President Harris' Finger On The Nuclear Trigger - What's A Woman To Do?

It hadn't been months of the Harris presidency and the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and even North Korea ramped up their nuclear talk.  Now that a woman was in the White House, and a progressive one at that, they were sure she would keep her finger off the nuclear trigger.  Her thoughts were only on her people - the black African diaspora and women in general. Collateral interests included gay men and women, native Americans and her official utterances included some inchoate rambling concern about 'the poor'.  In other words  this potpourri of distracting, inconsequential issues was of no interest to anyone but the United States and its new Chief Executive. 

No sooner was Kamala in the White House that the Ayatollah ramped up his threats.  'Kill the Jew', he shouted from atop the highest minaret in Teheran, having taken the microphone from the muezzin about to chant evening prayers.  'Kill every last one of these blood-sucking leeches.  Kill them all and clear the land for the only chosen people - Muslims!' And in a strange reprise of George Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama, he shouted, 'Islam now, Islam tomorrow, Islam forever', after which the muezzin took the microphone and began Salat al-maghrib. 

 

'He's just scimitar-rattling', suggested Kamala's National Security Advisor, smiling at his own clever tournure de phrase. 'Nothing new there, Jew-baiting at best.  Pay no attention'; but of course the new President did indeed pay attention.  What would she do if the Ayatollah really meant business this time and launch a skyful of nuclear missiles Israel's way?  She nervously eyed the black briefcase chained to the wrist of the young Marine by her side and wondered if her time had come, a retaliatory strike to blow the Ayatollah and his mullahs off the face of the earth. 

'God forbid', she said to herself.  She would not be the first president to bomb innocent brown people.  She stopped her thought in her tracks.  Well, the third President if you counted the Vietnamese who by rights should be included even though they were not brown but yellow.  Again she stopped herself in mid-thought.  Why were they called yellow in the first place?  Really more a rust-color with a yellowish tint if the light is right...And in no way she was going to follow in the footsteps of Richard bloody Nixon and LBJ even with the foresight of the Great Society. 

When she heard the words of Russian President Putin who had ratcheted up his attacks on Kyiv and in public pronouncements echoed the sentiments of the Ayatollah - Russia was ascendant, and once more the world would feel the might of the Imperial past - she again glanced at the nuclear briefcase. War with Iran would be a playground fight at best, but with Russia? That motherfucker has more nuclear weapons than we have even counting the 'uncountable, deniable' nukes under the Nevada desert. 

'I don't even want to go there' said the President to herself in the large Empire mirror she had put up in the Oval Office shortly after her inauguration; but still, she was President now, not just a hawker of the good news that got her elected; and thank God she was, because if her opponent had won our nukes would be on their way even as we speak. 

'President Xi, Madam President, has issued....'

'Stop right there, Malcolm', she said to her National Security Advisor.  'No more bad news today; and besides the Chinese are not ogres'.  She remembered her kindly Chinese gardener, Hong Fat who had tended the roses in her Southern California home, the laundryman, Cheng Wang, who gave her candies when she and her mother dropped off her father's shirts, and Ling-Tze, the man in the white apron stirring the boiling vat of noodle soup she loved so much. 

President Xi had always struck her as a kindly gentleman, a nationalist in the best sense of the word, a patriot; and she was sure she could do business with him; but there he was, she later found out, sending a fleet of warships steaming for Taiwan and suggesting that he would reduce Taipei to rubble if the insurrectionist, traitorous government continued its anti-mainland hostility. 

The afternoon affair in the Rose Garden was just what the President needed to take her mind off nasty things.  It was a ladies tea like the ones she had always imagined when she saw drawing room, Edwardian episodes on PBS - elegant, formal affairs with porcelain tea cups and silver services, women all dressed up in frilly hats, low-cut bodices, bustles, and dainty shoes.  Her prerogative and her choice.  Aides scurried before her, the whole country was at her beck and call and today she would preside over the most elegant gathering the White House had seen in years. 

The briefing paper put on her desk in the evening, after the tea - to be honest, a very successful event - was unsettling for it contained top security satellite images of Iran's first strike preparations; that and the increasingly incendiary remarks by the Ayatollah were cause for concern.  So led into the war room by her Chief of Staff and accompanied as always by her code-carrying Marine, where she had to address an august assembly of top brass, CIA operatives, State Department, National Security Advisors. 

'There are no black people here', she said to herself as she scanned the roundtable of nervous men and only a few women.  That will have to change.  The black point of view in matters like this would be critical.  Coming from a background of incessant internecine tribal warfare, black men of the diaspora would be well-placed to provide context to the intimidating threats common in the African forest.  True, centuries had passed since Africans had come to this country, but the griot oral tradition was still alive and well. 

And the woman's perspective?  Nothing more need be said about the importance of the compassion and human love that had always been women's purview.  Women would be the mitigating force to hold off testosterone-fueled aggression. 

'Madam Vice President', the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs began, 'we must act now, act resolutely, and act with everything in our arsenal'.  

How could this be? the President asked herself.  How did this fool get traction over there in the Pentagon?  He sounds like General Curtis LeMay who suggested blowing the Soviets back to the Stone Age.  A nuclear war would last only thirty days with minimum American casualties and limited damage to the United States.  'We would rid the world of the Communist scourge once and for all'.  But she had to listen for he was her top military advisor after all, but the problem was he insisted on talking in generalities.  Act now against whom?  All of them?

 

When the war room had settled down, the President spoke in her now familiar metaphorical mix, as indecipherable as ever but said with passion and commitment. The men around the table nodded and tried not to show their bemusement and confusion.  She was the President after all. 

'I didn't sign up for this', Kamala again said to herself, having vastly underestimated the tangle of high office, and very much out of her element which was diversity and inclusion and a vaporous, Genghis Khan attitude; but she had no where to turn. 'Heavy is the head that wears a crown' finally made sense after grappling unsuccessfully with Shakespeare in a required college course; so she banged on about resoluteness, definitiveness, and principle, wading in shallow waters, avoiding the deep end, speaking in her own brand of tongues until she closed the meeting with generous thanks. 

Nothing much happened after than inconclusive meeting.  Russia ramped up its attacks on Ukraine vowing to get rid of that pesky Jew once and for all.  The Ayatollahs felt no reason to keep their nuclear silos under wraps especially with the ground war against Israel by Iran's clients going so well; and the Chinese simply consolidated their political power, encircled Taiwan, rolled tanks into Xinjiang Uighur land and bought up most of Africa and its rare earths. 

Kamala returned to what she knew best - women and the black man - and did her best to create a diverse, inclusive, and progressive society.  She paid no attention to the polls or her conservative critics and simply went on her own way.  'I am a black woman', she said proudly, and left it at that.