The Butcher's Thumb

The campaign never stops. At least I used to think that. But now, from me, it’s been cut off like a gangrened arm. I woke up today and looked around the vaguely familiar room, the cheap furniture, thick drapes, noisy air conditioner, ice bucket – all the usual chain motel mass-produced accoutrements. The chairs are begging to be smashed into particle board bits. I saw my wallet and my White House credentials, tags I used to wear like a proud dog, and I tossed them into the waste basket like a Frisbee. I started this journal 1,407 days ago and I’m all out of bullshit. Bone- dry, not ever the residual odor of manure. Through most of my life I seemed to have an endless supply; it got me laid, past difficult interviews with howling reporters, even convinced a few people that I was all right. For someone like me to be out of bullshit is like being out of air or blood, so I fill it with the next best thing: scotch. When a bullshitter is out of bullshit, well, the truth is too horrible to face. Here’s a little recipe I’ve tried: out of milk, yet still half a box of Lucky Charms to go, I’ve mixed the cereal into a tumbler with a bit of scotch. And when I finally bothered to pick up a Dispatch today and saw my, shall we say, unflattering visage, I mixed myself a double. Seven days until the 2004 election, the polls show “my guy” with a healthy lead, one I helped build. Much of the political world’s attention is turned to my home state of Ohio, and I find myself here on the same day as and a few blocks from the president I’ve defended for too long. It would be funny if it didn’t hurt so much. Voltaire was right, ‘God is a comedian performing to an audience that’s afraid to laugh.’ The truest form of being lost is when home looks like a foreign world. I used to know this town, Columbus, like I knew the battered streets of Marion, Ohio, where I grew up. But now there’s no familiar place to get back to, no familiar face to find. In the end what we are is chewing gum. They find us in one piece, neatly formed. They strip us, pop us in their mouths, and chew. Every now and then they squeeze us flat in their mouth, blow hot air in us and we inflate, all full of ourselves. Then we burst. We’re back to being chewed up. They get tired of us, and spit us out, and we spend the rest of our days sticking to the bottom of their shoes. No doubt Stephen Shay is here calculating every angle, studying the poll results, and like a butcher, weighing the meat, glancing at his audience to see if he can slip his thumb on the scales and tip things in his direction. I was his best student, but to challenge him and the rest of Kensington’s administration – my administration, for God’s sake – would be futile. The media has gone right along with what Shay and Gail have been saying about me, that I’m crazy and vengeful. That headline in the Dispatch? PRESS SECRETARY’S MENTAL HEALTH QUESTIONED. How about that? It’s a true conspiracy, baby, and any explanation I can give is just too easy to dispel: he’s a nutjob! It’s like Baudelaire said, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn’t exist.” Come to think of it, Mickey Rourke said that, too. I didn’t start out this way, you know. No one starts out thinking they could end up drunk in a motel near the airport throwing their White House creds into the trash can. We start innocently, even if we’re corrupt and just don’t know it yet.