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Governor Frank Pelly woke up that morning and ate a nice healthy breakfast with his wife, Betty, and his three children, William, Dole, and Claudia. He thought them to be a fine family. They got along together, rarely argued, and the kids were smart as a whip and did well in school. Having a family like Pelly’s was also good for politics. It never hurt to have your boys and girls moving around while daddy played politics with the big wigs.
“Daddy,” Claudia said, “Do we go with you to the capitol today?”
“Yes, my sweet. We all have to be there. The press expects their governor to share his family with other Texans.”
“I was just wondering,” she said. “I don’t mind going. In fact, I sort of enjoy the hoopla. I also like to see you making speeches.”
“Thank you, Claudia. That was very sweet of you.” He stopped speaking and looked at his two boys. “How about you guys? Ready for another political hoopla with daddy at the beautiful Texas capitol?”
“Yea,” Dole Pelly said. “I’m looking forward to it. It’s better than school.”
“Right on!” William agreed. He high fived his brother. “School is great, but watching you speak, Dad. Well, that’s really special. I love it when you speak.”
“Thanks, William. I like it, too. Speaking is very pleasurable to me.”
Betty Pelly brought a large plate laden with eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns.
“Dig in,” she said. She handed a large spoon to her husband who was always granted the first digs into whatever dishes were being served. Governor Pelly smiled and spooned some food onto his plate, then handed the spoon to his wife. Soon, they were all eating and talking about the coming day.
The phone rang. The governor of Texas stood up, then walked to the other room.
It seemed like he never got a moment to himself ever since he had been elected to his first state office. Now, as governor, his life was neither his own nor his family’s. Instead, he had become a prisoner of his own ambitions.
“Never obtain what you ask for,” his grandmother had told him. “Otherwise it may take away your life unawares.” He thought she was strange at the time, but now she seemed as wise as an ancient Greek seer. In his memories of her, his dead grandmother had become the ancient Greek prophet, Tireseus, the man-woman fetishist whom the ancient Greek nobles always consulted before making important decisions.
Once they had reached the capitol building, the governor asked one of his best friends, “What can I do to make this a wonderful day?” This one statement was his trademark.
“You can get to the capitol podium on time and read your speech with gusto, Frank Pelly,” Henry Foster replied with a smile.
Henry was Pelly’s public relations specialist and press secretary. He was also his best friend.
“This is a small get together between you and the house and senate, but it means everything to the outside world who will be getting a tiny snippet from the news whores. We need to make it good.
“Maybe I can twist a few arms, make promises I can’t keep, then placate them with some insipid breaking news leak to get them past it.
“You know the ropes, Frank. God, what I have to do just to make you look good.”
“It’s all about you, Henry. Isn’t it?” Governor Pelly said, smiling at his friend and mentor.
“Yes. It is, Frank, unfortunately. Remember, I was an only child. Then, maybe you can forgive me my total selfishness. I just didn’t learn better.”
“Well, Henry, you are indeed a cross I need to bear. Lucky for you that I consider your work fantastic and indispensable.”
“I think you just admitted how corrupt you are, governor.”
“Yes. I know.”
Henry laughed.
“Let’s do her, Gov,” he said.
“I shall, Henry. Have to go now. We are having breakfast.”
“Gotcha. Click.”
The phone went dead. Governor Pelly was momentarily free at last. At least until the next phone call.
“Sorry about that. Henry needed to give me a pep talk. You know how he is about those things.”
“Well, Frank, he’s done a lot for you,” his wife, Betty Pelly, said.
“Don’t I know. Don’t I know,” Frank said. “He’s like a third arm.”
“Whatever, dear. Better a third arm than none at all.”
“Now there’s a phrase that was tired before it was even thought up.”
“I agree,” Betty said. “I could have done better, except look how little I am paid. More coffee?”
“Yes.”
She poured him a fresh cup. Betty was always the perfect housewife, the eternal and inconsummate mother, selfless unless it came to buying too much jewelry on the Home Shopping Network. Fortunately for the family budget, she’d wear the stuff for thirty days then send it back for a full refund, saying, “I just don’t think this is me.”
Frank had always found that line to be hilarious, which was exactly as she meant it. Betty was all right. He had married well. On top of being so beautiful and mentally charming, she even had money. What more could a man ask of such an appealing trophy wife? Absolutely nothing.
Later that day, the governor’s limousine arrived. The entire family got in and closed the doors.
“Well, here we go,” Betty said. She smiled as the car rolled away from the governor’s mansion as it was called. The mansion was an all right house, as homes went these days. Betty thought it was a bit pretentious and overly noble for public servants of a democracy.
After all, governors were not kings. They weren’t even gods. They were merely punching bags, people elected by disgruntled and very unhappy voters as their revolving punching bags. They were expected to be long-winded, addicted to lying, and able to fight their way out of most wars of words, which was exactly what politics was all about. Her husband was good at it. In fact, Betty knew for a fact that Frank Pelly was a natural. He was born into leadership. Why, he didn’t know, nor did she, but that he had been born to be a governor, she was certain.
