Jeff Whitten

Local columnist

In case you missed it, the presidential election was Tuesday.

One candidate won, the other lost, as tends to happen sometimes in elections. The side whose candidate won is considering it a great victory for their side and for all who love America, while also saying precious little about formerly evil Dominion voting machines – which didn’t work four years ago but apparently work fine now. How ‘bout that.

The side that lost is wondering what the heck (I’d use a stronger word, but this is a family weekly paper) went wrong for their choice while also worrying it will spell the end of America.

Media types, prone to over exaggeration, are also in on the act, declaring the win as either the greatest thing since the invention of people or the death knell for democracy.

Still, some of us weekly newspaper clowns dumb enough to get roped into writing this opinion piece fall in the middle on what happened, including me.

That’s because I basically try to operate on the principle that nothing is as good or as bad as it appears in the moment, meaning time will tell. And it will. Probably. If we even remember to check back later and see whether it was good or bad or more of the same.

No, the only thing we know at the moment is we’re one very weird country full of weird people. Weird on the right, weird on the left, weird in the middle.

Except for the weirdos, naturally. They think they’re normal and this is all how it’s supposed to be. But I digress.

Dissecting what just happened and making sense of it can be left for another day and smarter folks than me. I’m only here to get in my list of requests to the president-elect pronto so he can put them on his to-do list somewhere up top.

I’ll keep them brief, or try to anyway.

• 1. I think we need a roundabout and Jiffy Lube at the intersection of Highway 204 and Old River Road – you know what I’m talking about. It’s where they put up a Dollar General across the road from Joyner’s Corner at the same time traffic consisting of semi-trucks and dump-trucks and soccer-moms in oversized SUVs and idiots-in-giant-pickups has increased about a thousand-fold thanks to the booming port, 9,000 new warehouses and subdivisions and a certain EV plant out in Black Creek.

Basically, every time I go that way it reminds me more and more of trying to drive in Richmond Hill, which is about as much fun as a trip to see a proctologist, not that I go to the Hill often since I’ve retired. Anyhow, a roundabout and Jiffy Lube at 204 and Old River Road, please. You can work on Richmond Hill traffic later once you’ve settled into office.

• 2. A wall. I know the president-elect promised to build a wall way back in 2016 and get Mexico to pay for it, and even though they didn’t during his first four year term, I’m all for a wall in 2025, but in the other direction.

This one would be about 200 feet high and run from the Atlantic ocean somewhere north of North Carolina, continue west about five feet north of Tennessee and Arkansas and Oklahoma and then start dropping south on the other side of Texas, and then run east along the gulf coast past Louisiana and that little chunk of Mississippi. Then it would turn north for just a minute before heading east again, severing Florida from the American states of Alabama and Georgia. It would also sever Virginia, so maybe we could adjust the line a tad bit. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Once it’s complete, you should make Ohio and Michigan pay for the wall.

And New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York, etc., could certainly chip in. But mostly Ohio and Michigan, I think. I’ve got mixed feelings on deportations, by the way. Sometimes I think you should give amnesty to transplant yankees. At other times, mostly when I’m in line behind about 18 of them at Lowes, I think politely deporting them back to Scranton and Akron is a good idea.

• 3. Give everybody free lessons in the Art of the Deal. I think this is important, because clearly too many people in this country don’t get the Art of the Deal, and I believe it’s holding us back from being great again or playing a great hand of cards. So, yes, please send us all a free copy of the Art of The Deal and make it required reading. Have a pop quiz on it, with anybody who makes a C or below being required to wash your car.

• 4. Appoint me to office. I don’t want to have to work too hard now that I’m retired, so you can maybe make me “King of Electronic Billboards” or something. I’m not sure what I’d do, other than probably require the uploading onto these billboards of lots of pictures and videos of good looking women in bikinis fishing on boats catching fish and then having some beer.

Nothing could be healthier or better for American morale, unless you’re a fish, I guess – but I suspect even a fish, if it’s a good American, would enjoy being caught by a beer-drinking bikini babe.

Besides, that sort of content would beat the heck out of the nonsense we see on there now, bothering people’s retinas. Does anyone stuck in traffic at the intersection of Highway 144 and Highway 17 really pick their banker or realtor or mortgage loan originator because they saw them in high definition at 100 footcandles with a maximum luminance of 160 cd/m2? And, who cares what Scenic America thinks, let’s make them brighter than 40 nits so they blind people no matter how far from the Crossroads they are. We’re talking bikini babes in boats catching fish here, with beer.

• 5. One more thing, and then I’ll hush. I think you should abolish the House of Representatives. They don’t do any good for most of us, and spend most of their time fussing and finger pointing and feathering their nests and getting themselves re-elected by gerrymandering districts whenever things look dicey, and some of them sound and look like Christmas elfs – and those are the ones you have to watch.

Instead of Congresspeople, you should replace the House with a Homeowners Association, since technically we the American people are the homeowners in this enormous subdivision called the good old U.S. of A., except for those parts up north I personally think should consider moving to Canada, if Canada will have them.

And after you’ve got that done, go ahead and appoint the nosiest, bossiest, most self-important and pretentious folks you can think of (people who drive Land Rovers or Teslas, for starters) to this HOA board, so they can tell the rest of us what we can or can’t have in our yards. And instead of taxes, let’s pay dues and an annual maintenance fee. I’m thinking $100 a year should cover it.

Granted, this is a lot to mull over, and there are probably a bunch of details in need of fine tuning. Plus, you’ll have a lot on your plate and a bunch of people looking to get in your good graces, like me. Just remember, we’re No. 1 and for every problem there’s a simple solution. If you keep that in mind you’ll go far. That’s certainly how I got where I am today.

Your friend, Jeff.

Now retired, Jeff Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.