Hello dear cord-huggers! It has been a long time since I have had the opportunity to share my TV Recap!ing with you. I confess that I have been going through a hard time in life these past couple of years. My marriage to the guy on Tinder I hadn’t met in person started falling apart soon after we exchanged our real burner phone numbers. Although we had been working on sharing our real phone numbers, I was devastated to learn that he had been sexting with another woman when he accidentally sent me a picture of his bruised little guy and asked if our insurance covered car door mishaps. Newsflash: we didn’t have sexy car insurance together.
It was a rough Tinder divorce, with the lowest moment being when I lost custody of the dog I imagined was ours. Let me tell you: it’s no fun dragging a dog through the process of making him sit in the middle of a park thirty feet away from both of you and seeing who he would run to first. At least, it wasn’t fun when I pretended to do that with my “park friend,” Gayle probably, who was actually trying to train her dog and didn’t appreciate the interruption. But it’s not all bad news, as I lost a tremendous amount of weight in the ensuing depression and was able to enjoy gaining it all back, and then some, six months later. This shows me that I can reach my diet goals, and stay there, whenever I’m in a prolonged depressive state.
That aside, I am so proud to be back on the sectional, just in time for the show of the century! Last week, the House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s apparent attempt to gain better ratings. The news has come fast and furious, with the President admitting that he was trying to bribe, extort, or bully Ukrainian President Zelensky to make up dirt on Trump’s chief political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump insists that he doesn’t know which of these things he was trying to do, or which laws he successfully broke. He fully expects exoneration when the nation fails to agree that it was just one of these things. Needless to say, the President is in deep political and legal peril, and has dispatched his best lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to implicate the President and most of the Cabinet in an array of additional crimes and cover-ups.
Of course, this impeachment story is extremely fast-moving. Already, the Senate has acquitted the President. But I think it is important to step back and examine the genesis of this extraordinary episode in American drunk history TV—I’m talking about Nancy Pelosi’s flag-bestrewn impeachment fanfare pilot. This daring new series dropped unexpectedly during September sweeps, which is when chimneys in the Panhandle (where I live) are prepped for actual fall, in February. The star of the show was immediately recognizable: Speaker of the House and Representative of California’s 32nd Zombieland, Nancy Pelosi’s zombie corpse. Through incredible makeup artistry and state-of-the-art computer-generated affects, Speaker Zombie Pelosi managed to execute her Constitutional duty to speak. It’s been so long since a House Speaker spoke that many Americans, myself included, were shocked to hear her operating her jaw. It was especially jarring hearing the bone-on-bone scraping involved, marring what otherwise would have been a perfect imitation of living, non-flesh-eating human beings.
But it was the substance of what Speaking Pelosi speaked that consumed my attention. Mouthing words emanating from the radio-controlled speaker in her esophagus, Talking Pelosi accused the President of violating his oath of office, breaching his Constitutional duties, and trying to seem taller than the law. She calmly laid out the facts of the case, outlined the procedures the House would follow, and inspired us all by referencing Ben Franklin’s famous response about keeping a Republic fresh in the fridge. After listening to this literally exploded bombshell of a person, I was completely hooked. Who knew Trump had become President?!?
Astonishingly, the speech lasted only six minutes, which provided no time for more than five very loud commercial breaks, all of them touting drugs for the undead. This short episode was a bold an unexpected move for a new series that no one was expecting, except for those paying attention ever since Trump said, five months into his Presidency, that he fired the FBI Director in order to interfere with an ongoing federal investigation. Speeching Pelosi’s announcement marks a new beginning in our ersatz news culture, one in which facts, law, and justice seem to have taken on a bold and surprising popularity. While the American people cannot help being enthralled by this turn away from dystopian sci-fi news porn, only time will tell whether this intriguing new character, Donald Trump, will survive his harrowing personal journey toward full-blown megalomania.
No matter what happens, I’m looking forward to the dead rising from their grave and devouring this fake-news monster.
Dalton's Magazine 