The Mendel Letters: 1

Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.

November 12, 2020

Dear Mendel,

I know you are dead. I’m not crazy. I decided to address these letters to you because the times are crazy. I’m worried for my kids and their kids, for the country, really for the world. I’m an old man now, but I hoped to leave something better for them. Last week was Election Day and the country voted out a bizarre President who doesn’t believe in science, mismanages everything, and cozies up to racists, loonies, criminals, and dictators. We thought we would be rid of him, but now he screams that the election was rigged, somehow his votes were stolen, strange aliens voted for the other candidate, and he is threatening not to leave office.

On the front-page today’s New York Times, the COVID-19 epidemic is surging and states are competing again for supplies as hospitals fill. The moron in the White House, the one who refuses to admit defeat in the election last week, pretends nothing is happening. Meanwhile he searches for ways to overturn the vote in the courts of in Republican controlled state legislatures. It would be a coup and the end of democracy. My family and friends worry that dissidents like me could be rounded up and put in camps like in Nazi Germany when Hitler came to power in the 1930s. The moron-in-chief (MIC), who I will not name or grant him a title, is also firing advisors who don’t kiss-his-ass and filling top Defense Department positions with so-called “hard-liners.” I don’t know what this means, but the MIC has his finger on the nuclear button and control over the world’s largest and most technologically advanced military machine for at least another two months. Times, and the Times, are scary.

Your son