A decadent party of America’s richest & most callous at Mar-A-Lago, celebrated the denial of Food Stamps to 40 million Americans, when destroying the SNAP program gave tax cuts to the rich.
(Donald Trump and his fat cat friends feasted and partied all Halloween Night at Mar-a-Lago while 40 million Americans, mostly children, worried about where their next meal was coming from. The only appropriate question is: What would the fitting punishment be for the cruel crime vs. humanity?)
In Stephen King’s novel Thinner, an arrogant, obese, sleazy, wealthy and politically connected lawyer runs over and kills an old woman crossing the street, because he’s getting a hand-job in his car, and loses control of the steering wheel. The lawyer escapes legal punishment for the crime by leaning hard on all of his friends in the local police department and the courts to exonerate him.
Furious by the failure of this obese, crapulent, flatulent oligarch to be brought to justice, the woman’s 106-year old father—a member of a group of Romani (gypsy) outcasts casts a curse on the killer of his daughter by uttering one word: “thinner.”
The curse takes effect on the obese oligarch immediately. No matter how much fattening food he stuffs into his large pie-hole of a mouth—hamburgers, french fries, cheesecake, ice cream, gold-decorated chocolate bon bons—he loses weight at an incredible rate of speed. The more he gorges himself, the thinner he gets.
We’ve got to find a fitting punishment like that for each and every guest at Mar-A-Lago on Halloween Night, 2025, there to celebrate Donald Trump’s “Great Gatsby” themed Ball for Billionaires. They dined on the richest, most fattening foods, while 40 million Americans were being forced to go hungry, because the corpulent capitalists in the room took away the money meant for Food Stamps to gorge themselves on bigger pieces of seven-layer cake, and gargantuan tax cuts.
The grotesque sight of the nation’s wealthy, with their boiling teeth glistening in the glare of kleig lights and feather-fans, wallowing in wave after wave of festooned food they would never finish—having fun while they forced tens of millions of children to go hungry, could never be erased.
I shared with my granddaughter Stephen King’s story, and the curse of “thinner,” upon the truly evil, heinous and unjust, and the savvy 16-year old thought it wouldn’t be punishment enough for the jewelry-dripping perpetrators of crimes vs. our youngest humans.
“That crowd likes being thin,” she observed. “They spend all their waking hours obsessing over how to lose weight. I’d flip the curse, and call it “Fatter.”
I sat up straight.
“Brilliant, “I said to my brilliant grandchild. “Brilliant The more they stuff into their faces, and their pockets, the fatter, and more obese they get. Their caloric corpulence multiplies ten-fold. Each morsel of food they take away from the mouths of babes, adds layers of flab to every part of these pigs. Each dollar they take away from programs to help the the poor and working people, converts to pounds of flesh, where they least want it to show.”
I shared with her how Stephen King’s story ended, but we decided to come up with our own, more fitting ending.
They’d just burst, like Augustus Gloop, and exist no more.