I’ve been down with a bad cold, feeling listless, nestled in a brown comforter in a big chair, but I got a lift from the president’s promise of a $5,000 dividend to every grown-up if the Republicans win the midterms. Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced it as “socialism,” because all grown-ups would be paid, not just Republicans, but it’s a very generous offer, and with the Iran war won, the economy booming, the streets safer, crime declining, America finally respected around the world, you wouldn’t think a cash bonus would be necessary, but so be it.

I am thinking I might spend my $5,000 on an arch and so I’m shopping around for an architect. I’d like to be remembered by future generations in the event that this cold turns out to be a fatal influenza brought on by intravenous immunization and the books I’ve authored won’t be legacy enough in the post-literate world to come, when texting will replace publishing — no, you really need to put your name on things, such as an arch.

Our Leader’s arch would be a neoclassical French arch near the Lincoln Memorial, 250 feet tall, in which elevators will take you to the top so that you can look at Arlington Cemetery. But nowadays, thanks to aviation, people are accustomed to higher elevations. The observation deck on One World Trade Center is 1,268 feet and there aren’t long lines waiting to go up.

I’m thinking big, people. An entire colosseum of archery right here in New York City, honoring American writers, because where would we be without American — what we used to call “English” but really it’s ours, it’s the language of our Leader who by his own admission may be the greatest president in the history of the United States, so it’s time for us to create this gallery of American Literature, called the National Station of the Pen, which will be created in Midtown Manhattan, in what is now Penn Station, which is already pretty snazzy and through which half a million rail passengers pass every day, sometimes more.

So most of the work has been done already. You have a ready-made audience coming through the National Station of the Pen. All we need to do is write limericks honoring each writer to put on the arches.

In the Illiterate Era to come, the novel will be dead, even the short story, and poems longer than a page will be ignored. But the five-line limerick is irresistible.

The world’s out to screw you, you know.

So says me, Henry Thoreau.

Don’t get screwed,

Accept solitude

And when asked to dinner, say, “No.”

You read this on an arch over the escalator coming up from Track Four and it sticks with you. It’s an electronic arch, so the message changes —

The great novelist Hemingway

Woke up and had a bad day

And blew off his head

And you wish that instead

He had simply gone to A.A.

So the work is well underway and the place is a beehive and all that remains is to build the arches. There are hundreds of doorways that could be arched, and escalators to be overarched, and we’d honor archetypal authors like Twain and Melville and Whitman and also minor ones such as Moi.

Some anarchists are opposed, I suppose, but American literature slipped badly during the Biden administration, due to foreign authors being available in English translation, which should be illegal starting pronto — you want to read Tolstoy, go to Russia —and let’s up our production of limericks to Make America Memorable Again (MAMA), which is the power of the limerick, you don’t forget it.

Here is a yawp for old Walt

Whitman, who’s well worth his salt

Though sometimes he’ll slip

And just let her rip

And say, “Camerados! What is this blade of grass? Who am I? Who are you?” And you have to say, HALT.

Now AI is coming in that’ll automatically correct text so you make less mistakes in you’re writing but I for one refuse. We’re all busy, on our way somewhere, listening to podcasts and checking text messages. We need to make American literature available.

Eliot, the poet, T.S.

Wrote verse that is full of distress.

Tom, it’s okay

To go your own way,

Are you straight? Are you gay? Let me guess.

Donate your MAGA dividend to arch support and let’s honor America with a Station of the Pen. Thank you for your attention.