Kitty Lyons Fires Rumsfeld…Up
Kitty Lyons, the political Wankette whose “Secret Life” ran bimonthly at www.nerve.com between Monicagate and the Dawn of the Age of Terror, gets back in touch with herself.
Despite his rugged features and rock-hard self-confidence, I’d never been turned on by my Secretary of Defense. People who lose wars by mistake or torture people on purpose tend to creep me out.
On the other hand, if there’s anything I adore in a hooker-upper, it’s staying power, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, no matter how many generals or experts attack him, just lasts and lasts— and lasts, beating his little drum long after all the toy soldiers have toppled over and been buried in tiny, flag-wrapped coffins.
“I’m going to call you Drummy,” I promise him, even though we haven’t yet met. I’m supposed to have lunch with my friend Xian, pronounced “Jane,” which her name used to be until she adopted a Chinese orphan and began studying Mandarin, marketing and masters of tai ch’i. But now that she’s got what I call the Tao jones, she’s been cancelling every other date with me to seek enlightenment, so forget her. I’m going to lunch with Drummy instead, and try to crack his rocky façade here in my very own fold-out interrogation room.
My plan of attack? When approaching a stony man, get stoned, I say. I drop half a tab of Ecstasy and drive my unarmored jeep over to a field office in the Green Zone where Drummy is phoning generals. “All we need to subdue a popular uprising or civil war is a small, light and flexible military — Right?” he asks, not at all rhetorically. He’s on his twentieth “No” response, but my man so thrives on the world’s contempt that he’s practically glowing, or maybe that’s the Ecstasy kicking in. Anyway, it is at this receptive moment that I burst into the room like a SCUD, wearing nothing but a pair of army boots and a smile that says, “Hello Sailor.”
I project the concept “sailor” because he started out as a Navy pilot; but he doesn’t get it.
He stands there, large, heavy and stiff. In every part.
“Small, light and flexible,” I cry, “That’s me! Show me your most stubborn and sectarian insurgency and I’ll quell it with my quagmire.”
I guess I was expecting him to say, as he has before, “Put your head down, do the best job possible, let the flak pass, and work towards those goals.” But instead he says, “Oh my goodness gracious,” and throws up his hands.
Recalling the expression of joy on his face last April in Dollywood when he shared a stage with the great mammarian I advance on his cupped palms and dock my suddenly very large and perfectly formed (yet silicone-free) breasts in them.
Left, right.
“Why don’t you tweak reality to suit your agenda?” I suggest, because I know that this is something he loves to do, and, surprise, surprise, he starts tweaking me like mad.
The feel of his make-believe fingers on my imaginary nipples is cruel, but he’s so helpless and pitiful in his obsessive need, that phantasmagoric rockets flare through my body.
He spreads his hands and pushes my flesh all together until neither of us can tell if these things in his hands are breasts, buttocks, thighs, piles of naked terrorist suspects or Shi’ite sand dunes towards which scads of tactical nukes are hurtling.
There’s definitely an invasion. This time, with massive force, as if he’d learned something. As if. But not. He’ll never!
Despair reduces me to a crack, a swell and a sigh, and another sigh, on and on, until I’m nothing but the moan of a girl who, dying in a losing war, thinks she sees paradise, because here I am, rutting a druggy night away in Dollywood or Iraq or even Iran with a man who likes to dissociate even more than I do.
And after, when I wonder aloud how my emotional life suddenly got so complicated, he recites a Taoist poem he wrote that makes all of Xian’s Tai Ch’i masters seem like amateurs:
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know, and how you got mixed up with me, Kitty, is one of those.”
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© Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.
Mme Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is often called the first modern novel. Along with Don Quixote, it is one of the most squirmy and amusing accounts of the way every moment of bourgeois life, however palpably transcendent or romantic, is shackled to an inescapable banality. Although Flaubert spent most of his life in his room as a prisoner of his vocation and his temperment, and although he wore the sort of moustache that usually smothers one’s sense of friendly curiosity, Frederick Brown has apparantly managed to make a compelling story of his life and moment. 
