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Squid #235
(published July 14, 2005)
Notes from the Giant Squid: The President I Admire Most, Peanuts and All
Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid?
As President of these United States, I am often asked "Oh great and wise ruler before whom we all do quake of the fears, which of the many Presidents who have preceded you do you muchmost admire?"

It is not an easy question to fairly address, as there are many of those Executive Ninja india who I find fit and well for emulation, adoration and admiration. Frankly Pierce was a noble savage, as were the Cannibal Ben Franklin ElanoreDelanor Roosevelt and Millard Fills-More. The Stony Avatar of Abram Lincoln, Spider Liberator and Devourer of Men, was an adversary most deserving of all due consideration and reverence. William Howard Tubby-Tafts was simply adorable.

So, it is to say, that my presidente favoríte is a mutable thing, changing with the brezinesses. But, doubt not, there is oft-always a warm and protected cove in my triple-trip-hammer hearts for George Washington-Carver, our El Presidente Numero Uno and Founding Father of the Fathers of this Great Land.

Washington-Carver, as a figure, is shrouded within secrecy and myth. Some believe him three-fifths a man, two-fifths a machine, others five-sevenths beast, three-sevenths cavalier and negative-one-seventh tachyon chocolate lover brother from a dimension behind time. School childrens are taught the easy and palatable portions of our First Father, so that they do not choke upon the truth. The truth that I as your polychromatic narrator, guide and Commander-of-Chief shall not hold back from. The long and hard truth, that I shall make you feast upon. It is so that you will indeed be choking upon my truth before the day is out, humble readers. Choking upon it. Your gorge shallow rise with honest, and the bile of knowledge spill fourth.

It must be said first that "Washington-Carver" was not his real surname. The real name of that First and Greatest of American Heroes has been lost, like so much of history, to the torch, the weevil, the rot of age. It was his actions that he did undertake after the slaughter of his family at the farm that did earn him the fearsome appellate of "Washington-Carver."

The ultimate origins of "Washington-Carver" are unknown. Some say he was found in a crater, surrounded by the husks of peanuts, by the Kent family and raised as one of their own. Some believe he was a freed slave, adopted by loving and nurturing agronomes des arachides. Others claim that the Grand Ruler of the Freemasons, Adam Weisshaupt, fled to colonial proto-America from his inhospitable Europe and killed the real Washington-Carver and assumed his identity. Some believe these tales. Some do not. You should not, for they all are lies.

Here is what is known:

George "Washington-Carver" grew up a free man in the Colonies of proto-America, black as night, full of Hell, with a mind like a steel lobster pot, a shock of red head-hairs which waved and crackled like the fires that consumed London in 1666, arms like the trunks of trees, and a third leg like the trunk of an elephante—which is to say, prehensile, and through which he might take the dry-airs, as is the method of humans. His remaining two legs were normal, and his hands medium. From a young age, barely past his whelping years, Carver had a love of peanuts and all things peanut related.

A passionate and inspired scientist, Washington-Carver developed methods to resinize and plasticize peanuts, so as to enable them to be crafted into any object. His home. His tools. All of the furnishings he rested himself upon to escape the horrible gravity that clutches and gnaws at all those who walk so ungainly upon the suffocating surface of this planetoid. All of this was nut-forged. He nut-forged a carriage, and a horse to pull it; a wife, and dishes for her to wash; a child, and regrets for that child to hide in his little peanut heart.

As for his likely beginning, it seems clear that Carver-Washington was found orphaned in the North by a loving couple. They were peanut farmers. He was raised with intimate knowledge of the peanut, it's uses and abuses. That holy nut occupied his thoughts and learnings for nearly a decade. And then disaster struck.

When he was a palindromic man of two-and-twenty, the British levied a peanut tax, and a tax upon all peanut related goods and services. The tax was to support the British war against the French, the Indians, the French Indians, and the Indian French.

