MEGA on the Left Bank

More about MEGA on the Left Bank

Three years into his second term, the slogan wore out before the hats did. So he abandoned making America great again and announced something bigger, shinier, planetary: make everything great again. MEGA. The press secretary explained it with a laser pointer and a map of 1843. The Oregon Trail, she said, would be diverted east. A bridge would be built across the Atlantic, a tasteful one, gold rivets, very discreet.

The engineers fainted. The historians ordered wine.

And then, as if history had been waiting for a cue, the first settlers rolled straight into the café section of Paris. Conestoga wagons creaked past linen-draped tables. Oxen snorted at the Eiffel Tower as if it were a suspicious windmill. Influencers filmed it. Philosophers shrugged.

There was a party. There is always a party when geography gives up.

The Donner Party arrived last, fashionably delayed by snow that no longer existed. They had rebranded as the Third America Party, a platform based loosely on the Morlocks from H. G. Wells and heavily on late-night hunger. “We are the subterranean electorate,” their pamphlets read. “We prefer candlelight.”

At a corner table, a woman in a black dress toasted a bearded pioneer with champagne. Behind them, half-starved visionaries reclined like a living footnote to Géricault. A French Butoh troupe drifted through the crowd, pale and deliberate, reenacting The Raft of the Medusa between the espresso machine and the dessert cart. They moved as if the Atlantic were a thought experiment and the café floor a trembling deck.

“Is this policy?” someone asked.

“It’s infrastructure,” someone else replied, pointing at a hologram of a bridge arcing over stormy water. It glittered like a promise you could walk across in comfortable shoes.

The settlers ordered croissants. The Parisians tried pemmican. Children chased pigeons beneath wagon wheels. A man in a stovepipe hat debated a poet about destiny and municipal permits.

By midnight, the Atlantic looked less like an ocean and more like a suggestion. The bridge shimmered in the distance, unfinished but confident. On one side, a republic that had run out of slogans. On the other, a continent that had run out of patience.

MEGA, the banners read, strung between café umbrellas.

Make everything great again.

Or at least interesting.