TK: Banning snowmobiles is better than drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge -- and you have to be honest and admit that Clinton faced a Republican Congress for most of his administration that was astonishingly hostile and...

LB: [Overlapping on "Congress."] Whee-hoo, action! Snowmobiles! Head Start! Don't-ask-don't-tell and, and lookie here, three whole forklifts full of wasted paper and -- and you want to talk about hostile?

TK: [Overlapping on "paper and..."] Negotiations for peace in Ireland, in the Mideast and...

LB: [Overlapping, continuous from above.] Just wait till you see Tom DeLay if Kerry beats George! Hostile? Listen! Hark! That's the sound of Richard Mellon Scaife a-sharpening his -- And oh yeah negotiations, like that amounted to spit!

TK: And, and at least we didn't attack another country, at least with a Democrat in the White House there's less chance of...

LB: [Overlapping, continuous from above.] You go on and on about Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group -- and no you didn't attack another country, not like you meant it, you all just fire a missile here and a missile there and look like you are thinking real hard about the meaning of missiles and, and when Iraq is free is ten years even at great cost, if it works out and it's free you'll still be hoping for it all to go badly...

TK: That's not fair, I mean I know we fucked up because, because for years we've left the business of governing to people whose, to centrists and quislings and reactionaries, and we have a lot of organizing, a lot of catching up to do, getting back into electoral politics and the turnaround will be slow and uncertain but...

LB: [Overlapping with "a lot of catching up to do."] Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, you really think you people will do diddly squat about dismantling Halliburton and the Carlyle Group? Here's the second reason you hate George so much! Here's the reason you're so angry! You're powerless! You anticipate a future of powerlessness! That's why you're all choking in rage and writing nasty little plays, you're...

TK: You're not angry? You people have all the power in the world and you're the angriest people ever in the history of -- you're inexhaustibly splenetic! That's how history will remember you, spluttering on camera at everything that moves! Kvetch kvetch kvetch!

[Kristen Johnston enters.]

KJ: Um, I'm sorry, you guys, but we have to stop and do the Q&A.

LB: OK. Can I just say one more thing? And I know I said in that interview with that woman journalist from the New York Times that there was nothing political about American literature. But I'm not stupid. I know that there is. I know that like 90 percent of our writers are liberal or worse. 99 percent. Doesn't matter a lick. The liberals may have nearly all the poets and painters and everybody else but WE have Dostoevsky and he obliterates the whole kitandkaboodle, we have Dostoevsky and so we win.

KJ: OK, thank you, Mrs. Bush.

I'd like to end by telling you a dream I had.

Is that OK?

TK: Um, sure.

LB: Is it funny?

KJ: Sort of. It has a happy ending.

It was the night after your husband spoke at the U.N., after the war had started.

I watched his speech and then I dreamed about it. Your husband is speaking at the U.N., addressing the General Assembly. He wants the other countries of the world to help him out of the awful mess he has made and is making in Iraq. His handlers have been telling him that it turns out he needs help from "old" Europe after all. It turns out that the liberation of Iraq is not going to be easy, and enormously expensive, and it's not going to resemble in the least the African-American civil rights movement, which Condoleezza Rice had been telling him it would. His party did its best to destroy the African-American civil rights movement and to this day works assiduously to dismantle some of the movement's most important achievements -- increased voter registration, redistricting for purposes of diversifying representation, affirmative action and the war on poverty -- but nowadays every Republican other than Trent Lott talks about Dr. King as if he'd been their best friend and Condoleezza Rice has likened those who opposed the war to those who opposed civil rights for African-Americans even though the war was largely a Republican pet project and the civil rights movement was opposed by Republicans, and it's all gotten very confusing and mostly your husband doesn't like to be confused, he likes things simple, and so he just shuts it all out when it gets confusing and does what the people he trusts tell him, the people who like him and who do his homework for him, like Rice and Rove and Cheney; and they told him this would be a cakewalk, and it isn't turning out to be, it's turning out to be a mess, and now here he is standing up before these folks at the U.N. and telling them why they have to help him rebuild Iraq even though they didn't want him to go in there in the first place.

