The man who invented the future

I was reading today that NORAD used to run simulations in the late '90s in preparation for hijacked planes being flown into the World Trade Center. They would have been prepared; they could have sorted it all out. Except that the rules of engagement in such a situation were changed by the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. He changed them so that there suddenly wasn't a way to cope with planes flying into the WTC. And then to basically use that terrible disaster to validate something they were going to do anyway? Rumsfeld had been talking for years about invading Iraq to safeguard U.S. oil supplies, and all of a sudden he had George Bush, a scion of the Bush dynasty and someone with unresolved issues about the way his dad had been humiliated and laughed at.

Emasculated.

Right, he wanted to show the world that you can't laugh at a Bush. I was reading this excellent book called "American Dynasty," that gives the whole lineage of the rotten bastards all the way back to Prescott Bush, who was dealing with the Third Reich up until 1942. I mean, it's not that long ago! We shouldn't forget these people, or their sons or grandsons. I tend to think that the whole tree is rotten, that's the only conclusion I can draw. These are dynasties; they carry out the will of the family, which is old, avaricious, power-mad, arrogant. Generation after generation, they see that the family's will is done. I'm surprised that the Bushes are doing so well over there. You people actually had a war of independence to free yourselves from a dynasty of blue-blooded Georges. I thought that was the whole idea! You were fed up with having a bunch of aristocrats named George ruling your country, but obviously it seems that you can't get enough of it! [Laughs.]

We're addicted to them. My chief problem is that he keeps bringing along a bunch of Bible-thumping fundamentalists who are stoking this global holy war we've got going on.

Well, that's because of the alarming influence that Southern Baptists now have upon the American presidency. His language is very often cribbed from the Book of Revelation; it's obviously very emotive for the religious fundamentalists that make up so much of his base. As far as I understand it, George W. Bush is the de facto leader of the Christian right in America. Pat Robertson kind of stood down, didn't he? I mean, for the first time you've got an American president who's also a major American religious leader. And it's a funny kind of religion. I was noticing that Bush's buddy Rev. Moon -- in front of a number or Republican and Democratic senators he declared himself the messiah and savior of mankind.

We don't have this terrible problem with the religious right that you have over there, and I truly have every sympathy for you. If there's anything that makes America a laughingstock, it's those people. America is a huge, surging, relentlessly modern country that will nevertheless send Oral Roberts millions when he tells them that if they don't, the Lord will send him home. They'll actually give credence to people who -- in any other country of the world except perhaps some of the equally addled fundamentalist Muslim countries -- would be laughed at. At the same time, since it's a crusading religion, it's difficult for them to accept that some might possibly reject their frankly retarded values. It's certainly dangerous that you've got a president who's playing pope to all these frightening, God-struck rednecks, which is probably a bit sweeping. But what the hell, I'm in the mood for it.

One thing I did want to mention to close out this subject is that there is no shortage of American moral outrage over the various beheadings going on in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Such acts have enormous symbolic power, and your work, especially "Voice of the Fire," is full of them.

Oh yeah, there are heads all the way through "Voice of the Fire." They're a kind of punctuation that runs through the entire book. Well, yeah, heads -- they're important. I mean, I was up visiting my youngest daughter, Amber, in college sometime last year and noticed a carved head at least above every third or fourth doorway. This is a surviving practice of the Celtic cult of the head, where you would place the real heads of your enemies above your doors as a way of usurping their power. After all, if you've got your enemy's head above your door, all of their power is now yours. So I should imagine that it's got a certain symbolic strength.

Do you find it curious that those of us in our part of the world are repelled by these visceral beheadings, but we can't find the time to blink at the fact that we've already killed thousands by pushing buttons?

Yeah, because it's remote, impersonal, and you don't have to look your enemy in the eyes while you're doing it. This is a thing that has come to typify much American warfare over the past 10 or 15 years, and can be explained by Sigourney Weaver's strategy in the second "Alien" film: "Nuke 'em from orbit." It doesn't matter if those black dots so far beneath you are enemy troops or a wedding party. Or your own troops, for that matter. You're up there in the stratosphere and all you have to do is press a button, just like Super Mario. For people who have grown up on Pong and Space Invaders, it's only a small step. And it does show that when you do finally get to the unfortunate physical aspects of warfare, like beheadings, they still have the power to shock. And the Americans do seem rather squeamish, especially with the blackout on the body bags or disabled soldiers coming home. I mean, most of the people we saw on television were gung-ho at the start of this war; surely they understand what happens in war. People do tend, for some reason, to get killed.

This is not a pillow fight.

No, it's not. People tend to come home with bits missing, or sometimes they don't come home at all. This is what wars are; it's not Hollywood, not that ridiculous manipulation of Jessica Lynch, where they had soldiers shooting blanks into the air to make it look as if they were rescuing her under fire. It's Jerry Bruckheimer warfare; they even had to dress it up to make it seem as if she was sodomized or raped by her captors. And there's no evidence of this, she doesn't remember it, and it seems that the people looking after her were trying to get her back to the Americans. The whole thing is a movie.

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