Everyone's Mad at Lloyd Austin But I Died Three Weeks Ago and No One Cares

By former Vice President Kamala Harris

The author, former Vice President Kamala Harris, passed away in late 2023. (photo by Gage Skidmore)

All of Washington is furious at Lloyd Austin. And they should be: The Secretary of Defense left White House officials and Congress in the dark for days as he was hospitalized after complications from surgery. It was inexcusable; people need to know when government officials are incapacitated. Though — at the risk of making this all about me — my nose is just slightly out of joint over the Lloyd Austin uproar, because I passed away in December and there hasn’t been a peep from anyone about it.

I was the Vice President, after all. That’s supposed to be important! And, sure, I’ve spent my time in office alienating people through my poor organizational skills and lack of policy mastery, but…come on! Vice President! Second in charge! To a guy who’s 81! You’d think that my passing would have at least made the crawl on CNN, or that the White House would have sent a “remembering those we lost recently” tweet with pictures of me and Franz Beckenbauer. But no: When I google “Kamala Harris death”, the first result is still the obituary for some schoolteacher from Ontario who died in 2002.

The way that I died also kind of sticks in my craw. Because I desperately called for help using the exact channels that Secretary Austin is being criticized for not using! You see: I froze to death in the walk-in freezer at a Hardee’s. Embarrassing, I know. But if you ignore the arguably humorous circumstances of my demise, what you’ll see is a disturbing portrait of high-level dysfunction and disrespect for the constitutional process.

The trouble began on Christmas Eve. I was by myself at a Hardees in Dayton, Maryland. Why was I there? Well, one has a lot of down time as Vice President. I often get in the car and just drive, and that night, I had somehow made my way about 30 miles north of DC to Dayton. I had a Big Hot Ham & Cheese combo and lingered for a few hours — I must have refilled my Coke a dozen times. Around ten o’clock, when the one remaining staff member was flicking the lights on and off trying to get me to leave, I noticed that the walk-in freezer was open a crack. I thought the same thing that anyone would think: “Free hash rounds.” The coast was clear, so I slipped into the freezer to grab some hash rounds to fry up at home. I fry lots of stuff because Dan Quayle left a deep fryer in the Veep residence rec room, which is the probably the best thing about being Vice President.

The Hardee’s employee didn’t notice me enter the freezer. In fact, I must have been too quiet, because the next thing I knew: SLAM! The door was shut and locked tight! I rattled the handle and screamed, but I guess no-one heard me; a minute later, I heard a car drive away. And that was when the seriousness of the situation sunk in: The next day was Christmas, so no one would be by for two days! I shuddered at the thought of becoming only the fourth Vice President in history to die in a walk-in freezer (Calhoun, Hobart, Adams).

But all hope was not lost: I still had my phone. I immediately texted the President:

Did that wrinkled old jagweed reply? No, he did not. Now, for the record: I don’t think that the President willfully let me freeze to death in a Hardee’s; I think that dingleberry simply has not read any text I’ve sent in the last two years. He does use his phone — people who know him tell me that he texts all the time — but he never replies to me. The last text I got from him was about J-Lo getting back together with Ben Affleck, so that was early 2021.

The real asshole here is Secretary of State Blinken, because he does reply to me, but does it in a flippant, brush-off way that makes it obvious that he didn’t actually read my text. Here’s our exchange from Christmas morning:

What a dick.

I texted everyone and their cousin about my impending death: Jill Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin (irony), Chuck Schumer, Mike Johnson, The Washington Post, Hardee’s, my husband, every cabinet member except Buttigieg (I would literally rather die than talk to that twerp), Elon Musk, the Postmaster General, the head of the fucking Girl Scouts…NO ONE REPLIED!!! I have to admit that my feelings were hurt. It’s honestly hard to say which hurt worse: The fact that nobody answered me or my body slowly succumbing to hypothermia as I desperately tried to build a fire out of frozen biscuits.

I also have to really wag my finger at Hardee’s. What the hell kind of operation are you running, Hardee’s? You must have come across my body on the morning of the 26th — you didn’t notify the press? Even if you didn’t recognize me as Vice President — and most people don’t — then surely an unidentified corpse in your freezer is worth a call to the Dayton Gazette. Or do you come across corpses so often that no one bats an eye? Did someone just find my body and go “Uh oh, we got another one! Commence corpse disposal protocol!” What the fuck? If I was still alive, I’d be Sonic for life now.

It all just feels like a real double standard. The Secretary of Defense is out of commission for a few days and all hell brakes loose. But I’m currently an unidentified corpse in a central Maryland morgue and my own staff hasn’t tweeted about it! I guess this is why John Nance Garner called the Vice Presidency "not worth a bucket of warm piss”. I thought about that quote a lot while I was trapped in the freezer, and not just because a bucket of warm piss sounded heavenly right about then! At any rate, the Vice Presidency is someone else’s problem now, or at least it will be when somebody notices that the Jane Doe in Dayton with her hands frozen to a box of hash rounds was actually the second-highest officer in the country.

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