Wag the Dog Read online

  The terrorists would be Muslims. The Backward forces of Superstition and Repression of the East against the Rational, Ethical, Forward-looking West. It tapped into atavistic hatred. Christians against Moslems! There it was—the project title—The Crusades.

  Excited, he called Kitty on the intercom. He used the speakerphone. He hated holding regular telephones against his ear. It made him feel like a nerd with half an earmuff.

  “Kitty,” he cried.

  “I’m not Kitty,” a female voice answered.

  Then he remembered. Kitty had quit. This was a new one. Did she have a name?

  “Yes, Mr. Beagle?” she said into the silence.

  Did she have a name? Why was he calling her? He remembered. “We got a kid here . . . smart kid. Uhhh, Yalie. Gay kid. What’s his name?”

  “I could look in the personnel files.”

  Dimwit. Or were the personnel files listed by sexual preference? “Are they filed that way?”

  “What way?”

  Beagle hung up.

  And there was something else he’d wanted Kitty to do. He dialed the new person back.

  “Would you get my wife a dress,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “A dress. You know, like women wear. On their bodies.”

  “I know what a dress is.”

  “Good.”

  “But what kind of dress . . .”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “What size?”

  “Kitty knows all that,” Beagle said. He didn’t know his wife’s sizes. Of course, he realized that buying things was no substitute for being with your family. But at least it proved that he was thinking of them. And in spite of what his wife said, she was in fact easier to deal with when he bought her something.

  “You have kids?” he asked the faux Kitty.

  “No.”

  “Know anything about them?”

  “Some. I have nephews and nieces.”

  “Good. Get a present for a twenty-month-old.”

  “What should I get?”

  “Never mind,” he said as politely as he could.

  If he remembered correctly, the Yale kid was a librarian. There was a button on his phone that said LIBRARY. He pushed it.

  Teddy heard the phone ring. An actual call. A human voice was going to speak to him. It was a rare event at work and Teddy, savoring the potential—certain, however, that whatever the call was, it would somehow be less than what he hoped—let the phone ring three times before he answered it with a cheery “Hello, library.”

  “Hey, Beagle here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you the Yalie?”

  Teddy wondered what might be wrong with that, but he said, “Yes.” He added, “UCLA film school too.”

  “You must be very bright. Glad that you’re working here. Wish we had more time to spend together . . .”

  Oh God, what does he want? He’s speaking to me. Opportunity calling.

  “Here’s what I want. I want one page on propaganda.”

  “What about propaganda? History of? Ours? Theirs? Definitions? Controversy over? Great examples? Hot war? Cold War?”

  “I want one page on the essence of propaganda. The guts of it. The whatever, if I had it, I would be a genius at propaganda. The Zen of Propaganda. Then you can give me more on the rest of the crap later. Get it?”

  “Got it,” Teddy said, though he didn’t

  “Good. End of the day tomorrow. No, take your time. Two days, OK?”

  “Sure.” Of course, it wasn’t. What was he doing? Shouldn’t he speak up and say a job like that just to find the references will take two days, then two weeks or a month to do the reading, going round the clock, then if you want something really astute and well written—especially if it’s short, short is harder than long—I would like at least a week for that. People hate people who promise more than they can deliver. Bosses like employees who advise them honestly what can and cannot be done and when. That was ridiculous. Bosses hate that. They want people who can do the impossible for them without argument. That’s what impresses them. Better not speak up. Just do what you can. And fail. Or not.

  “You don’t have to do your regular job too, at the same time. Tell Kitty to get someone to cover for you.”

  “Uh, Kitty’s gone.”

  “Right,” Beagle said.

  “Uh, thanks, Mr. Beagle.”

  But Beagle was already off the line. He was onto something and he knew it. The Crusades was exciting because it at least postulated an answer to the problem of who would be willing to go to war. Supposedly, that was not his problem. His job was to come up with the script, with any enemy he wanted, as long as it did the job. Then it was up to Hartman, the packager, or George Bush, technically the producer, to make an enemy deal. If they couldn’t get the enemy he wanted, then he would readjust. Shit like that happened all the time. Hadn’t 48 Hours originally been a buddy picture designed for Stallone? Then it got switched to Eddie Murphy and adjustments were made. A good director shaped his material to his stars. And in a war the number-one enemy has got to be considered a star.

  Still, since he would be dealing with so much reality, it would be good to let reality help shape the concept. He would have to, in essence, get into a dialogue with reality because that was the raw material that he would have to manipulate. So dealing with questions like who would fight, who would be willing to die to get George Bush reelected, was important to the process.

  The Arabs had a whole tradition of holy war, jihad. If they truly believed that those who died as sacred martyrs would go to some holy hashish, hookah, and houri heaven, then they might be willing—even pleased—to fight a war they were contracted to lose.

  The image of Paradise, the Persian garden promised as the Islamic afterlife, intrigued him, and he made a note of it as a possible subject—maybe setting—for a film. It was a lot like what people dreamed L.A. would be. Large, brightly colored intoxicating drinks, hot tubs, exotic foliage, lots of drugs, especially love and sex drugs, a variety of beautiful and subservient women. What if, once you got there, the reality of Paradise turned out to be the reality of L.A.—pollution, hatred, crime, too much time spent in automobiles breathing fumes, eternally irascible, demanding women, in the end, the hero escapes, gets another chance at life, rushes back to the battlefield and says, “Don’t be a martyr, Paradise is just like home.”

