BONUS Advice Column Question by Madeline and Dillon

BONUS Advice Column Question

By Madeline Perez and Dillon O’Toole

“Let me tell you about my friend, Juan. You see, Juan was a janitor at my home town’s high school. He didn’t make much money, but he always came to work with a smile. Speaking to him was the highlight of everyone’s day, student, teacher, fellow janitor, it didn’t matter. People would ask him, “Juan, oh beloved janitor, tell us why you smile so!” To which Juan would invariably respond, “I love God, I love my family, and I love my country!” No matter if it was the first or fiftieth time you heard it, Juan’s aphorism melted your heart, made increasingly stony with age.

Only one man hated Juan, the mayor. A cowardly man with an obsequious and supercilious affect, he could not stand the simple humility of Juan the janitor. For years he had attempted to use the town’s police to arrest Juan on trumped-up charges and have him deported back to “Mexico” (Juan was from El Salvador), but the Sheriff, an honest man of distinguished scruple, rebuffed his attempts. One pivotal day, my friend Madeline, an indefatigably clever woman, suggested that Juan run for mayor. Like Hank Scorpio, we all collectively slapped our heads and said “My gosh, why didn’t I think of that?!”

In a landslide, Juan won the mayoral race, earning 98 percent of the vote (within a 2% margin of error). He campaigned on the slogan, “I love God, I love my family, and I love my country!” In a triumph, Juan, with his family in tow, stood upon the stage from his campaign headquarters and delivered one of the greatest orations in American history. Peter Robinson, the man who wrote President Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall!” speech, is reputed to have cried while in the audience at the time.

Beneath the mayorship of Juan, my town saw unparalleled peace and prosperity, from the fact you couldn’t walk down the street without being offered a high-paying, secure job, to the fact that my little league team went undefeated for his entire tenure in office. By the end of his term, the town (and even our neighboring counties) were screaming for him to run for Congress, and take his wisdom and goodwill to Washington. Though he initially refused, desiring to return to his simple life as a janitor, he was convinced by an old woman who spoke of the good he could not do, were he not fighting for them.

Serendipity smiled upon Juan that year, for the incumbent (and not to mention popular) representative was to retire at the end of the year. Though our dastardly former mayor had ambitions to campaign for it, he was quickly put to flight by even the whisper of Juan’s congressional aspirations. For brevity’s sake, I will not describe the divine miracles attributed to Juan during the campaign, but I shall note that his unsurprising win yet holds the record for the greatest voter turnout and victory margin.

Within his first month of assuming office, the corrupting influences of Washington were broken upon Juan’s intransigent integrity; within his first year, he had become the House Majority Leader. He could not tarry long, however, for in the next year, a senatorial race of our state was to come in the next election cycle. Tragically, our previous senator Daniel Webster IV had passed away upon Juan’s election, and so the spot to fill his shoes became increasingly Juan-shaped as the two years passed.

Understanding his duty to God, his family, and of course his country, Juan assumed the role of Senator for our state. There was no contest as to who would become the Senate Minority Leader, but Juan had refused—for he knew that were he to secure that role, he may become “locked in,” unable to advance, nor retire with much ease. He spent twelve years in the Senate, sitting on every committee and subcommittee at some point in his tenure; by the end, were Juan to merely speak, his word would effectively become law. He gained a reputation as “silent Juan,” for he would often be absent from the proceedings, for fear that his presence would unduly influence his fellow senators.

By the turning of the twelfth year, a word was in the air—a sublime word whose utterance produces a veritable panoply of emotion: “president.”

“President, president,” they would whisper—in the hall, in the street—Juan could hear them all. Without hesitation, he announced his run, relinquishing his role as senator to his son, whom he loved as himself. In his campaigns, both primary and general, Juan visited all fifty states and even some U.S. territories. Across parties and geographies, Juan was idolized. His election made Reagan vs. Mondale look contested. At his inauguration, Juan delivered a simple speech to an enraptured audience, “I love God, I love my family, and I love my country!” His voice is reported to have broken during it, though none in attendance cared.

As president, Juan cracked, however. One day, he took an axe and brutally murdered his wife and son after watching Christian Bale’s American Psycho fifteen times in a row. Despite (or perhaps because of) their love for him, the secret service neutralized him and brought him to a mental hospital, and the vice president, Juan’s traumatized daughter, assumed the presidency.

For years Juan languished in his solitude, before suddenly escaping one starry night. Breathing the brisk autumn air, Juan let out an eleutherian cry. Suddenly a tramp came up to him, saying,

“And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”

Juan saw then that it was the mayor who hated him, so many years ago. And then he shot Juan with a golf gun.

My question is, what is a golf gun?”