On trying to farm Scorched Earth.

The stupid! It burns! It burns!
(click on pic for larger version)

To tell out this story properly, let me frame it out old school.

In Three Acts.

Act I is a snip of something I wrote back in June of 2005. Just a mildly hallucenogenic reminder of how dissent of any kind was treated by these people only a couple of years ago.

...
I had these roaches.

Filthy, plague-bearing exoskells, made my allergies worse, and the little cockblockers would pop out every time I lured a nice lady back to Castle Driftglass & send her screaming. So it was time to send the roaches off to periplanetary Valhalla.

The city had a guy they hired – Jorge Bush – said he knew all about roaches. Now talk to Jorge for five minutes and it’s pretty clear that – how shall I say this? -- alcohol has take more from him that he ever took from alcohol. Low, animal cunning, but not bright. Has some kind of Ganser Syndrome problem – gives only these weird, vague, approximate answers to direct questions. And even though he’s just hired help, he gets really bitchy when you tell him, “Hey, Jorge. How ‘bout just answering the fucking question?”

Big, disturbing gaps in his knowledge, although at the drop of a hat he’ll talk your ear off about lovin’ Sweet Baby Jesus, which is kinda creepy, and I really don’t know what that has to do with killing roaches.

Even though we’ve corrected him a million times, he still pronounces “nuclear” like Homer Simpson – which doesn’t exactly diminish the overall impression you get that he’s one of them “little bus” kinda guys -- and will spontaneously shout “You Forgot Poland!” for no reason.

Basic addition and subtraction seem to baffle him.

Still, his daddy got him this gig, and he swears that he knows all there is to know about roaches. Best intel in town, he promises. Gonna be easy. Won’t cost much. Gets this feral gleam in his eye when he talks about “smokin’ ‘em out their holes.” OK, he does tend to complain a lot about his job being “hard work”, but he really gets off on the uniform.

And his enthusiasm for killing things is undeniable

He was an exterminator in Texas before the city hired him here: “pulled the switch” hundreds of times with a smile, and during the interview he said he had never, ever made a single mistake when it came to “killin’ thangs”.

So I get home from work yesterday and, holy shit, my building’s on fire. And the building next door. And the one across the street. As I pull up I see Jorge is out front with a bunch of his scary friends – Donnie and Condi, Karl and Dickie – who are also the local volunteer fire department. They’re running a bucket brigade, which I think is laudable, until I get a little closer and notice that they’re dousing the houses that aren’t on fire…and that the buckets are full of gasoline.

Fuck.

“What the hell are you doing, Jorge?!”

“Killin’ roaches. Tha’s my job: killin’ them roaches.”

“Yeah, but you’re burning my house down!”

“Wassa matter. You one a’ them roach lovers?”

I waved at the other houses that were ablaze, and the people running out of them. Women and children. And the houses further down the block that his stooges were soaking in gas.

“What the fuck, Jorge?”

He shrugged and giggled in that Richard Widmark in “Kiss of Death” kind of way he does.

“Coulda been roaches in ‘em. Never can tell. Roaches it purdy clever critters. Better off bein’ safe is what I say.”

Donnie and Condi and Karl and Dickie were all nodding, smiling, dancing, and in the cherry-red glow of the firelight you could see how completely unhinged they really were. Now I was getting scared. I took a couple of steps back and asked in as calm a voice as I could manage, “Uh, Jorge, how exactly do you know whether or not there are roaches in those other buildings.”

“Oh, ah go with my gut. An’ with what Sweet Baby Jesus tells me, and Sweet Baby Jesus ain’t never wrong.”

They he started to walk towards me, brandishing a Jerry can of gas and a Zippo.

“Ah don’t like all these questions. I’m thinkin’ maybe you got roaches inside YOU.”

That’s when I ran.

...

Act II comes from this story via the AP, with emphasis added.

Bush asks for cooperation on new Iraq plan

By Jeremy Pelofsky

President George W. Bush called on Democrats and Republicans on Saturday to work together on a new strategy for the war in Iraq after a high-level group said the administration's current approach was not working.

"Now it is the responsibility of all of us in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, to come together and find greater consensus on the best way forward," Bush said in his weekly radio address.
…

A Newsweek poll released on Saturday showed that many Americans agree with the recommendations. The magazine said its poll found 39 percent agreed with the Iraq Study Group, 20 percent disagreed, while 26 percent said they were not aware of the group. Newsweek also said 68 percent of those polled believe the United States is losing ground in Iraq.

Bush seized on parts of the report with which he agrees.

driftglass aside: like a coke-head snorting the ½ gram of unidentifiable white powder – mealworms and all -- scraped off the pantry floor. Because, y’know, just maybe…

End aside.

"The Iraq Study Group's report also explicitly endorses the strategic goal we've set in Iraq: an Iraq that can 'govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself,"' Bush said.

The bipartisan panel on Wednesday called the situation in Iraq "grave and deteriorating" and made 79 recommendations urging the United States to begin a regional diplomatic effort and boost U.S. forces training of Iraqi army units.

James Baker, co-chairman of the group and a confidant of Bush's father, urged the administration not to pick only the recommendations it liked and instead accept the whole package.

…

In Act III, we translate what the Bicycle Chief said in Act II into plain “What is actually going on here” English.

Sorta like “Mulholland Drive” but without all the hot, lesbian stuff (this one’s for you, US Blues. And the Doc. And Jen, of course.)




Act III:

…So having soaked the ground with pitch,

bulldozed the fire towers,

slashed the tires on the fire trucks,

dissolved the fire department,

outsourced the extinguishers to China,

disbanded to Congressional Committee on Flammable and Inflammable Oversight,

defunded the National Sprinkler Board in a tiny, unnoticed paragraph of my “American Motherhood Makes Jebus Happy” bill,

smeared every bunny rabbit with napalm,

tied oily rags to the antlers of every moose and mule deer,

rained white phosphorus, mercury fulminate, and a box-car full of truck flares over the whole, volatile mess

and publicly attacked as a traitor anyone who tried to sound the alarm…

…I now invite the dirty hippies, cowards, islamofascist collaborators, and other pro-terrorist lefties who my Party and Pravda Media has relentlessly and hysterically vilified for the last twenty years to bend over, grab their ankles and capitulate “cooperate” in underwriting my absolute failure as President and agree to share my liability for the inferno I created as well as…

A) Running the single the most criminally incompetent presidency ever.
B) Pissing away the our good name.
C) Bleeding the Treasury white.
D) Crippling the military.
E) Losing a major American city.
F) All while obstinately steering the nation into the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in modern American history.

Or, for those of you who prefer the Cliffs’ Notes version of things, here are all three acts in Four Short Words:


Save Me


Holy Joe!