A man in a MAGA hat visits the Women’s bookshop

There is a time in every man’s life when he must stare the cyclops of destiny in its ocular singularity and neither flinch nor flee. Wellington at Waterloo, Custer at Little Bighorn, Mel Gibson at Gallipoli.

Mine was last Saturday.

Mother’s Day was fast approaching and I had tracked down the perfect gift for the woman who gave me free internal room and board for nine months. It was a book, the last in a series my mother was devoted to, of interest to ladies in the latter stages of life. Something about a woman discovering herself through exploring vineyards in Tuscany with an Algerian boy toy. Or perhaps she was discovering the vineyards and exploring the boy toy. I forget. Anyway it was a book which could only be purchased at such a late hour at The Women’s Bookshop in Ponsonby.

Ponsonby.

To the Right thinking individual, Ponsonby is the techno-beating heart of enemy territory. The hip nexus of trustafarian faddishness, radical feminist-green-queer lunacy and NIMBY chardonnay socialist elitism. All that’s shrivelling to the soul and the testicles in one foul suburb.

This trip was gonna be grim.

I needed fortification. A tinder dry vodka martini in the late Autumnal sun. I got to thinking. Why the trepidation? This was New Zealand damn it! I could go wherever I wanted. No man or woman or gender non-compliant being was gonna make me feel I didn’t belong. Through the wonderful alchemy of alcohol my annoyance soon turned to an empathic expansiveness of the heart. They were my fellow kiwis, these Ponsonby lardy-da lefties, they would see reason, wouldn’t they?

I had another even drier martini and got to thinking some more. Why not test this? Proclaim my political affinities to the world and see if our inherited Anglo-Saxon freedoms still held in this country. Even in Ponsonby.

Yes, it was decided. I’d wear my MAGA hat to the Women’s Bookshop.

So I set off in the late afternoon sun, a liquored-up man in early middle-aged (yet somehow still retaining the well-defined cheekbones of his youth) with a bright red ‘Trump’ hat upon his head.

I had not got ten metres down K-road when a barefoot young hipster in grubby denims noticed my head gear. He gawped and shook his overly-complicated haircut. I strolled nonchalantly past him and whispered ‘Lowest unemployment rate since 1969.’ I thought he might appreciate that being as he looked in need of a job himself. He gave me the finger. I strolled on.

This was going to be my only defence to abuse and ridicule. The facts. Trump Facts.

Most of those sharing the pavement with me, gave my provocative potai not a second glance. I got a snicker or two. Someone yelled something indecipherable from a moving vehicle. It could have been pro or anti the Trumpian agenda. It also could have been ‘Show us your tits’ directed I hoped, at the woman opposite.

It was in Ponsonby proper that things got serious. I noticed a gang of lesbians were tailing me. Big butch and mean as hell, psychotic with penis envy and menacingly banging weighty tomes on gender theory against their massive thighs. I was about to be a victim of a hate crime.

As they came closer I prepared my defence. “Trump has appointed an openly gay ambassador to Germany who is leading an international effort to decriminalize homosexuality” I was about to proclaim.

They brushed past me and disappeared into a shoe shop. I wondered at their haste. Then I saw there was a sale on Doc Martins.

Soon I reached my destination. Inside as I scanned the shelves, a lady in her fifties, dressed in a voluminous floral print skirt and wearing earrings heavy with green stone looked me up and down. On seeing my hat, she started like she’d been hit by a rock and cried out. Immediately from behind the shelves came three more ladies of similar vintage and even bigger earrings. They all stared at my MAGA hat, a black hatred in their eyes. I backed towards the door, about to shout “Trump has appointed more female federal judges than any president except Obama”, but my nerve failed me and I ran.

I wandered back down Ponsonby road, dejected. My mother would have to make do with a lotto ticket and a Whitakers peanut slab. Outside a café I was the target of jeers as the latte sippers had a go. At last Ponsonby was showing its true colours. As they loudly and profanely took the President’s name in vain, some sneaky bugger grabbed my MAGA hat and frisbeed it out into the traffic.

Enraged I could only cry out “Trump is standing up to the Chinese! Try voicing political opposition when they run the show!’

But the beautiful people heckled on. No one was listening. The MSM had so poisoned their minds that they could but parrot insults about the man standing up for the very freedom they enjoyed.

Then a figure emerged out of the dimming light. A large man in tight leather. Likely a large gay man in tight leather He looked like he ate middle aged men who retained the well-defined cheek bones of their youth for breakfast. He held my crumpled MAGA hat in his hand. Where, dear God, was he going to stuff it?

Then he smiled. ‘Trump’s the man.’, he said and put on the hat.

 Here at lefty ground zero was a fellow traveller. My faith in the freedom of our fathers and the non-conformity of our political culture was magically restored. By a man dressed like the scary one in the village people.

We high-fived and he left.

Still wearing my hat.