Imagine my surprise to find in my inbox an email from one “Elon Musk” with the subject line “Russian Roulette” ordering me to send him five bullet points of what I did last week (leaving the sixth chamber empty) to justify my existence. Failure to pull the trigger would be taken as resignation from this space, which he assured me he could have me deleted from by a team of AI-generated black-booted, black-jeaned, black-shirted, black-ballcapped, black-backpacked tech-bro bots.

Not wanting to be knocked off my platform, I replied immediately, explaining that in the interest of gun safety I’ve removed the bullets from my laptop, but it doesn’t matter because as usual I’ve been doing nothing. It’s in my job description as a smalltime scribe on the margins of mass media puttering along in the slow lane, on paper no less, even though my words find their way online through some digital wizardry beyond the bandwidth of my analog brain. I am an old-school contemplative, more philosopher than journalist, and so I do a whole lot of nothing.

“In other words, Mr. Faux President,” I typed, “you’re barking up the wrong bureaucracy. And how do your techno-thugs have any authority over what’s published in the Sentinel anyway? Has the First Amendment been hacked? Are you even who you claim to be?”

“We don’t have to show you no stinking First Amendment,” he (or his AI avatar) replied. “I am everywhere and nowhere, an omnipresent omnipotence, your Big Boss Bro, and I’ve been authorized by the Oval Orange to demolish democracy, one newspaper at a time. We’re going after your little blue bubble of progressive pathos. Now that English is the official language of our white Anglo-Christian Republican Republic, and the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America, Santa Cruz is Holy Cross and anyone who says otherwise gets a one-way ticket to Guantánamo. Same goes for the Spanish-speaking criminals growing your food. Even the fish in your bay have no sanctuary.

“Monterey is now King’s Mountain, and you know who the king is. King City is Donaldsville, Marina is Melania, and Pájaro is Bird Flu-over-the-River. Best of all, Moss Landing is Musk Landing, where the batteries of all the Teslas in the world will be stacked in my personal pyramid scheme and we’re building a launch pad for my rocket ships so when they blast off to colonize Mars every living thing in Elkhorn Slough and all you pitiful libs will choke on the smoke.”

Thus spoke Musk (or his replicant) in the billowing exhaust of the first weeks of his regime, a runaway battery fire we must stand back from and stand by and stay cool as it burns itself out. At this apocalyptic pace it may not even take four years.

While I had him online I asked him if he thought torching the Constitution, the federal government and all its agencies and departments would really make America as great as it was before the white man landed, or only as great as the antebellum South when all those happy-go-lucky African Americans were learning the useful skills of picking cotton and building their masters’ mansions.

“Listen, wise guy,” he typed, “as long as the people are unwoke, gaslit, bamboozled, buffaloed and befuddled by the trumped-up attack on everything they used to believe, and the MAGA-base cargo cultists keep waiting for it to rain cheap gasoline and hardboiled eggs while their health care is killed and vaccines are banned and measles is on the rampage and the climate keeps raising hell and Mar-a-Gaza is resurrected as an offshore tax-shelter resort for corporate executives and homeless refugees from everywhere are shipped to the freshly dredged deepwater port of Carmel-by-the-Sea to camp where even Clint Eastwood can’t chase them off the streets, then you and your overeducated liberal elites and defunded scientists and DEI divas will know which end is up — and it’s not yours.”

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.