So, I had a bit of free time at the end of a long couple of days, and I'm floating around the Web, and I come upon this little masterpiece from the man who wrote a book about Woody Guthrie that damned near ruined Bruce Springsteen's music for all of us.
Look down there, Joe. See it? Way down there below where you're at right now?
That's the shark.
I despair often of my Beltway brethren. Most of the time, I feel it's time to march most of them out of Washington forcibly and intern them in a work camp and re-education center somewhere in the northern Smoky Mountains.
But that's just me.
Occasionally, however, one comes upon such a perfect fractal symptom of the overall contagion that it seems more than worth it to start building rude huts and stocking farm implements for the eventual inmate population. Peggy Noonan and her magic dolphins were one such pustulating example a few years back. Howard Fineman on Bush's comfort in denim and ermine, or whatever the hell he was talking about, was another. And now we have this.
Sweet mother Mary, Dick Cheney performing for Brit Hume and GUYS IN VIETNAM? An aging corporate carnivore downing beers and stalking farm-raised game, and some poor young guy drafted out of Butcher Holler and dropped into a jungle kill zone? Dick Cheney, as a boomer, learning the lessons of An Loc on the killing fields of some plutocrat's toy wilderness? And being sadder and wiser for the experience? And Bob Kerrey, who's said enough flaky stuff in his day to take a job with Kellogg's, chiming in with some look-there's-a-unicorn psychedelia about how this may make Cheney "have a better sense" of what he's asked other people's children to endure?What kind of mushrooms do they serve in the dining hall at The New Schoolanyway?
This isn't a serious conversation.
This is a Lifetime TV movie.With khaki and camo.
Look, Joe. I'm sorry you didn't go to 'Nam, OK? I'm sorry you're going to have to enter your declining years without the kung-fu grip. Can you try not to drag the rest of us into your midlife crisis, please? I mean, you there, Tomasky. You live there. Does anybody edit these clowns? I mean, seriously, does anybody read this over at the copy desk and think,"Jeebus Christmas, Klein must be on freaking acid to make this comparison. Should we alert the authorities? In any case, these are pretty plainly the rantings of a man gone, as the late George V. Higgins would have put it, as soft as church music. We can't publish this. It will make him look bad. Let's pretend we lost it in the system and maybe he'll forget and send us something about health care or Iraq. Why didn't I take that job at Home And Garden when I had the chance?"
I have worked full-time for three magazines in my life. I have freelanced for a half-dozen more. I am telling you now that, if I had ever handed in a piece of fanciful mock clairvoyance like this -- if I had said, for example, that, by striking out in a crucial situation, Nomar Garciaparra must now be humbled and know how Lee felt when he sent Pickett across the pastures -- there isn't a single editor for whom I ever wrote that wouldn't have poured himself a martini as big as a horse's leg and laughed himself out onto 57th Street. If I always wrote like that, I'd be driving a crosstown bus by now.
There are a number of things wrong with this comparison and the fact that it's plainly nuts is only the most obvious. First of all, no soldier in Vietnam had a covey of flacks to disperse and blame the people he shot for their own deaths. (Well, Bob Kerrey did, but that was years later.) No grunt at An Loc got to shoot someone and then walk over to the opulent ranch house and mix himself a coldie before talking about it. The only time Dick Cheney ever got a "thousand-yard stare" was when there was an oil field 1,000 yards away from where he was standing. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but: NEITHER HARRY WHITTINGTON NOR THE QUAIL WERE SHOOTING BACK! Forget my editors. This wouldn't have gotten past Sister Marie de Paul at St. Peter's School in Worcester, Mass., back in 1965.
Gentlemen, Dick Cheney does not do introspection, OK? In Texas, the birds he was killing were bigger than his conscience is, and they were exercised more often. That he busted a cap in his friend's dome did not change this in the least. His first instinct was to go for the liquor cabinet and his second was to go for the spin. This constant search for good faith and human decency on the part of people who have spent their entire public careers avoiding either one is totally a function of having walked among the Great Men for too long. Bob Kerrey, who wanders through life disheartened that the presidency is not an appointed position, must know that at some vestigial level of his being. Joe Klein and the rest of the cats 'n kittens in the political press corps, are more charming in their delightful naïveté. George Bush is a cowboy! Condi Rice is a genius! Dick Cheney has a soul to search!
Why aren't any of these people ever at my poker table?
It constantly eludes me why what should be the most aggressive, most skeptical, and most irascible press corps in the world seems so ready always to turtle up. There isn't even a practical reason to believe that Dick Cheney looked into the soulful jowls of Brit Hume and found his troubled inner soldier there.
What's he going to do if you don't write stuff like this? Shoot you?
Forget I said that.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer at The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also is heard regularly on National Public Radio.
