Saturday, March 04, 2006

Why we love him

"Part of my mission today was to determine whether or not the president is as committed as he has been in the past to bringing these terrorists to justice, and he is," Bush said at a joint press conference at the presidential place after more than an hour of private talks with Musharraf, an army general who seized power in a bloodless 1999 coup. "He understands the stakes, he understands the responsibility, and he understands the need to make sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy."

Once again, our Rebel in Chief has upended the few, hardcore Islamofascist critics he has at home. “Making sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy” – there will be gnashing of teeth as once again, he nails it. What a strategist! Those sniveling defeatists did not even see this coming.

But the liberal MSM, which as many in the Insta planetary system have been pointing out, have been lying about the greatest man to sit in the Oval Office since Jesus Christ, is not going to tell the story behind the story. So we will. As is well known, the President, like R. Austin Freeman’s famous detective, Doctor Thorndyke, is versed in the latest investigatory techniques, and they could barely hold him back on the plane over to Karachi. He knew his mission and he knew it well. As the plane went into Pakistan air space, Bush put on his parachute, double checked the radio receiver, and then he was off. Goal: find out about this Musharraf character.

A man of ominivorous intellectual appetite, our Rebel in Chief had learned several of the local dialects last week so he could get on the spot information. The mission reminded him of the old days, when he and Sly had gone off on many a black op, penetrating Hanoi, assassinating cadre in Laos, and in general winning the Vietnam war (before, of course, Ted Kennedy, directed by radio phone from Moscow, drowned the war at Chappaquiddick). It felt good getting back to mission strength, and as Bush donned his disguise – popping a betel nut in his mouth, adjusting his white beard and his turban, and putting one sandaled foot after the other – he wondered why he’d ever let this go. Of course, at the end of the mission in Nam, he’d accepted that he’d be more use off of the field – bankrupting small oil companies, being shoehorned by his Dad’s friends into an undeserved windfall with a baseball team, and of course illegally selling stock – all disguising the real trajectory of his life: to become a war president. Even then he knew it would be mano a mano with the dreaded Saddam. No wonder he had a few drink sodden and frankly coked up years there.

But that was long ago, and he couldn’t let regret cloud his mind now as he inquired about the democratizing process among the villagers. Quickly he learned that Musharraf was so popular that nobody in all Pakistan felt like there was any need for an election. This confirmed our man’s intuition: democracy, as he himself had learned in 2000, sometimes meant going beyond the mere fact that you lose an election to the higher fact that you know, in your gut, that you deserve to win. Bush smiled grimly to himself, as he made his way from one Waziristan village to another: Mush, as he liked to call him, would have been on the team in Florida.

But then there was this Osama character. Some memory loss thing, perhaps attributable to that night in Lubbock when he frankly went overboard smokin’ rock, scenes from his past in the Cambodian jungle seeming to lurk in the corners of that cowboy bar, perhaps that was the problem. In excellent Pashto, our Rebel in Chief made his discrete queries about the famous terrorist. He noted the Osama burgers joints that were popping up in every village center. He noticed the Osama informercial playing on many a tv set in the village night. He noticed the Osama look a like contest, the sign on one of the villages quaint Holiday Inns (One Night Only: Osama and his Merry Men), and the ads in the paper: terrorists wanted! It almost made him think of something. But at this point, the betel nut was really giving him a reminiscent buzz, so he decided to cut Mush some slack. After all, our Rebel in Chief himself really hadn’t done all that much about “terrorism” (Karl always used the quote fingers back in the Oval office). This wasn’t No Child Left Behind, where you had to pass some friggin’ test – this was Nam!

It was always Nam, in the end. Our Rebel in Chief radioed in – time to be picked up.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of the beginning of the fiction reminded me of Joseph Heller, it was most amusing. I was remembering 'Good as Gold' somehow, but this may be off. Also a little bit Bruce Wagner, my favourite modern fiction writer. LATimes had a blog a while back about LA fiction, they said 'the City of Hollywood and the Westside doesn't exist anymore,' but that's a crock of shit, because Wagner cranks out a new one about 'The Industry' every year, each one funnier than the last (I even found Armenian almond pastries on H'wood Blvd. due to 'I'll Let You Go'.) They said it was all Montclair, City of Industry, Pomona, Hawaiian Gardens, Bell and Bell Gardens, etc., none of this *Western* and *Vermont* acid-homo talk. Of course, Wagner's a little provincial-cosmopolitan, you have to be an LA enthusiast, but I think he has proved that the limitations of the internet are still substantial enough for us to have a few more years of physical concentration. I wondered if you'd read him, he wrote teleplay of 'Wild Palms' for Oliver Smith way back in 1993 about 2007--and it seems truer than ever that 2007 is going to be like that. Was first science fiction-like thing I saw that started using the near future rather than faraway future. I thought it was magnificent, and it made me sick for a few weeks. Wagner knows things about LA even Joan Didion never dreamed of. I think you could really write well for Playboy, but you're probably too principled. Hell, if they paid me, I'd even start preferring chicks.

Roger Gathmann said...

Yeah, I've reviewed Wagner for somebody. Was it the Chronicle? I liked his first novel, but the one struck me as slightly not right in tone, I'll let you go. I was staying with a friend, a jazz enthusiast, actually, in LA when I did the Wagner review.

Roger Gathmann said...

oops. Somehow my sentence got garbled: "I liked the first one, but the second, I'll let you go, struck me as not right in tone." By which I mean I felt like he was not in control of his subject.

Anonymous said...

I actually liked 'I'll Let You Go' less than the previous 'I'm Losing You' which I thought was the best and the harshest (very good movie adaptation he did too, Janet Maslin all wrong not to think so)one of the trilogy (I just discovered he wrote 'Still Holding'as the 3rd part, haven't read it yet.) Only continued with this because critics seemed to think 'I'll Let You Go' was some sort of huge achievement, although I didn't--I thought he was running out and that's when I thought the internet was making the novel even more vaporous than it is anyway. The newest one 'The Chrysanthemum Palace' is MUCH better, I think, even if Mme. Kakutani thinks otherwise in her infinite Nipponese wisdom. I like the way he doesn't care if he uses vulgarities openly instead of trying to apologize for them. I now want to start staying at the Chateau Marmont if I had the money, if my hot-sheet motel gets sold (they are now doing a new deal to close down 60 H'wood Blvd. businesses. This is too depressing, it might really look like 42nd goddam Street.

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