The Invisible Library

I have to give Bush credit for this one. He had us all fooled. We thought he was a moron and he played that card over and over again, like it came from a deck with five aces. It’s true, he is a liar, a cheat, a failed businessman, war monger, and an all around enemy to the English language. But he’s just smart enough to hire Karl Rove. And Rove is a shrewd son of a bitch. He knows how to exploit the ignorance of the general populace, that most citizens have become so inebriated with trivia that with just a hint of uncertainty, he can send us all into a whirlwind of doubt.

They’ll turn us all into existentialists if they have their way. We’ll be so preocupied with our own navals, arguing about ligetures and obsessing over whether or not IBM had devised a typewriter that could handle proportional spaced fonts by 1973, that we’ll completely ignore the fact that they’ll have stolen a second election, killed another thousand soldiers for no good reason, trampled our civil rights, undermined our national security by exposing spies for cheep political gain and lied to us in countless other ways, big and small. But at least we’ll have figured out whether or not an IBM typwriter form the seventies could have handled Times New Roman at least as well as a modern word processor.

It’s not the font, stupid. Or even the weight of the paper these documents are printed on. It’s the fact that while in the Air National Guard, George W. Bush ignored a direct order by his comanding officer. The man is guilty of least Dereliction of Duty, if not outright Disertion, and during a time of war. The first gets him jail time, the second makes him eligibe for corporal punishment. And, to add insult to injury, all this comes to light after Bush has spent the last month shitting on the name of a decorated war hero (whose complete records are on public display, unlike our supposed Commander in Chief’s).

“Oh, well, Kerry may not have diserved one of his three purple hearts, or that Bronze Star because some guy who also went to Vietnam was paid money by Rove’s buddy, Mr. Regnary to publish a book saying that John Kerry is a poopy head. It’s all over the internet, and in Times New Roman, so it must be true.”

Arg!!! I need a drink… I hear England has some good beer.

ON SUNDAY MORNING, ALICE WICKERMAN excuses herself from breakfast and teeters into the hall. Frederick, her father, goes about chewing his sausage and dipping his pancakes in pools of syrup until he hears the distinctly unappetizing sound of retching coming from the direction of the downstairs bathroom. He sets his fork down, sausage still dangling from the end, shuffles over and knocks on the bathroom door. “You OK in there, honey?”

His question is met with more vomiting. Pushing the door open, he finds his daughter kneeling before the toilet, pale as a fish dredged out of an ocean trench, fifty thousand fathoms down. “Oh, touch of the old flu, eh?”

She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand and smiles weekly at her father. “Nope. I’m just pregnant.”

This comes as quite a surprise as Alice, a devout Catholic since she forced her father to have her baptized at the age of seven, has a reputation unimpeachable, even by the most jaded skeptic’s snickering. Faith, pure but hardly simple. That her virginity remains intact is a matter of faith to which Alice’s Priest, Father Jose can attest, as he has been her confessor since she signed herself up for catechism class at age eleven. Ever since she hit puberty six months later, the girl’s near constant visits had rattled the poor Fathers mind on its hinges, so detailed are her confessions of even the most trivial transgression of the most esoteric edict of the Holy See.

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I caught Lucy mid-stretch. she seems startled a bit but doesn’t seem to mind, the ham.