It must be because Sunday was my mother’s 105th birthday, that I woke up this morning thinking of the bedtime story she would so often read to us. It was a prophecy, in a way, of the America we all wake up to every morning now. It’s a very gentle version of that prophecy - it left out the President’s racism, his love of vengeance and love of violence. But it captured his endless braggadocio, his profound personal insecurity, his emptiness. And how very American all of that is.
It was Carl Sandburg’s “How Bozo the Button Buster Busted All His Buttons When a Mouse Came”.
http://userpages.monmouth.com/~colonel/rootabaga/bozo.txt
I don’t imagine there’s one adult in the land who won’t instantly recognize this character.
"Now, you must understand, Bozo was different from other people. He had a string tied to him. It was a long string hanging down with a knot in the end. He used to say, `Sometimes I forget where I am; then I feel for the string tied to me, and I follow the string to where it is tied to me; then I know where I am again.'
"Sometimes when Bozo was speaking and a button busted loose, he would ask, `Was that a mouse? Was that a mouse?' And sometimes he said to people, `I'll talk with you--'
"The last day Bozo ever came to the Village of Cream Puffs, he stood on the public square and he was all covered with buttons, more buttons than ever before, and all the buttons fitting tight, and five, six buttons busting loose and flying into the air whenever he took his lungs full of wind to go on speaking.
"`When the sky began to fall who was it ran out and held up the sky?' he sang out. `It was me, it was me ran out and held up the sky when the sky began to fall.'
"`When the blue came off the sky, where did they get the blue to put on the sky to make it blue again? It was me, it was me picked the blue-birds and the blue pigeons to get the blue to fix the sky.'
"`When it rains now it rains umbrellas first so everybody has an umbrella for the rain afterward. Who fixed that? I did--Bozo the Button Buster.’”
That string? It’s the trail of promises he made - manufacturing jobs roaring back, Mexico paying for The Wall, cheap health care for everybody, lobbyists and Wall Streeters kicked out of Washington, huge tax cuts at the same time as a balanced budget. And I'm sorry to have to tell you, Mr. President. But we all have mice in our pockets.
