The Era of Good Feelings
After Election Day, the groundswell of excitement during America’s new “Era of Good Feelings” reaches a fervor that news outlets call “near orgasmic”. It is reported that “everyone has a spring in their step” and “food tastes better”.
This becomes a global phenomenon, and a palpable sense of relief sets in across the world as hostilities cease in optimistic anticipation of what will happen next. Money markets soar, damaged nations begin rebuilding, and the hardest hit citizens of the planet emerge from caves and bunkers and basements, rubbing their eyes.
Hoes are taken up, crops planted.
The weather itself cooperates, settling down and leaving climatologists to scratch their heads and issue retractions of earlier scenarios. “Sunny and 78 degrees,” they say, shrugging and grinning.
Word arrives that orangutans may, in fact, survive, and that the population of lowland mountain gorillas is rebounding. The missing bees are located and returned to their homes in robust condition. Oyster beds thrive.
The dodo successfully cloned from a feather.
On Inauguration Day, Washington, D.C. becomes temporarily the largest city in the Western Hemisphere as jubilant throngs jam along Pennsylvania Avenue, pack A through Z Streets, and spill out across the states of Maryland and Virginia, with more pilgrims arriving every minute.
There is not a single sign of protest to be seen. Police and security details have left their sidearms at home. Secret service agents are instantly recognizable by their broad smiles and loose collars.
At noon, the oath of office is taken, and the president-elect swears in on not just the Bible, but also the Qur’an, the Talmud, the Mahābhārata, the I Ching, and scores of other volumes, including The Complete Tracts of Jack Chick, an autographed screenplay of Battlefield Earth, a pamphlet entitled The Rosicrucians and You, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and The Book of Mormon.
Once the ceremony is complete, a cheer goes up over the country, audible from space. There is much tossing of hats, especially purchased for their tossability. The citizenry of the United States at home and abroad clasp one another about the shoulders and erupt into the classic 1972 Johnny Nash hit, I Can See Clearly Now.
This is a red letter day for fans of goodness and light.
By the following morning, the crowd has still not dispersed. The White House surrounded by beaming faces and bright, expectant eyes. The President peers from behind a curtain in the Oval Office.
“Why don’t they just go?” he says. “We need to get down to business now.”
An old man on crutches moves to the front. A little blind girl. Others join them. The sick, the infirm, and the morbidly obese. The afflicted, the clinically depressed, the recently divorced. The barren, the bereft, the clubfooted, the deranged.
“Heal us!” they say.
“Heal them!” shouts the crowd. “Heal us!”
Chanting begins. Frothing. Tongues are spoken and serpents passed around. People bend steel bars with their bare hands, seek available train cars to pull with their teeth, boulders to hoist, logs to toss.
Saint Vitus’ Dance breaks out, a tarantella whirling in an ever increasing spiral, contagious as the mania spreads throughout the streets, the city, the land, from sea to shining sea.
Then birds go silent. Cats everywhere hide behind couches as dogs bark in unison before setting up a continuous howl. Forget about milk, the cows aren’t giving it up. Spiders make for higher ground.
There’s a wash of static on televisions, radios, cellphones, computers, then the signals all go dead.
“Uh oh,” the President says, closing the curtain and stepping back from the window.
“This isn’t good,” he says. “This really probably isn’t good.”
