Photo by Cynthia Larsen

It’s the only acronym you’ll ever need

By Ed Goldman

I’m guessing you’ve heard that this coming November are the country’s midterm elections. I mean, it was in all the papers—but since there are fewer and fewer of those, I can’t blame you for missing the news. 

Anyway, while it may already be too late to start working on slogans for the midterms, I’d like to suggest a unifying motto for both major political parties, an admittedly derivative but pithy shout-out: MASA. 

It stands for Make America Sane Again. 

I realize anyone who uses it will be risking a plagiarism or trademark /copyright infringement lawsuit from our beloved Plaintiff In Chief (PIC).  It’ll probably be for a minimum of a billion dollars, which seems to be Trump’s go-to figure for every fictional infraction he incurs. God forbid he should sue an individual or institution for $500 plus legal expenses and parking fees. But then, our beloved PIC has never heard of something called Small Claims Court. If he had, I’m sure he’d have obliterated it by now with the weapon he claims to have invented and branded for his takeover of Venezuela, the Discombobulator. (Sadly, I didn’t make that up.) 

MASA could unite Democrats and Republicans alike, but it’d mean that the former would have to stop insisting that seven-year-old children can choose their genders and undergo the appropriate surgery to achieve same; that the best way to express their anger at an ICE agent is to scream in his face profane comments about his daughter, sister or mom; and that illegal aliens should be provided with housing and major medical plans, especially if they have criminal records. Toss in a few Starbucks gift cards while you’re at it.

As for the latter—Republicans, if you began to nod off midway through this diatribe—they’ll have to undergo emergency Trumpotomies to remove this lethal parasite from their brains and bodies politic. 

We’ll have to create and invoke a 28th amendment, which we’ll call the Responsible Adult Clause. This would entail removing the rhetorical question “Were mistakes made?” from elected officials’ vocabulary, to be replaced by “Here’s how I screwed up.” It would prohibit both parties from issuing this statement after mass shootings: “It’s high time for this to stop.” And it would need to end the economic blame game, where each President accuses his predecessor of having ruined the country’s solvency, disrupted its budget planning and looted its tip jar to distract from the fact that you’re doing the same thing.  

The MASA Movement will require all of the people who call themselves “strict Constitutionalists” to actually read something called “The Constitution” and for the Republicans among them to actually follow it. Democrats would have to sign up for webinars on judicial overreach and admit that while they’d like the U.S. Supreme Court to be stocked with a few more liberals, its structure is just what the Constitution said it should be. For help in finding their way to it, they should type in “Article III” on the MapQuest app. 

MASA will forgo mandatory cognitive testing of Presidential and Congressional candidates in favor of a new version of the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Yes, the SATs will now be the SEATS (Show Ethical Attitudes To Society). Instead of questions focused on identifying pictures of lion cubs or reeling off key dates in American history, applicants must demonstrate a working knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. Since the average grades are expected to be low, the test won’t be graded on a curve—otherwise we’d be right back where we started.