The conservative administration learned to regret supporting the right to bear arms.
Photo by: Jessica Ma
After two weeks of conversing with petroleum companies, conservationists, legal authorities, President Trump, and his own wife, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke finally got the support he needed to push forward with a plan to designate roughly 15 percent of Yellowstone National Park’s land area for fossil fuel extraction. To celebrate, Zinke borrowed taxpayer money and flew himself and his family to Yellowstone to deliver an elaborate speech commemorating the occasion. However, before he was able to finish his opening sentence, he discovered that he lost his audience to an endearing grizzly bear cub some 50 feet behind him. “It’s unbelievable just how quickly that happened,” Zinke commented. “I mean, the thing just lazily strolls by without doing anything and suddenly it’s the star of the show and everyone’s in love with it — wish that would happen to me.” Zinke’s attempts to recapture his audience’s interest were entirely futile. Within two minutes, even his wife and children had left to go see the cub and make noises of admiration. Finally, Zinke called a park ranger to the scene, hoping to get some assistance regaining his crowd’s interest. To his dismay, it took almost 45 minutes for a ranger to arrive. The ranger who finally showed up to the scene, Pauline Fredrickson, later revealed that she had not come by choice. “As soon as they told us it was him, we all started protesting,” recounted Frederickson. “Even after I literally drew the short straw, I still refused to go. I was only convinced to do it once my co-worker, Sarah, bribed me with a huckleberry pie, and she told me that she would deal with the next time someone gets bitten by deer because they wanted to feed it.” Regardless, Fredrickson did not do anything past asking the visitors to step back from the cub, warning that its mother must be nearby. “And then they all just stared at me open-mouthed,” she recalled. “So I told them to back off unless they wanted to end up like Leo in ‘The Revenant,’ and that worked much more effectively than trying to explain how protective mother bears are of cubs.” Zinke still had no luck giving his speech, and he vented his frustration by taking away his wife’s phone as she tried to take a selfie with the cub. Finally, he was approached by a journalist who asked, “Sir, what will happen to this bear when you shrink the park?” Five other reporters followed his lead and asked the same question. “I was astounded at that,” Zinke confided. “Here I am trying to make a case for how much I’m contributing to the longevity of the U.S. economy and all these bozos just want to know what’ll happen to one insignificant bear.” On the contrary, the bear proved to be rather significant, as within the hour, images of the cub were circulating all over social media, trending with “#savesmokey” in reference to the ursine icon of American forests. Before morning, disdain for Zinke had grown to such astronomical proportions that he was forced to withdraw his proposal to shrink the park. “I’m not even sure what his whole speech was about,” commented his daughter Jennifer. “But it doesn’t matter. I got to see a super cute baby bear.” “You know what angers me the most?” the secretary lamented. “People are calling this thing ‘Smokey.’ My son keeps telling me that I’ve been burned by the mascot of wildfire prevention.”
