Thursday, August 12, 2004
The "What if" I don't want to think about.
The USA Today today had a review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, a novel about a man who wants to assassinate George Bush. When I first heard of the book, I thought it was probably only tangentially about an assassination. Certainly no one would try to publish--just prior to an election--a novel where the assassination of one of the candidates is the main point of the book.
According to this review, I was wrong. Indeed, it appears that the whole book is a conversation about killing the president--one character convinced it must be done, the other--no Bush fan himself--trying to talk the first character out of it. And the conclusion: "open to interpretation."
According to this review, I was wrong. Indeed, it appears that the whole book is a conversation about killing the president--one character convinced it must be done, the other--no Bush fan himself--trying to talk the first character out of it. And the conclusion: "open to interpretation."
So it appears that we're not left with morality winning out over murderousness.
And here's the line from the review I found really chilling:
Baker makes you feel as if you are indeed inside the mind of a potential assassin. Whether you want to go there is your choice.Okay, imagine this scenario. An unbalanced individual--say Michael Moore--reads this book, and already convinced that George Bush is a bad guy is convinced by the narrative that Bush must be assassinated. So he does it.
Should Nicholson Baker be considered an accomplice? Should the publishing company be held liable as well?
But hey, those are just academic questions. The anti-Bush climate in this country is at a point where it's not such a stretch to imagine there will probably be an assassination attempt--not by al Qaeda, but by an American citizen gone round the bend. My biggest question is "WHAT THE HELL WAS KNOPF THINKING!"
I suspect that if the novel was set in 1865 and was a conversation between John Wilkes Booth and a friend, I might find it interesting. When an event like that lies so far in the past, it becomes a sort of academic study. But given the current political atmosphere, publishing this book is irresponsible.
