Fatherly Noir

Contributed content by, Brandon Saint Randy

 

A couple weeks ago I checked out VSB’s Panama Jackson hosting a talk aptly titled My President Was Black. It was very DC. The audience was chock full of bright eyed, napp…natural haired young people with expensive bags and that liberal gleam of tolerance and student debt in their eyes. There were even a couple WWF’s (Woke White Folk). Of course I knew the whole panel because, well, I’m light skinned, and that’s what light skinned people in DC make it our business to do. I heard audience members wax poetic about the deep impact living in DC in the Obama era had on them. What it meant to have a man like Barack be their inspiration, their imaginary friend, and in some cases, their actual, real life boss. I had to cut short the lovefest early to go pick up my son, so I didn’t get to soak it all in, but the sense of loss in the air felt so real. It was like a wake for a better time now gone. The Saturday morning after while we were watching Paw patrol (Rubble’s my favorite), I asked the boy what he thought of President Barack Obama

 

“I like him”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because he’s a good president.”

 

Now, the boy is five years old. He’s never known a president beside Barack Obama. He doesn’t remember George W. Bush and Iraq and Katrina; or Bill Clinton and Monica; or Ronald Reagan and Iran Contra and South Africa. His only concept of the President of the United States is of a tall, goofy eared guy, a thoroughly decent man with a quick smile, who kind of looks something like him.  And has a hot, smart wife. When a green helicopter flies overhead, he’ll go: “That’s President Barack Obama.”

 

“Will you miss President Barack Obama?” I asked.

 

“Where’s he going?” he said, a bit perplexed.

 

“Well he’ll still live in DC. But he won’t be President anymore. We have a new president, ”I replied.

 

“Ohhhh, Donald Trump.”

 

“What do you think about Donald Trump?” I queried.

 

“Um, I’m not sure he’ll make good choices as a president, I think. Well, just forget about it for the moment.”

 

Look. I know my kid is smart.  But I don’t know that any five year old independently thinks of concepts such as a President making good choices or not. He certainly can’t grasp the concept that Trump’s vice president doesn’t want people like his principal or my business partner to be able to marry their partner. He can’t really fathom the idea that the President wants kids at his school who are Muslim to sign up for a registry. And how does one explain the abomination that is Trump’s puppetmaster, Steve Bannon, a man that resembles what you’d imagine a perverted anti-semetic Muppet would look like if perverted anti-Semetic muppets were a thing (although Sam the Eagle does look a smidgen Third Reich-ish). My son couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that the leader of the free world would feel no compunction grabbing his mother by the pussy if that’s what he felt like doing. Even five year olds know that’s wrong. A man I would never want my child to see as a role model is the President of the United States. Biff Tannen in the fucking flesh with worse hair. An insecure bully surrounded by a motley crew of villains and zealots like a latter day Mumm-ra, Slive and Reptilian. A diseased Rhinoceros pizzle flanked on both sides by that sweat from a baboon’s balls that is Mike (Grindr screenanme: HoosierDaddy) Pence and Kellyanne  “Goebbels Barbie” Conway.

 

What I know is that for the entirety of his life, my little black son had a president I was always proud he could look up to, not just as a politician but as a man. He may miss Barack Obama as a nice man people liked. What I’ll miss about Obama is actually the opposite. It’s that people not only disliked him, they hated him. And yet, BHO stood tall in the pocket under the face of an endless onslaught of criticism, disrespect, and racism like Johnny Unitas in his prime. And he didn’t just stand up to the blitz, he hit that TD in the back of the endzone time after time. When you want to teach a child how to handle a hostile world, I don’t know that you can do better. Yeah, we all wanted Luther the Anger Translator to come out and slap the shit out of Joe Wilson. Just one good time after Mitch McConnell opened his mumble mouth, for one BHO to take his shirt off, talmbout “now who else wanna fuck wit Hollywood POT-US?!” But when you’re trying to teach a kid to be strong yet kind in a complicated trap-laden world, no one did it like Obama.

 

“Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever’s left out there. Ask them about that.”

 

“I have no more campaigns to run.”

Reckless applause.

“I know. Because I won bofum”

 

“Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, girl of the south side, for the past 25 years, you have not only been my wife and mother of my children, you have been my best friend,”

 

My President Was Black.  My Lambo blue. The boy’s gonna miss him. His daddy will too.

Brandon Saint Randy is a single father of one rambunctious five year old boy. Residing in Washington D.C., he enjoys looking down on people from the M and V portions of the DMV, discussing politics over cigars, and trying  new and innovative ways to test his co-parent’s patience. Mr. Saint Randy is a legitimate businessman.