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In case you haven't seen the love letter Scooter ("Biff") Libby wrote to Judith ("Queen of All Iraq") Miller, here's the last paragraph. The typographical equivalent of vomiting will follow. Here's what one mass killler (and published novelist) says to another mass killer (with a book deal):
You went to jail in the summer. It is fall now. You have stories to cover--Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work--and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Scooter Libby.This is childish, but bleeeeaaaaagggghhhhh. Wasn't Saddam Hussein also supposed to be some kind of novelist? Here's hoping Biff goes to the Big House, just for writing that paragraph. Jane Hamsher, posting on Digby's blog, has more on what sort of coded info was being communicated in the non-mash-note part of the letter. Haven't been following the Plamegate minutiae to this extent, but it's pretty clear that navigating the twists and turns of the investigation is how we're processing the terrible crime of the Iraq war, because the Democrats are too complicit to have a real debate about it. The aspens can't turn soon enough for me.
This photo cartoon, from Gawker by way of Forward Retreat, depicts an actual event. The big boat is re-enacting an artwork that was never enacted, Robert Smithson's "Floating Island," while the little boat tugs a Christo orange gate--a cheeky student project. Didn't see the actual tree-barge, just the photos, and while it looks entertaining, should it really have Smithson's name attached to it? If the artist were alive, he might well have moved on from this kind of eco-showmanship. Who the hell knows? It's a bit like August Derleth writing novels in the style of H. P. Lovecraft, tres postmodern but perhaps an empty exercise. The theme of disembodied, portable nature arguably achieved its apotheosis in the movie Silent Running, made in '71 (with a fantastic folk-modern score by Peter Schickele, that helped set the mood). Recalling (anticipating?) not-Smithson's tugboat, Bruce Dern's spaceship the Valley Forge contains the last remaining earth forests, floating in sealed domes out near Saturn. The shitty earthlings, who live on food substitutes and remarkably still seem to have an atmosphere despite the absence of plant life, order Dern to "blow the domes" with nuclear explosives.