Remember Me Like Sarah

In a recent interview at the 2018 Women Who Rule summit, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders described the legacy she hopes to leave:

I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could to put forward the president’s message, to do the best job that I could to answer questions, to be transparent and honest throughout that process and do everything I could to make America a little better that day than it was the day before.

“Bolding added to highlight a wish that defies fulfillment under Trump,” said media critic Erik Wemple.

I disagree. In this era of alternative facts – an era Sanders herself has done much to make a reality – I see no reason why Sanders, or indeed any of us, cannot be remembered exactly as we wish to be, irrespective of our actual behavior in life.

Here is how I would like to be remembered.

It’s difficult to summarize the accomplishments of someone like Dani Alexis in a single speech. A luminary of her caliber, a beacon of shining hope for humankind, comes along only once a generation, or perhaps even less often. From her nine Olympic medals in figure skating to her perfect score of 100 at the 2022 WGI World Championships – spinning all 30 parts of a highly complex show whose theme, “World Peace,” instantly ended all war and strife in the world – Dani was truly a force to be reckoned with.

Most of you remember Dani best under her pen name, Verity Reynolds, which sounds familiar to you because over a billion households worldwide own copies of her tour de force novels. I still recall the day her sales topped those of J.K. Rowling for the first time. Today, of course, we all say, “J.K. who?” It’s been said that Dani’s work is more popular than the Bible.

Dani herself, of course, would never say any such thing. A paragon of humble virtue, Dani was known for using her vast wealth to end homelessness, wipe out student loan debt, and provide vaccinations to millions of children. And she was equally generous to her critics: each received a life-size participation trophy wrought in their own likeness from the finest Limburger cheese.

When asked to name her proudest accomplishment, Dani recalled with fondness the year 2031, in which she won the Nobel Prize in every category for her side gig: turning the moons of Mars into blockchain miners capable of beaming solar enery directly to Earth, thus solving the energy crisis in a series of equations organized as an epic poem. That was also, she notes, the year she learned to make macaroni and cheese from scratch.

Dani plans to spend her remaining days at home, surrounded by her family, her cats, and her best friends Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, and Captain America.