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Amtrikeling Along
June 2023
BY
Leonard Earl Johnson
~ Fiction ~
Roman à clef, cher!
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Sunset Limited bound for Lafayette, Louisiana |
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Amtrak
Number One, the Sunset Limited
is the first train in America to carry a name. Its origins trace back to 1894, running daily (originaly as the Sunset Express) between New Orleans and San Francisco. Making it America's first coast-to-coast rail line, if you consider the Louisiana Gulf Coast a coast.
The route has shrunk. Now it runs New Orleans to Los Angeles three days a week. Departing (usually) at 9am, Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
New Orleans is the Sunset's railhead, the end of the line. Meaning the road ends ~ or begins ~ in NOLa. It originates ~ or terminates ~ on the other end in Los Angeles.
This great Iron Horse has had few on-time arrivals at either railhead, or anywhere in between in the past fifty years. Federal law mandates right-of-way to passenger trains, but this unfortunate trainset crosses the bloated heart of bloody red Republican Texas, where the hat worn by a public service railroad does not hold much water. Amtrak is routinely halted for the passage of oil and freight ~ while human cargo is left on the sidetrack drinking surprisingly good coffee.
"But no longer, 'smoking big cigars' ", L. A. Norma says. "Like Johnny Cash used to sing about."
"Not even little cigarettes," she adds, knocking a Camel ash into a long necked receptacle at the terminal house door.
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Sunset Limited, Westbound |
Yet it miraculously almost always departs New Orleans on time. Providing its arrival the day before was the same day as actually scheduled.
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Dillard and Sylvia boarded for Lafayette, Louisiana. Where they had decamped months ago, after being forced off a special Trump Rouge Train stopped overnight in the Cajun Hub City.
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Cathedral Oak / Lafayette Louisiana |
They stayed in Lafayette, took a large airy apartment overlooking the Saint John the Evangelist Cathedral Oak Tree, and
joined the Cathedral congregation. They begun making groceries at Rouses Market, "To show solidarity with Donald Rouse, Sr.'s presence at the January 6, D. C. Insurrection."
Dillard boasts of their assimilation to all who will stop and listen.
According to the Times-Picayune / NOLa.com, Rouse Market's ex- Human Rights Director, Steve Galtier posted photos on his Facebook page of him and Rouse, Sr. in facemasks and baseball caps at the park where Trump supporters gathered near the White House. He posted more images of the surrounding crowd accompanied by the caption: “Millions in DC today with us.”
"We are not parlor pinks," Dillard points out. "We are deadhead deadeye reds."
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The Red Women are so called for their red hair, hats, clothing, and politics.
Dillard and Sylvia fell from favor on the campaign train for their insistence on buttons, ribbons and banners encouraging Americans to rekindle their lost war for the Confederacy at home, and overseas in Vietnam.
The Pack Leader of the Iron Horse Red Women is known as, The Red Mistress. She says, "It is really not Party policy to advocate wars, or to deport Vietnamese fisher folk, but it is a good strategy for making America great again. Keep them fighting again and again. And again!"
"Till the streets run red with blood,"
said a D. C. demonstrator wearing an aluminum hat and a leopard cape.
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To this end these Rouge Republicans have abandoned Abe Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt ~ Republicans who liberated masses and dug the Panama Canal.
Replacing them with the rote dogma that their own government is their own enemy, a wedge tactic of occupying armies older than New Orleans demonized Civil War governor, Benjamin 'Spoons' Butler. They even aligned themselves with the remnants of the old Soviet Union and act like a Fifth Column for Russia inside the United States.
Their motto should be:
"Think government can work? Elect us and prove it can not!"
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The Party wants to arm every man, woman, and child. To mold streetfighters willing to attack America, from its Capital to school yards, to movie theatres, to temples and churches, to street cafés, to you and yours.
"They play chicken with the National Debt, triggering a raise in the debt's massive interest load,"
L. A. Norma snorts, exhaling a gray plum of Camel cigarette smoke,
"and the interest you pay on your bank cards, too!
"Republicans don't mind spending money,
as long as it doesn't do any good."
www.LEJ.world 
© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved