Hi, I’m Marco, the would-be viceroy of Cuba, which I hope someday is the runway to the grand office of president of the United (which a typo just rendered as Untied, also appropriate) States, and this is what I am here to confess: I am so terrified of losing my extremely impressive job that I am willing to humiliate myself by shuffling along in shoes that are clearly way too big for me in front of a press corps that has — can you believe it? — cameras just because my boss gave them to me and he might be mad if I don’t wear them and show my proper appreciation for this extremely thoughtful (and well thought-out) gift.
My consolation is that I am not the only shuffler in this deck. I’m not clear how many shoes were given out, but we’re all wearing them regardless of fit in order to avoid having a fit thrown by the grifter. Oh, did I put an R in that word? I think I meant to say gifter, but maybe not.
I would love to blame Florsheim, so that’s what I’m going to do. At a layman’s guess, given the grifter’s (shoot! I did it again) past history of parsimony while using pseudonyms to call reporters at financial magazines to assure them that he was, indeed, a billionaire, Florsheim must have worked some artful deal to arrange it so that this billionaire could claim to purchase shoes at $150 per pair and give them to men. Not men who need them or who might not have money to buy their own shoes — no, this grift (dang it!) came to those of us who are busy insuring that people of limited means are even more limited in their quest for fripperies such as food, housing and medicine while we play fast and loose with lots of dollars across the international stage, a stage upon which I hope I can walk without tripping in these oversize shoes.
I can’t really imagine why, but the CNN story reporting on this tremendous grift (we’re working on getting the R out of there, honest) we all received from our boss for some reason devolved very quickly into a discussion of shoe size and penile length. You have to hand it to these reporters — they can be very good about trying hard to make something from not much of a thing.
I don’t know why CNN would go there — I will insist to my dying day that my shoe size really is 11.5, just like I supposedly told someone involved in this grifting. At least I’m not Vance, stuck with trying to pretend he’s not trying to show how eager he is to fill really big shoes by insisting he’s a 13. His don’t fit either, just so you know.
It’s not really clear if anyone’s grifted shoes fit well. I mean, in the halls of government 150 bucks means a pretty crappy shoe that us rich Cuban Americans, who are currently happy to let the people (too damn dumb to get off the island when they should have) of our ancestral homeland go without lights, fuel or food (come to think of it, cruelty also seems to have an R in it), would never be caught dead in unless it was a grift from our boss and we’re so terrified of him that it wouldn’t even occur to us to send one of our aides out to buy the same shoe at any discount footwear merchant in a size that might actually fit. No: I would rather be photographed wearing oversize shoes. I’m sure the American public will not make fun of me for this. It’s not like my hand size, which is plenty big enough for shaking.
Shoot, I should have taken the route Hegseth did: he just banned photographers because they were taking unflattering pictures of him. It’s good that’s the biggest thing he’s got to worry about these days.
So here I am, standing tall (at least 6-foot-7, although not so tall as my boss, who perhaps doesn’t even like his own son for growing taller than he is) in my very thoughtful grift of cheap shoes that I have stuffed with today’s shopping market insert, lest I learn any real news through osmosis of the toes. I don’t need to know anything, because if I did I might want to push back against my boss, and he’s such a big bad scary man that I’m wearing shoes that don’t fit. I couldn’t possibly tell him something he might not want to hear, like maybe that’s he’s really stepped in it with his gold-plated red tennis shoes that I don’t think ever really got produced for the mass market despite people paying in advance for them.
I’m afraid to tell him that his Middle East victory maybe, just maybe, isn’t quite the victory he has already imagined it to be. But he’s so good at living in his own world that it almost — almost — seems like he’s lost touch with reality, a word that starts with R but none of us in our fabulous new shoes know what that means anymore.
Our States may be untied right now, when everything feels rather unraveled, but I am here to assure you that my shoes are tied very tightly. They have to be, or they’ll fall right off, and imagine how embarrassing that would be.
Garbanzo Beans for Breakfast 