Inside the capitol dome, Frank Pelly peered up at the large lone star at the top of the massive structure. That star was the symbol of the fantasy that Texas was an independent state and was once its own country. But it couldn’t hold Mexico off forever. It simply didn’t have the people, so it needed the United States as its militaristic backer. So, it joined. Still, every Texan liked to think of his state as its own country. Sure, it was a fantasy in their minds, but the world was too full of similar outrageous fictions which they always toted about as facts. No one needed to be much concerned about such a colloquial mindset in faraway Texas. It was mere quaintness in a far corner of the world, and it was well tolerated, even laughed at. And why not? It never hurt anyone. Like all the other states in the union, Texas was reduced by politics to a fledgling wussy state that would never fight for its independence again.
Texas was the perfect slave like all of the other states. It licked up under the federal government like a domestically trained swan looking beneath uncertain waters in a stream of nature’s wealth for another minnow to coax into its long throbbing neck and down into its dark and endless gullet. The federal agreement had become the mother hen who layed golden eggs. Never say No to mama, or you might well be in deep shit. Besides, Frank Pelly was no dummy. To begin with, he had his heart set on living in the white house and acting like the world’s egotistical dictator the way that most of the American presidents always had been in their zeal to make the entire world hate the United States for its arrogance and its well-armed, fascist bootsteps in the middle eastern desert where it seemed always ready to get its butt slapped in public by the natives and asked to leave.
The Pelly family made their way to the house of representatives where both houses were jointly sitting and hoping to get this over with before going home early for the day. Once this was over they could leave for a four-day vacation. The governor and his family were introduced by the speaker of the house, and everyone rose to
applaud.
Frank Pelly was well liked. In addition, he had not been caught doing anything wrong which could be used by the reporters to stick him until he bled and attracted even bigger sharks who waited in dark corners to bleed him out in the national news. But they could always wait in the back rooms like hungry, sharp toothed predators and wait for his ensuing blood bath once he was gored by some insipid scandal. It just hadn’t happened yet, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t and wouldn’t. In Texas, these things just seemed to happen inevitably.
“Mr. Speaker, Mr. Majority Leader, and all of you royal potentates of the Great State of Texas,” Governor Pelly began. The room exploded in laughter and applause. They were indeed rambunctious potentates, but they had rarely been called so to their faces. To have it done honestly and with a sly and very foxy smile on the governor’s face seemed downright hilarious and fitting to them. The truth always seemed stranger than the lie that all of them were humble servants of the people, when in fact many of them considered themselves to be top political rock stars worthy of the people’s emulation and worship.
“We have come through some difficult fiscal times, and I am happy to say that all of you there in the immediate audience, along with your esteemed constituents, have devised wonderful ways to sail our ship of state over the rocky shoals. We did not sink. We sailed through the rocks and survived. I want to thank you for being wise enough to show us the way to financial independence by meticulously finding places to cut our state’s budgets in many of its departments. You have done the heavy weight lifting necessary to our financial sanity. So, I will ask you to stand and applaud yourselves, because you deserve all of the credit, my friends. Now, please stand and applaud yourselves, because you deserve a hand after all you have been able to accomplish.”
They stood and applauded themselves, then sat back down to listen. What they soon heard, however, were not the governor’s finely crafted and spoken words, but the explosions of Greg Hauser’s massively powerful plastic bombs that were causing the roof of the dome out in the huge marble rotunda to crumble and collapse along with the walls and the ceiling above them which was suddenly falling apart and crashing down upon them to reveal the big sun-filled Texas sky filled with tumbling stones.
Large chunks of pink Texas rock tore away from the capitol dome’s immense structure as it collapsed into pieces and hurled its massive weight down upon them. At the same time, more and more bombs exploded overhead, and the dome’s collapsing stones poured out over the roof above and into the crowded house. The roof’s viability was soon exhausted. The dome’s collapsing walls tumbled along with its ruined and bomb torn roof into the huge auditorium, crushing its audience of Texas’ cleverest and most recognized dignitaries. The blazing sunlight’s sudden brightness broke again and again through the falling roof along with the heavy carcass of the ruined dome as it’s huge falling stones rained down upon them. The lawmakers covered their faces as the roof and walls of the dome collapsed in upon them. In moments, the mayhem was over. There was no one left to cry or even to sob. They were gone forever. Their bodies were crushed almost beyond recognition beneath tons of lone star stone and metal. At the top of the heap of wreckage stood the lone star itself. Only, now the star was at ground level. Still, it was turned upward at the sun as though someone had placed it there, a symbol of the sturdiness of the State of Texas in the midst of every calamity including this one.
Whatever had happened, the state’s next governor soon announced solemnly to the entire world, “My fellow citizens, let me say this about Texans and their remarkable future. We, as Texans, have a way of surviving whatever is tossed our way. The collapse of the dome upon our state officials is no different. So, we shall rise from the ashes and rebuild in even grander ways. Long live the State of Texas and its people.”