Next Year in the Hague! Jane Smiley Moos Cheney Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks, March 7, 2007
The trick is in the beholder
Our good friend Leila at Dove's Eye View was at a Jane Smiley reading in Oakland, California, on March 6 (where were you Linda?). She reported the following: After Smiley celebrated the indictment of Scooter Libby,
Ms. Smiley led us in a cheer, then took off her shirt to show us the fetching tank top she wore underneath in honor of Dick Cheney. It was printed with his famous curse across her chest. (Go Fuck Yourself - he said it on the floor of the Senate, isn't he a credit to the Vice Presidency?) Ever the loudmouth, I shouted from the back of the crowded bookstore: Next Year in The Hague! Ms. Smiley loved that, repeated it, and said she was going to lead us in a cheer at the end of the reading. Sure enough, when she was finished with reading and questions, she made us yell it three times: Next Year in the Hague! Let me spell it out: I hope we get to see Bush in the dock at the Hague, on trial for war crimes. Impeachment is too good for this guy (but I'll take that too). Cheney needs to go right with him.
I should note that in Leila's original, she had the fuck starred out, as in F***. I couldn't tell if that was how it appeared on Jane's tank-top; I would hope not, and would doubt it, given Jane's style. Dove's Eye View is a sanctuary of supreme civility, so I can understand the stars. But the man who came to office under the guise of restoring civility and modesty to Washington has proved to be less civil in words and temper than Lyndon Johnson—who at least had honest intentions and great (domestic) deeds at heart—less modest than Mussolini, and less civilized than Idi Amin. So here at least there's no need to veil the applicable. If the word fits, use it.
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
