Smoking Lizard Media

Similar protest statement written in happier times…

© 2017 G.N. Jacobs

I have a friend that in these stressful times really needs to find a hook for putting a metaphorical zipper on his mouth. He basically has what historians traditionallly call a Becket Problem – “Will not someone rid of this troublesome priest?” – directly suggesting on Facebook that someone not named him murder DGF. Yeah, I’m pretty much expecting a visit from various Federal cops either beforehand to evaluate the level of threat or after the fact to determine how much of a conspiracy charge with which to fit on my friend. If it’s the former, I hope to pull off “he’s totally harmless” with a straight and believable face. If it’s the latter, I’ll have to see how well my “he was so normal” flies with the current crop of Federal cops who seem to be losing all sense of proportion and humor with each passing day. 

I will reiterate that the likelihood of my friend actually doing something like joining a murder conspiracy that includes a doctor, a boardinghouse operator and a few others exists somewhere between slim and fat. The most recent bubble up on his Facebook says he needs something to cathartically release the animus of him seeing our beloved Republic get sold up Shit Creek without Paddle.

I bitched him out on Facebook that he should keep his mouth shut on social media because this was at least the fourth time since November that he’s committed the felony of threatening the President. He has a young kid that will never see him again except through the bulletproof window in a visiting room (assuming these Feds don’t simply light him up). And he writes comic books I actually like reading.

The end of my comment included a bit where I suggested to him writer to writer that he should write a comic book a cathartic story involving a gruesome presidential murder and I would help up to the limit of the law. Something got through to him, my friend pulled his posts off Facebook. But, being a pitbull with a bone with certain types of story ideas, I thought it out and worked out a story outline.

Okay, so we’ve covered catharsis – the purging of emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music. Or in simpler Greg-speak, “I write it so I won’t have to do it.”

The handgrenade in the title derives from the fact that in my desire to feed my friend with a story outline designed to keep his head on straight for him to write, two things will happen. One, I would sacrifice one of many story ideas, something I don’t really do ever. Two, writing the outline for my friend or later just writing the book, script or comic book also puts me on the firing line if the Secret Service completely loses proporation or humor and comes after me. Handgrenade, indeed. I must really like this guy.

As I put some mental effort into this, as yet, unrealized story I kinda grokked out just where the limits of this story had to live. My suggestion to my friend included my common refrain about Names Changed to Protect the Guilty, that Dragnet had it wrong because the innocent don’t actually need protected identities.

 What this means in the delicate needle threading of a story about a presidential murder where we want to keep our need to shout – “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” – in purely fictional terms, gender switching. A female candidate/president is the absolute furthest thing from our pussy grabbing, Russia colluding…very nice man. Surely, having a woman president solves the problem of an Administration rapidly losing all proportion and respect for the First Amendment as we breathe.

It does the best I can to avoid what I fear coming for another friend who wrote Food for Thought (see picture above, review to follow whenever) during that awful eighteen month interregnum where we still thought Blue Facebook hadn’t lied to us about the election. I keep waiting for this other friend to get his Federal cop visit depicting DGF as a baby-eating cannibal. I doubt a picture of a Trump-esque president getting shot for his douchebag-ery will fly. Any male president being too close to DGF, in these times.

The minute I knew my fictional president had to be female, I knew I already had this story idea on my list, or at least the first part of the story. In the wake of Meg Whitman trying to buy her way into Governor of California using her own money without asking people for donations and her subsequent smack down, I had a lightbulb. Candidate Something Something but Clearly Female is put up to run by a group of advertising executives who see her self-financed campaign as a way to shore up a soft quarter.

The candidate begins to do well and the advertising guys are terrified that they might have to live with her as president…they send assassins. Naturally, a relationship much like Olympus Has Fallen develops between the candidate and head of her Secret Service detail. And then like a lot of my not fully realized projects I didn’t get much further, mostly due to not fully grokking the second half/ending of the story…until now.

I’m thinking this out ready to feed something to my friend in need of a dental zipper and writing distraction, suddenly I get the second lightbulb. All of that nasty DGF behavior that keeps the majority of us terrified to read the news every morning becomes the second half of the story. The Secret Service agent slowly discovers the Russia (Upper Dancing Bear-istan?) interference, the growing sellout to people willing to burn civilization down and the blustery WTF. Basically, leading to the Secret Service agent killing the president himself and then either turning his weapon on himself or agreeing to arrest and absolutely refusing to defend himself against capital murder and treason charges.

Wow! A more complete partial story outline that just needs a few more Save the Cat beats to be fully ready for prime time! Hopefully, making the killer ultimately the Secret Service agent will carry the rest of the weight for keeping those Federal cops far off and therefore legendary. If a Secret Service Supervisory Special Agent ever shot a protectee in real life, we will have already had the Apocalypse and simply didn’t notice. That and a female president, we can only hope that I can claim the mantle of fiction that Martin Scorcese got when Hinckley used Taxi Driver as his motivation on President Reagan.

The current Secret Service likely has even less sense of humor in this case than they would’ve for DGF’s predecessors. But, I would have to bet my freedom on being able to explain guys, fiction, I don’t actually mean it and I made the President a woman specifically to avoid this unpleasant conversation. If I or my friend run with this story, this conversation exists in my future. I think I can pull it off.

Moving on, I pitch this partial outline to my friend yesterday (5/10/17) with the specific thought of giving my friend a reason to shut up about killing people on social media. A day later, after he’s pulled his posts off Facebook, my friend listens intently but has already softened his hard heart. This means he wants to read my version whenever it will drop into our collective headspace. Yeah, we all get bouts of Not Invented Here. But, even so I just poured concrete into a major plot hole. Giving us the post title.

One last word, any real assassins out there taking me too seriously will be thrown under the proverbial bus sooner than it takes me to buy pizza. I just don’t want to win that way.