Red High Heels

George, here's a foreign policy for you:

First, make it look like we've turned the war around, if only a smidgen. After all, a smidgen is a smidgen is a smidgen, as even Gertrude Stein could tell you. Then string the public along with a bare-knuckled spin machine that has the fissile power of an asteroid in heat. While you're at it, plan to hand the whole requiem scenario over to the next president, presumably a Democrat, who can then be blamed for your war's failure. It's the only way to cut and run without being tagged a "quitter" yourself. Make sure you snatch away the mirror, however, in the event that anyone tries to hold one up.

Meanwhile, allow the "best and the bravest" in our country to die like flies while issuing more barbaric yawps about the importance of "victory." For this purpose, continue to demand from Congress a spending allowance of $12 billion a week, until death do us part. Keep to your one story line, your one plot, however punishing, so you can exercise, without ever stopping, your promiscuous will in opposition to the whole world. Raise destructiveness, exploitation, and deceit to a new level. Trade missiles and verbal insults wherever you can. Exult in the decline of everything. Above all, never become skeptical about your ability to figure out all the angles, slap on more sanctions, or perpetrate the scummiest, scuzziest mindfuck (I personally have) ever known.

Every day I wonder if I will live to see any accountability, any decent resolution, to this mind-bending hypocrisy that has stripped the gloss off my world. And I'm not the only one who feels that way, as far as I can tell.

"It's possible," chimes in the irrepressible Virgil, the only alligator known to mankind who is categorically opposed to oppression, pretension, grandiosity, and self-righteousness. "A body definitely needs more than the usual defenses these days," he announces, his snout glistening and nearly purple with excitement. "But here's a solution maybe even Simone de Beauvoir would have liked. I think we should put the president in red high heels. That way, we'll know for sure that he's publicly surrendered his ability to run away from his own wrong steps."

Virgil's probably right. Nobody's ever escapes if they're wearing high heels. It's just a fact of life.