verbena-19

Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman on How Bush Makes Fiction of Us All

In April 2005, I posted a dispatch in which I claimed that "a senior official in one of our intelligence agencies" had slipped me an unpublished manuscript by "the President." I added that I believed it genuine and had done my best to vet it. My source, I mentioned, had told me that the book might have had illustrations by either Paul Wolfowitz or Donald Rumsfeld (though no illustrations arrived with it). The title of the manuscript, I swore, was George's Amazing Alphabet Book of the Contemporary World, or Al-Qaedas All Around and, though it was missing two letters of the alphabet, K and R, it had stirring contemporary entries for children like:


"W as in Waterboarding. Wally waterboarded Ahmed (see A). Kids, it's not surfboarding, but almost! There's the board and the water and the person on the board, and it's the main sport of the Central Intelligence Agency (see G), and the great thing is -- you can do it twenty-four hours a day. You never have to wait for the surf to be up."

With this satire, I hoped to catch something of George's grim world. I assumed that what I had written, including "George's" book, was far too ridiculous on every level for anyone to take seriously and so never put a humor warning on it. How wrong I was became clear as soon as the first e-letters from readers arrived at the Tomdispatch mailbox, filled with shock that the President had written such things, or insisting I had been gulled, that this was obviously a product not of the President but of the CIA. Certifiably sane but puzzled friends got in touch to ask whether the "manuscript" was real or my fantasy. In this way, I learned a painfully useful lesson, one Ariel Dorfman, author of Other Septembers, Many Americas, absorbed recently -- as he recounts in his piece below (a shorter version of which appears on the Los Angeles Times Sunday op-ed page). The lesson is simple enough: The Bush administration's actions since 9/11 have outstripped anyone's ability to parody them; or, put another way, nothing in our world now is too absurd, too far-fetched to seem plausible. This, of course, is why one of the more popular news programs of recent years is Jon Stewart's Daily Show where the silliest parodies often come closer to our reality than anything you might see on the network prime-time news.

In fact, story after story from the Age of Bush reads like fiction of an especially improbable sort. Take the recent account by James Moore, author of Bush's Brain, a less than positive book about Karl Rove, that was put up at the Huffington Post website. He describes how, a year ago, he arrived at an airport, found himself on the government's no-fly list ("All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for..."), and has been unable to get off it ever since, though he continues to fly with some added inconvenience. ("I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list.") No fiction, in other words, could be stranger than the truths of our moment. Tom


Homeland Security Ate My Speech
by Ariel Dorfman

On December 27th, at 11:31 in the morning to be precise, agents of the Homeland Security Department detained me at Miami International Airport and proceeded to impound a speech I was supposed to deliver in Washington, D.C. to a plenary session of the Modern Language Association of America.

Well, not quite.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 3:18 PM