A PROPOSAL

It is a matter of national survival that we never get used

to the president’s hair. We can’t, for instance, look at a picture

of the exploded rooster comb he’s managed to cement up there

and say, Yeah okay that’s the president. It’s not okay. Just as

it’s not okay to bring a radioactive ferret to a house party,

the president’s hair threatens the very foundation of cooperative

society. Nothing Day-Glo ever crossed a land bridge, or helped

bring down a mastodon. The way you may feel about that

friend with the combover neither of you will talk about

(not even in a stiff wind), the way you may have felt when you got

put on the team coached by the dad with the unfortunate toupee:

this is not that. This is more like someone freeze-drying a fish taco

and nailing it to his skull—though even then someone could say,

“Hey, I see you’ve nailed a fish taco into your head. Would you

care to discuss that?”—whereas in the case of the president’s hair

nobody has any idea what’s going on, and it’s undiscussable. It’s

a conversation stopper—like when the man seated next to you

on a plane informs you that he’s built a UFO viewing station

on top of his barn. The spectacle of the president’s hair must remain fresh

as a stinking corpse. We need to maintain a case of national whiplash,

incurred from double-taking each time we pass a TV screen or newsstand

and see him glaring beneath that generous helping of lobster vermicelli

he’s decided to go through life with. The headlines should read

WHITE HOUSE HAIR SITUATION REMAINS WEIRD,

and most of all the people around him need to laugh.

Close aides and senior advisors may be limited to titters,

the occasional snort disguised by a hand to the face, but visitors,

foreign heads of state, are free to smirk and chortle, and both sides

of the aisle to openly guffaw when he strides into the house chamber

sporting that floppy visor spun from pure Siberian twat fur.

Let peals of har-de-har echo through the halls of the Capitol

until he stomps off to tweet the State of the Union from a remote locale.

It is our patriotic duty to never go numb. Whenever

the president comes into a room let us rise, gawk, point,

and howl like our life depends on it, because it does.