The April issue of Harper's offers many delights, including an excerpt from an English translation of Be Gone, Demons, the fourth and most likely final novel by Saddam Hussein. (Yes, it's as bad as you'd expect.)
Lewis Lapham's introductory "Notebook" essays can be a bit ponderous, but this time around I enjoyed it. In a piece titled "The fog of self," Lapham offers some uncharitable, but very plausible, reflections on the mind of George W. Bush. Take for instance his response to watching the president's dismaying performance on NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert:
The questions were polite, few of them followed with the indignity of a request for further clarification, and it was impossible to escape the impression of a prep-school headmaster listening to the richest boy in the senior class explain how and why he had burned down the library and the gymnasium. Both parties to the interview understood that the boy wasn't going to be expelled. The family money had sustained the school for five generations; the name was engraved on the hockey rink, the boathouse and the memorial gate. What was at issue was the young man's continuing progress toward a mature appreciation of the art of good citizenship. The destruction of the library and the gym was obviously an accident; so was the loss of the five townspeople unfamiliar with the school's emergency procedures — regrettable, but not something that could have been avoided.
The headmaster didn't expect any mucking around in the swamp of vain regret (flowers had been sent, the lawyers paid, a stained-glass window donated to the village church), but at least it was conceivable that the boy might produce a few words of apology or remorse. Here he was on his best behavior in a stiff-backed chair (dark suit, blue tie, clean shoes), and why not say that he was sorry, didn't mean to hurt anybody, no sir, not what he had in mind at all.
Young Master Bush didn't condescend to tell so sad a story. Excuses were for scholarship students, not for the captain of the crew team. Certain that his conduct and deportment were noble, true and right, he reminded the headmaster that the bonfire was the biggest one in the history of the school; that he had wanted to show the proper spirit, to salute the undefeated football season, pay tribute to the parents and alumni proudly assembled on the lawn. It wasn't his fault that the wood was rotten and the intel less than perfect; nobody told him that fireworks sometimes have a way of getting crazily out of hand, and for the entire duration of the prerecorded hour he presented the headmaster not with an explanation, much less with an admission of possible error, but with a boastful flow of pious sentiment and stalwart repetition of imaginary facts …
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