First the juicy part:
Jay's talking about going to an antiwar march in Washington:
Jay: Yeah, oh, and at the end all the cops were lined up in a long long row to keep us from going to a certain park, and as I passed I thanked them, I said, Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, nodding to each one of them, because they had been restrained, and there hadn't been any violence, and that's something. that's really important.
Ben: So you thanked them.
Jay: I did, and the next day, when I woke up,
I told myself you're not going to read blogs all day. Because I'd been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, , Talking Points Memo checking Google News twenty times a day.
Ben: I don't read blogs so much.
Jay: I said to myself, No more, because where does that get you? You've got to detach. It's happening no matter whay you do, no matter how well informed or not informed you are. [Emphasis and links mine]
Pretty neat, huh? More spoilers below...
So in case you haven't heard, Nicholson Baker's written a
"scummy little book" about a man who wants to shoot George W. Bush. It takes an afternoon to read all 115 pages of it. Maybe I'm just a veteran of paranoid Bush hatred but I found very little illuminating in this tale of Jay's decent into homicidal madness over the war in Iraq. It did take me back to that initial blush of irrational horror over the war in Iraq which we've all grown used to to some degree. You remember the first time you downloaded some awful photo you weren't supposed to see of an Iraqi child with his brains blown out and then watched CNN and saw them playing with their map and their graphics and the embeds with the shitty videophones. And it was all a big game to them but we, the anti-war voices who marched in the millions, were silenced and left to simmer in our rage and confusion. I remember Fourth of July, 2004, being so freaked out by the bombing and the destruction that I couldn't handle fireworks. I was on the edge. The country I knew and loved had turned into this vengeful, hate-filled place with this doofus in charge of it all. Bush's war might not have turned me into a potential assasin, but it sure as hell drove me nuts.
The character of Jay is certainly not sympathetic. He's no steel-willed revolutionary or religious fanatic, imbued with a holy self-rightiousness. He's a nut. A pro-life nut at that which leads him to feel further isolated from the anti-war left. He's an unemployed teacher who's been roofing and working on lobster boats. The physical labor gives him more time to "think" he says. In his delusional state be believes he can kill the President with a hammer, and a gun with special homing bullets he's prepared by "marinating" them in a box with Bush's photo. If that doesn't work he's got remote controlled buzzsaws and a boulder of depleted uranium that he'll roll onto a passing motorcade, Wily E. Coyote style. He has invited his high school friend, Ben, a college professor, to listen to him rant on tape (the book is a "transcript" of that tape) and explain why he wants to kill George W. Bush.
At first, Jay's critique of Bush's foreign policy seemed tedious and repetitive to me. The titular "Checkpoint" refers to an incident in which a family of fleeing Iraqis were gunned down by mistake at a checkpoint. The obsession with gore and child-death and revenge is simplistic and could barely fill even a 115 page "novel". Baker only gets interesting when he broadens his scope historically and geographically.
Jay and Ben discuss Ben's work on a new book about how suburban sprawl might have been a result of Cold War planning to spread out the population to limit the damage of nuclear attack. The past 50 years of foreign policy is seen as the primary force between everything shitty about modern American culture. Jay isn't just a true-blue Bush Hater, he really does hate America. Ben tries to rationalize:
Ben: You're looking for someone to blame. Everyone does this. I do it. I could feel myself doing it this morning when I was driving down here. I went past about four Staples and two BJ's Wholesale clubs and a Fuddruckers and a couple Wal-Marts and a Circuit City and a this and a that--all these cars going in both directions--and as usual I began to think, Why the heck is anyone bothering to drive anywhere in this country? Wherever you go, its the same.
Jay: It's terrifying, isn't it? Some places are hotter, some places more people speak Spanish, that's about it. Nothing's local, we're nowhere!
Ben: Right, it's the triumph of the galaxy pattern. So I start thinking, What was the demonic force that did this to us? What cabal was it? Who can I blame? You say, Oho, the Republicans. Aha, the president. I go, Oh ho ho, it was those cold warriors of yore, those passive defence think-tankers, who did this to us, who destroyed our cities, but truth is....we did it ourselves. We thought we wanted it this way. Most people like driving around all day. None of this was the result of George W. -- it's the result of millions of tiny individual decisions.
Jay: Yeah, but sometimes you reach a point where you realize that millions of tiny individual decisions are condensed into one man. That's what I'm up against.
Ben: I'm telling you, they were all bad. Honestly. Truman, Eisenhower, both bad. Kennedy? Devious, totally unfaithful. All he had was a smile. "Ask not," my ass, he was no good. Nixon, no good. Carter? Meant well, no good. Reagan: terrible. Bush Senior, worse. Very bad. Horrible. Mired us in military debt. Filled the government with intelligence agents. Disgusting, disgusting, loathsome, horrible. And a whiner, too. Godawful man. Who else? Ah, then we had Clintion. What's the first thing he does when he gets into office? He sends planes into Iraq, some "sorties," just to show he's no slacker.
Jay: Kills people.
Ben: Lost me right there. Later on he and Wesley Clark bomb Belgrade. They bomb the TV station!
Jay: And kill more people.
Ben: Clinton, bad. And now we have George W. Bush. Really bad. Hellacious. Stole the election, etcetera. So you're going to single out this one guy? Of all these people, one of them was killed in office. You're going to make it that two of these mediocrities were killed in office?
Jay: Yes.
In the end Jay doesn't kill George W. Bush. In a bit of Hollywood tomfoolery, Ben grabs the gun and turns it on him. But the will remains. There's no indication that without medication or serious treatment, Jay wouldn't go back to that hole in the fence and make his mad dash across the rose garden.