When the British tax agents came to collect upon the farm of Washington-Carver's foster parents, they were unable to pay. A scuffle ensued. The British soldiers—armed with new weaponry—were eager to use it, much like the modern day police of Florid Land, who are so beloved of their tasering devices that they use them nearly daily upon children, dogs and themselves. It is whispered that the Police of the Florid Lands are possessed of an unhealthy—and possibly unholy—love of the Volta and the Amperáge, well then so it was true that the policing forces of this ancient Americana, for they had an illicit love of the Musket, the Powder Charge, and the Leadshot.

The British did make to gun down Washington-Carver's foster family with such ferocity, vigor and sheer firepower that the act deafened all those near, and echoed around the globe. It shook branches in Tasmania, rattled teacups in Brazil, and cracked windows in Muscovy. It was the Shot heard round the World.

Washington-Carver was away at the time. He had been charged with taking a shipment of peanut-butter, peanut-leather and peanut-cotton to market. When he heard the deafening Shot, he raced back. But was too late. He found his foster parents, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, dead and burned by the Imperial Soldiers.

With his advanced peanutology techniques, Washington-Carver forged weapons in the lowest basement of his farm-fortress. He smithed the peanut steel, and folded it a thousand times over—a technique he learned while travelling in feudal Nippon. An axe was forged, sharper than any blade that had come before and light. It also smelled of the delicious, although was an allergen most deadly to some childrens. Armor was forged, though Carver-Washington's time was running short so he was only able to shape it into a thin exoskeleton, worn under his roughspun breeches and shirt. The armor also was light, and wholly unbreakable.

Carver-Washington, during his many years of peanut experimentation in the cold Canadian north had also happened upon the miracles of peanut milk. Said milk is said to have miraculous healing powers. Carver-Washington drank it daily in preparation for his battle.

He trained in his farm, in the isolated valley. He smithed his weapon, his armor. He thought he was ready, but nature and the vagaries of surface-dwelling weather systems confounded him.

A winter came that lasted for ten years. For ten years Washington-Carver was trapped within his farm, in the valley, with no food and no water. For ten years he trained and planned and grew ever hungrier for the blood of Englishmen—as hungry as ten hungry men. To survive he was forced to devour the peanuts that had formed the building blocks of his domicile. Fear ever gripped him, as termite-like he consumed his own home. "What if I should run out of home? How long will this Winter last? What if I should happen to consume with my razor-sharp beak a load-bearing section of peanut brittle?"

But the fear passed and the air warmed. When the terrible Winter of his Discontent was made Glorious Summer, all that remained of his farm dwelling was the forge where his unholy Axe and Armor were born. And so this was known for ever more as the Valley of the Forge, and his hunger and deprivations became legend.

Washington-Carver travelled only at night. He stayed far from the roads. He feared blundering into Imperial British soldiers too soon. He walked the trails of the wolf, of the wolverine, and of the rare wolferine—a now extinct cross-breed, my assistant Rob assures me.

He strode into Mary-Land in such manner, and further through the sylvan verdentry of William Penn. It was there, in Penn's Sylvania that Washington-Carver had his first bloody encounter with the Empire.

It was an outpost, three score of British troops symbolically protecting a mass grave where Yeoman Farmer Shea and his patriotic rebellioneers had been buried. The Empire had planted cherry trees atop the grave and they feasted heartily upon the fruit of that grave tree, believing that by eating the cherries they would be also devouring the souls of those defeated, as was the quaint superstition of the time.

Late at night, when no moon shone, Washington-Carver strode in to the camp and felled that fell tree with one swift chop from his peanut-forged axe. The axe was so light and sharp that it made no noise as its blade swung, like a fin silently cutting through the water, through the tree, through to the feeding frenzy that only whets and never sates.

The head officer of the troop emplacement sprang against the terrible gravity to his feet, his belly fat and full with the souls of dead American-farmineering rebellioneers, and proclaimed, "Who has done this deed that I failed to witness, as the moon shines not and my eyesight is poor, my eyes white-less?"

At his voice, the three score soldiers stirred and crowded near to the chopped tree, searching for more of the hell-cherries to slate their infernal lust, and also for signs of tamperer.

