3 April—Wednesday night, as my hot-pepper-cheddar-cheese-impregnated leavened Passover matzo was baking, I switched on the TV to watch “Your Brain: Perception Deception” on PBS. But life being full of disappointments, instead of Heather Berlin, what do I see? Goddamn Donald Trump. What a sick April fool joke!

It seems that Trump’s dilatory blather about his blatantly illegal (but nevertheless heroic, of course) non-war, strictly peaceful annihilation of Iran had preempted the regular programming, even on the network he and his evil flunkies went to illegal extremes to kill. So, since Hope and Glory had pinned me to the electric chair, I resigned myself to watching Trump excrete lie after lie while glorifying himself and actually saying nothing. In other words, same old same old.

I was able to take that crap for only a few minutes, however, so I encouraged Hope and Glory to get the hell off me and, although impeded at every step by the attention-craving little bitches, adjourned to the kitchen to see how my yeasted Passover matzo was rising.

For some reason, in the kitchen I started thinking about Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick; or, The Whale.” At first I couldn’t figure why, but then the epiphany: Of course, watching Donald Trump naturally brought Moby Dick to mind, “moby” meaning huge and “dick” being obvious.

But my senescently active or actively senescent mind didn’t stop there. Rather, it took me back to a homophonic riddle I’d first heard probably in Hebrew high school (which I attended under duress) some seven decades ago. Homophones are words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings, like “fore” and “four.” The riddle, then: “How do you circumcise a whale? You send down four skin divers, of course.”

Ha ha, you’re thinking, that’s punny but ridiculous because whales don’t have foreskins or even four skins. But they do. And whales, like humans, don’t have to be Jewish to be circumcised. And Herman Melville knew it. About whales, anyway.

Right around the middle of “Moby Dick,” you probably don’t recall, one of the Pequod’s crew, having removed the foreskin from a sperm whale’s penis (i.e., having circumcised the poor gent(i)le cetacean), dried and stretched it and wore it as a waterproof “cassock” while stripping blubber and who knows what else. Presumably that’s what really was done on whaling vessels.

Coincidentally, a sperm whale’s penis is about Donald Trump’s size, six feet give or take. But narcissistic Trump would doubtless prefer comparison with a blue whale’s penis, because blue whale penises can reach ten feet in length and are the biggest ones known.

Before leaving foreskins, then, you may wonder what’s done with human prepuces once they’re separated from their nourishing (usually) neonatal fathers. Well, some are put to various medical uses including but not limited to research; some are tossed as biological waste; and the least useful foreskins are planted in manure (usually bovine), in which they thrive and grow into politicians. And of course the absolutely most disgusting prepuces are known to have grown into the abominable Donald Trump and his despicable lackeys.

P.S.: You may recall that on April Fool’s Day in 1996, Taco Bell advertised in the national press that it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government to help reduce the national debt and would rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. Of course it was a hoax back then. And, for the record, it would require an act of Congress. But couldn’t you see Donald Trump selling the Liberty Bell and other valuable national artifacts and monuments by illegal executive order? After all, when has the law ever stopped Trump from doing whatever strikes his corrupt fancy?