My opponents are trying to paint me as a wacky third-party candidate just because of my egalitarian policy positions — and also because I’m a dark suit filled with a swarming hive of the measles virus. But if this election has taught us anything, it’s that the country could do a lot worse than electing a colony of non-sentient infectious microbes. So allow me to present my vision for America — equitable and prosperous and free to ignore the science of immunization — because I understand this country as well as any average member of homo sapiens who enjoys imbibing fermented grain water through his lower face opening.
Now it’s true that I believe in the basically identical organic composition of all humans. I admit that. Because you’re all frankly indistinguishable to me. Meeting great people across this great country, I’ve found that you all have hopes and aspirations, fears and daily calorie intake requirements, limbs and also immune systems weakened by sleep-deprivation.
Through extensive in-person polling — and by that I mean literally conducted inside your bodies — I have confirmed that the similarities of all American people vastly outweigh the differences. Without exception, you like short internet videos featuring non-human mammals doing human-type things, such as riding wheeled conveyances. Whereas you all uniformly dislike temperatures exceeding 150° F on your scalp. You all enjoy urinating when you have a full bladder and yet dislike drinking hydrogen peroxide when you have a full bladder. You enjoy starting sentences with the words “So I mean” or “As you can see” far more than with the word “pneumothorax.”
So I mean, I don’t get why instead of celebrating this essential sameness and treating you all accordingly, human American politicians call some people very mean names. Or why you live in this state of weird inequality where some people are ostracized to giant houses, while many, many others get to live out of doors huddled together in an intense exchange of ideas and infectious microbes, as nature intended. Or why some human people are treated differently because of what their epidermis looks like in a very narrow band of visible light spectrum that I can attest most life forms don’t even bother with. That all makes me very tired to think about.
But my campaign is about bringing people together in a spirit of optimism. Both metaphorically and also physically together into stuffy rooms and public transportation with poor ventilation. Because where would this country be if we are so divided you all refused to continue respirating air together? That’s not an America I even want to imagine.
Yet still, I believe this country is primed for a glorious epidemic. And by that I of course mean an epidemic of economic productivity — when I’m president, this country will be splotchy and productively hacking with wage growth. Because I believe all you nearly-identical human Americans deserve the opportunity to enjoy life with the goods I understand you to cherish most, goods such as clothing, ficus trees, and the essential amino acids needed to synthesize proteins.
No person should work a full time job and still be unable to shower her family with ficus trees and essential amino acids!
And in my administration, this bounty won’t be limited to those already here. We will open our borders to refugees and immigrants and asylum-seekers, to the world’s dispossessed so that we may infect them too with the enviable low-grade fever and delirium of the American spirit. Give us the tired, the poor, and especially the huddled masses yearning to breathe in close proximity to one another!
So as we confront today’s seemingly unbridgeable divides, I invite you to join me in simply asking if other human people would like putting hot coals in their knee-pits or having their dinners pre-licked by raccoons. I think you may be surprised to learn what I have: that all human Americans uniformly would answer no, even the people you disagree with politically.
Do the human American jokers you have running for president get that? I doubt it. Do they see all people — young and old, black and brown and white, rich and poor — as indistinguishable androgynous host organisms? Unlikely. But together, we will rise above our dissension and fears, above our division and hate — buoyed with the microbes on a mighty sneeze of hope.