s manufacturing sector, under heavy pressure from the low-wage Chinese economy, wasted no time in churning out the millions of badges, t-shirts, flags, lunch boxes, fridge magnet, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, action figures, cars, medicines, weapons, hats and eiderdowns that all celebrated the forthcoming expiry of President Obama. The blue-collar workers who had committed themselves to candidate Clinton found themselves writing extended letters of relief to their local newspapers, grateful that the selection of Mr. Obama had lead the salvation of the manufacturing economy, however temporary. In turning themselves gladly to their labour of memorial, they succeeded in both saving their livelihoods and certifying in the public consciousness the most important political and historical event of the next year as an unavoidable reality. The internet, ever savvy of emerging trends, complained into a turbulent electric void about the commoditisation of a death they had staked a claim to as far back as his stump-speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. But already exceptionally progressive elements were looking past the inevitable death of President Clinton to the next likely assassinatee; early surveys placed the libertarian crusader Ron Paul at the top of the list by a significant margin.

 

Senator Obama stayed in character all the way through the election right up to the very moment of his killing. Ever pragmatic, he quickly came to accept the fact that he would not survive his first year in office. An analysis of personal effects recovered from his body were confirmed to contain a statement to be released posthumously, which was only let into the public domain following a massive outcry over its withholding from public scrutiny by federal authorities. The version published contained bland platitudes and generic utopian musings about change and the American dream, containing none of his renowned rhetorical sweep, prompting inquisitive minds to speculate it was fake. A renegade faction of graphologists, believed to be supplied with a photocopy of the heavily guarded artefact by a sympathetic official, adjudged it a forgery and made their finding known immediately on every available medium. The mistimed pronouncement yielded an enormous amount of ire from an outraged public. A Mr. Hillary Rodham Clinton, of Apache Junction, Arizona, was later arrested for the murder of three of the graphologists, whose names were leaked to the internet within minutes of their own statement. Mr. Clinton was himself fatally shot outside a court house after his arraignment, by a one Mr. Hillary Rodham Clinton of Bryn Mawr, Chicago, who had recently returned to America having been deported from Cambodia due to visa problems. A highly placed source later confirmed, in private, to Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald of the New York Times that the genuine document was a scribbled, nearly indecipherable rant of rabid impatience, making repeated references to his lust to have his killer “get on with the job.” All attempts to retrieve this testament of President Obama have failed, and it is presumed to be held in anonymous deep storage at CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia.

 

That President Obama should have written with such rumoured annoyance should not come as a surprise. The public Obama was coping with the aggressively friendly accommodation of the crowds with his much-marvelled-upon grace, although everywhere he went he was cheered on by crowds chanting slogans that, despite his having secured the role of head of state, seemed to bid him on to a higher, more logical goal. The psychological pressures on President Obama were such that prominent medical professionals have made public their astonishment on the virtual absence of medicinal support – other than nicotine gum – from his personal coping inventory, even when faced nightly with tens of thousands of supporters willing on both his presidential win and subsequent murder. Never once did he publicly waver or appear to be on the verge of announcing his disdain for the blatant affonts to his mortality he witnessed on a virtually hourly basis. His wife, Michelle Obama, reported that as soon as his candidacy was ‘in the bag’, his sleep and domestic behaviour normalised to the degree that it could be said he was running for the management of a grocery store rather than the most powerful country in the world. He was positively glowing, even when enduring the harshest public attacks from the more undesirable and unofficial elements of the McCain camp. Not one of his inner circle has hinted at a troubled person, nor has any record of such behaviour been intimated from his documentation. This suggests a godlike level of self-control, or perhaps an acceptance and even endorsement of the millions who cheered him on to his doom like a tragic Indycar racer. The usual quarters are assessing the feasibility of this postulation to various theoretical extremes.

 

As he stood there, the happy cat, the victorious captain, steam-breathing the oath of office in the cold January day, looked upon by a dishevelled but relieved President George Walker Bush and a quietly grousing Richard Bruce Cheney, I could not identify any hint of the acceptance of his fate that was so readily visible in the televised repeats of his swearing-in. I felt something of an atmosphere of penultimatum as I stood mingled among the crowd, who seemed to be in the process of redirecting their exhortatory energies towards a higher calling for the newly-minted President, a mass not yet exhausted of their reserves of support, not yet satisfied that their man had captured every important booth that his capacities had clearly enabled him to take. A sense of “onward to the more important matter” hung over the gathered millions, a palpable impatience excited towards a calling they felt more suited to his symbolic power and undeniable historical appeal.

 

Every major historian and biographer in the country was said to be working slavishly on projects about the President, deploying considerable economic and personal resources to acquire as much documentation as they could on their subject. Professor Jeremiah Wright was dismissed from the political science faculty of Yale University for breaking and entering into the past college residence of President Obama, the current home of the Kennedy family, a respected local dynasty. Harrassed secretaries and junior staffers at all the major newspapers and television networks reported to their families annoyance at being constantly quizzed by their bosses on the aptitude or pungency of some sentence they were poised to insert into their personal obituary of the President. The death of President Obama coincided with an avalanche of mythical poetry and resonant prose supposedly written within minutes of his assassination. Jim Crow of the Herald Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for his affecting eulogy that he was said to have composed in twenty minutes. Respected playwright and literary critic John McCain said later, “it was as if the coiled historical force in Barack was released by his death and entered us, and it was only fitting that his fine gift for language should penetrate us,” a statement that was telling in its revelation of the almost sexual attraction the press felt towards the subject of his death in public.

 

The incident. Barack Hussein Obama, birthname John Fitzgerald Kennedy, of Portland, Oregon shot President Obama directly through the aorta on March 15^th, 2009, as the President was leaving the Strom Thurmond Hotel in Calfornia, Chicago. The weapon used was an Iver Johnson Cadet revolver, the same type of weapon involved in the death of Robert Francis Kennedy. He fired only once, and was quickly disarmed and restrained by Mr. Ronald Reagan of Reno, Nevada. A secret service agent, choosing to be identified only by the alias Newt Gingrich, claimed to realise the threat to the President fractionally too late, despite CCTV footage recovered from the hotel clearly showing him, along with many in the crowd, observing the assassin during the fourteen seconds it took for Barack Hussein Obama to take aim and fire. A board of investigation cleared Mr. Gingrich of any misconduct and returned him to duty, where he went on to be a major witness in the killing of President Hillary Rodham Clinton, an incident that saw him awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his meritorious actions on that day. Barack Hussein Obama, subsequent to a brief detention and interview by police, was released without charge and went on to a sold-out book tour the next week, promoting his account of events surrounding the killing of the President, in a book praised for its thoroughness and impressive accumulation of primary sources. Barack Hussein Obama was poised to enter politics in local elections in his home state, but was prevented from doing so by his murder by strangulation at the hands of Mr. Albert Arnold Gore of Cheyenne, Wyoming, who tragically died at the scene from a chronic lung condition caused by exposure to asbestos in his youth.

 

Now I am standing at the third presidential swearing-in inside a year, watching another black-clad figure solemnly swear to perform great services for his country. But as I listen to the echoing promises reach down the street, I wonder to myself: why did president Obama sell his assassin the gun that would be used to kill him?

Author's Note

First attempt at something, I think it has a strong streak of JG Ballard running through it. This is not intentional.

Reviews

[Legion]

This is bloody brilliant! What a wonderfully wicked, twisted mind you have to come up with such a masterpiece. I am definetly putting this in my favorites. Bravo with a standing O! Kudos.