Washington-Carver, axe in hand, came forth. "I can't lie, bub. It was me." He said in his gruff manner, as was his habit. "I'm the best there is at what I do, and what I do is peanuts."

This was a strange phrasing, made stranger by Washington-Carver's lack of teeth—for the devouring of brittle peanuts is harmful to dentition—and it puzzled the British men. They remained puzzled, quizzical looks upon their beefeater faces until Washington-Carver roared, "Fee!" he roared, "Fie! Fibby-Fo-Fum! I'll smell the blood of you Englishmuns!" and took his axe to the nearest man.

He hewed them all like so many saplings, and then wove their corpses into circles, like so many wreaths, chitinous flecks of red from their lobster-uniforms still clinging to the quickly green-ganging rot of their torn flesh, which he then hung upon the doors of noble, earnest and deliberative Minuteman as he wandered his way further west, to the Slaughter of Saratoga, so that the Angle of the Deathing which travelled ever in his wake—the blacker shadow of that dark gargantua—would know to pass-over the houses of these revolutionary colonial patriots. This is knowns as Washington-Carver's Passover of the Delaware, and is much commemorated in paintings, posters and postage stamps.

He left but one man alive, one man to tell the British empire that he was coming, dauntless, pauseless, feckless and fearless.

It was such that he slowly overtook the British, driving them ever back, the Angel of the Deathing ever on his heels, from crossroad to crossroad. He was spoken of as a myth at first, a boogeyman. He was called "the Carver of Washington." (Washington having been a small town most notable for it's superior laundering, hence "washing town," and a favorite haunt of those foppish, meticulous British dandies, ever-craving brighter lobster backs and whiter-whites.)

Washington-Carver waged a one-man guerilla war. He filled his mouth with the teeth of dead soldiers, replacing those that he had lost devouring the flooring in the Valley of the Forge.

He became a hero of the common folk, a righter of wrongs, a vigilant vigilante. And he was soon joined by the irascible Frenchman Lafayette,, whose wealth was then used to hire more and more soldiers to their cause.

Washington-Carver used his knowledge of the peanut to forge better weapons for their soldiers, and even developed a fleet of flying machines that were used by the Airmen of Tuskegee against the Mad King George's Aero-gyros and War-Zeppelins.

He gathered about himself the Fighting Fathers: Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Handcock, Hannibal, Murdock, Barrachus, etc. And with these brave men he defeated the British Empire at the Battle of Yavin,.

This is how it was, my dear and fellow Americanoes, and it is for this ceaseless chompery of his enemies that I oft always admire George Washington-Carver.

The Fighting Fathers became the Founding Fathers, beating their peanut-swords into peanut-plow shares. It is said often that revolutionaries make poor governors, that those too obsessed with causing massive social change are ill-equipped to deal with the rigors of designing and implementing a new system, perfect in its glory. And this was also true of George Washington-Carver. His ten years of rule were merciless and bloody. Men and women disappeared from their bedchambers nightly, never to be found again, the moribund perfume of sweet peanuts being all that malingered in their raided closets.

I have but five short grunting utterances that perfectly describe the foolish reign of King George the Washington-Carver the American: the Articles of the Confederacy.

But that is a story for another time, my dear and best belovéd voting public. The story of the Quiet Rebellion led by the Fighting Federalists . . .

I Remain Yet,
Your Giant Squid
President
These United States

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see other pieces by this author | Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid? Read his blog posts and enjoy his anthem (and the post-ironic mid-1990s Japanese cover of same)

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The Next Squid piece (from Issue #236):

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Tales of the Giant Squid: A Year and a Day (part seven of thirteen)

Notes from the Giant Squid: Concerning the Governance of These United States, A Primer (pt. 3)

Visions of the Giant Squid: To Eat a Cat (also, with instructions for knitting a squid hat for your infant)

Notes from the Giant Squid: Concerning the Governance of These United States, A Primer (pt. 2)

Ask the Giant Squid: I Eat Cannibals


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