He is talking, beneficiary of his Texas drawl which, with its gentle, assured rhythms, substitutes for ideas and passions and intelligence in giving Bush's voice a modulated and nuanced and lively sound. He tells the world assembly that things are going well in Iraq after his over-hasty and illegal attack; he repeats his now-proven-false but always-patently-absurd assertions about weapons of mass destruction, his insinuations about the role Iraq played in recent terrorist attacks; he tells the representatives of desperately poor countries full of people starving to death or dying of diseases, the cures for which are unavailable because unaffordable, because the countries are saddled with debt no one wants to forgive and are still reeling from the legacies of colonialism and the pillaging of modern-day imperialists and corporate bandits and exploiters, he tells the representatives of these billions of poor people that terrorism is their biggest concern and the world should help us because making us safe from terrorism, which means a U.S. occupation of Iraq supported by U.N. troops and paid for by member nations, this will make the world a better place. He talks about how well things are going in Afghanistan, which not only the U.S. but the entire planet has once again betrayed, doing nothing necessary to rebuild the country; and he introduces Karzai, who he says "represents a free people who are building a decent and just society ... building a nation fully joined in the war against terrorism." And the news cameras swing over to Karzai, who looks 10 trillion years older than he did two years ago and who forgets to smile on cue.

Bush talks a lot about the international traffic in young girls, about the sexual slave trade, and this gives him an opportunity to gravel up his voice and tuck his trademark smirk in his breast pocket and show the world assembly some of his trademark compassionate conservatism as he imaginatively enters the minds of teenager prostitutes living in "lonely fear," who "see little of life before they see the worst of life," he devotes more time to talking about the sex trade than he does to talking about the conflict in the Mideast, and the utter failure of his peace initiative, and the way his administration has abandoned any attempt to make peace in the Mideast and so set the stage for today's carnage -- about these things he says nothing. But he is still talking about the sex trade, he likes talking about this because stopping the trafficking in women and girls means for George W. Bush passing stricter laws against offenders, it means telling other countries to pass stricter laws, and passing laws, he has learned, is cheap, as is imposing sanctions on poor countries who "allow" rich Westerners to buy and fuck their children. For George W. Bush, stopping the trafficking in women and girls does not mean spending money to end the fearsome poverty around the planet, which is of course the source of the sexual trade, and of terrorism too -- but ending poverty means spending money, and he can't, he's tapped out, he'll need $200 billion this year alone to pay for the maintenance of our new colony, Iraq, and he's gutted the tax base in the U.S. and he has no money to spend, and so he will pass stricter laws and impoverish poor countries with further sanctioning (unless of course they happen to provide the US with something it wants in which case they will be allowed to continue to "allow" sex trafficking) and he won't have to tax the undertaxed American rich; it's just like his educational reforms domestically, which are predicated on the understanding that testing testing testing is a lot cheaper than schoolbooks or teachers' salaries or new schools.

George W. Bush is winding down to his conclusion, when all of a sudden something stirs through the General Assembly like a stiff March wind through tall winter grasses, some breath of life from the beleaguered common source of life, some exhalation from the lungs of the earth itself, or some stirring of the air produced by a shudder, a convulsion from deep within the earth's soul, the very common core of humanity, something that is carnal and animal and erotic and vital, something that is the very exuberant animate antithesis of this antidemocratic plutocrat, this wet-behind-the-ears schoolyard bully, this debauched lump of ensorcelled clay always entropically winding down toward inanimation. Something blows through and grabs hold of the members of the General Assembly of the United Nations who have been listening to George W. Bush and his heartless mindless gabble, listening with exhaustion, boredom, embarrassment and disgust, something courses through them and fills them and shakes them and lifts them to their feet, the whole chamber is rising to its feet, and like blindingly incandescent bacchantes drunk on fermented honey, the members begin to shriek EVOHE and to move as one toward the podium, ablaze with Life's revulsion at Death and at Death's astounded, clueless little minion: and then they seize him and hold him aloft for an instant to the eye of offended heaven and then...

And then I woke up.

And then I went online to MoveOn.org and johnkerry.com and democrats.org and I signed up for poll watching and leafletting and I donated to the Kerry campaign and the DNC the hundreds of thousands of dollars I am making doing Shakespeare in the Park, or at least as much as is my legal limit.

(Long, long pause)

LB: Well. That was very interesting. I certainly wish you all the best. And as I depart, trying to raise the tone of the evening, I offer this, which you Miss Johnston, will recognize:

"Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed."

See you in November!

Recent Stories