James Glassman sees a very disturbing pattern unfolding during this bitter election year.
What passes these days for the artsy-intellectual set in America has gone completely bonkers over the prospect of George W. Bush winning a second term as president.Something must be done to prevent another Bush victory, and America's artistes are out to do it.
First, there was Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, a crude quasi-Marxist fantasy about the war in Iraq, filled with distortions but widely praised by reviewers. (Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper, for instance, gave it two thumbs up, with Roeper explaining, "I've been angry at Bush's arrogance and incompetence, and I've despised his policies.")
Next, there was the July 8 fundraiser for John Kerry in New York, at which Whoopi Goldberg "fired off a stream of vulgar sexual wordplays on Bush's name in a riff about female genitalia," as one newspaper put it. Paul Newman said that Bush's tax cuts were "borderline criminal."
Now, get ready for Act III. On Aug. 10, Alfred A. Knopf, America's most distinguished publishing house, is bringing out a novel by Nicholson Baker, winner of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and a darling of the New York intelligentsia. Baker's bestseller, Vox, which Monica Lewinsky gave Bill Clinton as a gift in 1998, was about phone sex....
Baker's new book, called Checkpoint, eschews kinky sex for political murder. It is a long conversation between two men about assassinating President Bush. Yes, killing the sitting president of the United States.
One of the characters, named Jay, says of Bush, "He is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me angry . . . . I'm going to kill the .(expletive) . . . I'm going to assassinate the president."
Jay calls Bush "an unelected (expletive) drunken oilman" who is "squatting" in the White House and "muttering over his prayer book each morning." He says Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have "fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they've been lying, and they're stumbling around with grubs scurrying out of their noses."
Jay then describes methods of murdering the president, including radio-controlled flying saws that are "ultra-sharp and they're totally deadly, really nasty." Other methods: a gun and a remote-controlled boulder.
Glassman's conclusion?
John Kerry may not be responsible for the rantings of the likes of Moore, Goldberg and Baker. But he could strike a blow for decency in America--and, coincidentally, help his own cause--if he would forcefully denounce the murderous hysteria in Hollywood and Manhattan. A candidate who lacks the moral integrity to take a stand against these mounting outrages doesn't deserve to be president.
Well, let's don't hold our breath waiting for that.
It's too bad a self-satisfied Nicholson Baker probably can't be arrested by the Secret Service for creating a threat against the President of the United States. But the next John Hinckley Jr. is just waiting for inspiration.
It appears that Alfred A. Knopf can be contacted here:
Knopf Publicity
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
Knopf is a subsidiary of Random House, which is itself owned by the Bertelsmann Group of Germany.
Posted by Alan at July 20, 2004 05:58 PM