The Doll

A writer by the name of Carl Franklin is taking a walk in Central Park, when he comes across a little girl, crying her eyes out, because she lost her dolly. Carl tells her to come back in twenty-four hours, while he goes and buys her another doll; which he gives her the following day. She hugs him, and they depart. Thirty years later, the little girl, Gretchen, has become a celebrated poet, and writes a memoir for the New Yorker based on this event. Carl runs across it by accident, and goes crazy with joy. He contacts Gretchen, and the two of them launch a number of adventures, one of which is a march on the White House, demanding a redistribution of wealth, FDR-style. To the amazement of everyone, the National Guard fires on the crowd, sparking outrage and a takeover of the White House by the mob. Carl and Gretchen are elected co-presidents, while Trump flees the country. Gretchen's first act is to have the army go to Israel and rout the IDF, also to capture Netanyahu, cut off his head, and put it on a spike in front of the White House. Next she packs the Supreme Court with liberal judges, who reinstate Roe v. Wade. Finally, she asks the country to return to Jimmy Carter's "spiritual malaise" speech (1979), and decide if they are now willing to follow his advice about tending to their inner lives, or continue on the Reaganite path of unlimited consumerism and blaming the outside world for America's problems. The future of the country hangs in the balance.

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written twenty-six books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, Chile, and Mexico. He won the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a "Notable Book" by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.