The Twentieth Century, Section 15

The Next Chapter: The Road to Carter

Nixon died during his trip to China when a water gate holding back a reservoir of peasants' sweat broke, drowning everyone at the presidential debate, including Robert Kennedy, the son of JFK who had sought out revenge for his late father's murder at the hands of Nixon's henchmen.

Nixon's body, having been swept to sea in the torrent of peasants' sweat, was captured by the Taiwanese government and stored in a secret vault beneath the Taiwanese Baseball Museum. Taiwan officials deny such claims to this day; but even stranger are rumors that the shadow enclave of Taiwanese scientists that runs the country (and fathers all of its children) has reanimated Nixon's corpse and uses it to eat mainland communist spies. Others say that the Nixon-thing has taken control of the shadow government, hoping one day to defeat communist China and run for the US presidency on outstanding foreign policy credentials.

With Nixon's death, his well meaning but unelectable Vice-President Gerald Ford came to power. During his childhood in Unevenground, NY (where the streets are paved in ball bearings), he developed a rare and incurable tripping disorder. Ford would trip in a humiliating and exaggerated fashion once every fifteen minutes. The disease, known among some real doctors as malodextrouspedism, made all public appearances necessarily brief and unappealing. But at least twenty times Ford was unable to rush into his black trip-proof car in time, and the nation and world laughed ceaselessly at that stupid old man and his lack of bipedal coordination!

When peanut farmer and Harvard-educated redneck Jimmy Carter ran against Ford in the 1977 election, he won by a land slide. Not only was Carter a keen opponent of the pro-tripping lobby, but his favorite campaign slogan was "Jimmy C: poor, white, can't read or write, farms peanuts--and he wants to be president." Actually, he could read and write very well. However, it was not a complete lie, since Carter could neither read nor write in Hittite.

As President, many things happened and many things were interesting to the people it was happening to at the time they happened.
Let's see...some crazy Mohammadans took some cut out posters of Americans hostage. The posters, stolen from the American Frisbee Association of Tetran, were favorite memorabilia of president Eisenhower, an avid ultimate Frisbee player. Despite the immense national pressure, Carter only managed to get the posters back on the last day of his term.
Then a nuclear power plant on three mile island almost exploded when the chief operator, an environmentalist, wanted to save water by only filling the cooling ducts when absolutely necessary. In the end, no one was hurt except the burgeoning Nuclear power industrialists.
Then, in what came to be known as the rabit incident, Carter was attacked by a rabid and snarling swimming rabbit during a fishing trip.
Then R'lyeh resurfaced.

(OP: Ben, May 4 2008)