  Beagle was not in some never-never land. He understood that this was a real war he’d been asked to create. People were going to die. The idea filled him with a sense of power like he’d never felt before. Not even on set with a full crew and thousands of extras and special effects and helicopters all waiting on his command. This was deeper. Richer.

  Beagle faced that black wall. He punched up terrorist films. Black Sunday. Python Wolf. Terror Squad, Commando, Death Before Dishonor, Viper, Omega Syndrome, Invasion Force. The language of film was clear. Arabs were terrorists. Terrorists were bad. There was no other side of the story.67That was useful and important. It made for economy of exposition. Just like with Nazis, give a guy a monocle and a bit of leather, a straight-arm salute and that sneer, and the audience knows that this is an unmitigated villain, and the director can cut right to the chase.

  But watching the clips, Beagle was disappointed. In spite of the black and white simplicity, terrorism did not make for good movies. Not like World War II or even Vietnam. It was 98 percent sub-Chuck Norris shit. Patriot Games was top-of-the-line. It did not speak well for the genre’s potential.

  64 Programmed to Kill: a beautiful terrorist is captured by the CIA and transformed into a buxom bionic assassin. Hell Squad: Unable to release his son from the Middle Eastern terrorists who kidnapped him, a U.S. ambassador turns to the services of nine Las Vegas showgirls. These gals moonlight as vicious commandos. (Summaries by Video Hound, Golden Movie Retriever)

  65 Teddy was essentially right. Details, attitude, and style can reinvigorate a genre endlessly and make for gr
eat filmmaking—Sahara is reinvented as The Guns of Navarone > The Dirty Dozen > Platoon > Uncommon Valor.

  At the same time it proves how right Hartman was to select Beagle for the project, because ultimately Beagle did not just run a riff on the formula. When the genre was inadequate, he stepped outside of it and even outside his medium in the way it was normally used. He let the nature of the project define the form.

  66 Not a truly original thought: “According to Jefferson Morley [in the Nation]: several employees of Wackenhut recently worked on an elaborate scheme to help death squad members kidnap the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin Corr. The rightists evidently hoped to place the blame for the event on the FMLN.” Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan, The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror | Pantheon Books, 1989)

  67 The treatment of Joseph McBride at Variety for his review of Patriot Games was more than a glaring revelation of the financial incest between be entertainment industry and the entertainment media. It was a recognition of the total victory of our official ideology on the issue of terrorism.

  What is now called terrorism is, after all, the method of warfare employed by individuals and small groups against the power of the state. These groups were, not long ago, called the Underground and the Resistance. And they were, not long ago, automatically the heroes of our movies. The Secret Police that searched them out and the armies that hunted them down were automatically the villains.

  It may be argued that our attitude has changed because the Resistance that we loved consisted of civilians who targeted bad military people and the new ones are bad (though unofficial) military people who target civilians. But that would at least be an argument. The point is that there is no argument. It is considered unfit to mention that another point of view exists.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE PRESIDENT’S JOB existed beyond logic and sense. It truly belonged in the realm of magic. When the Man was blessed, thrice-blessed, all acts were good. Signs and portents ruled the realm. When the Man was cursed, truly cursed, all skies brought unwanted rain, nothing brought gain.

  It seemed, looking backward, that the strangeness had come with Camelot. Imagine this, that the nickname was more knowing than knowing knew. That the arrogant affectation—that this was a new age and bright, that these were knights more special than those that had gone before—revealed a truth so bizarre that no one single person for one single moment considered it literal. The myth of Arthur is that he was the Once and Future King. That he would return. Imagine this, that he did return and that he re-created the kingdom dedicated to dreaming, generosity, and virtue. Someone there was Merlin. Who the hell was Merlin? It doesn’t matter.

  What matters was that once again the king must die, once again be murdered. The corpse—like the body in some fabulous allegory—wove its own shroud into a tapestry of illusion. Everyone who looked upon it saw a different story. Everyone who looked upon it swore that all the other stories—about his death, about his killers—was false.

  And he left a curse upon the crown. His death left everything upside down. Or perhaps Merlin, divine necromancer, interepochal fixer, in rage and despair, left a wizard’s trick upon the throne.

  How else to explain the tragic Macbeth—Macbird, they called him in delicious satire—who followed him? How to explain the fall of Richard Nixon, master of intrigue and plotting, brilliant and devious—how could the incompetence of a couple of clowns breaking into a hotel, step by somehow unstoppable, undivertible step, bring him down lower than any president before him? Then Gerald Ford, an apparently decent, competent man, with no fault except bumping his head, found unfit to be president because he was clumsy on camera. Then Carter, who worked hard, who studied goodness like a theologian, brought down day by grinding day, by the hostage countdown on television.

  Which, of course, is the name of the magic that brought us John F. Kennedy, whatever he was, and the curse that he left behind. The proof is the one and only man who beat the curse—the television man, Ronald Reagan. He didn’t work hard, he didn’t know much about all those things that presidents are supposed to know—economics, foreign policy, law, history, even art. He did the opposite of what he said, seemed unable to tell truth from late-night TV, and should have been embarrassed by much of the company he kept. Yet he once again made the White House seem like a palace and the capital of a glittering imperium. Luck and blessings seemed to fall on all that he did and there was radiance around him.

  A curse? To Bush, whose whole life had been subservient to the goal, whose every choice had been faithful to what the polls said a president should be, do, think, feel, it often seemed as if, having arrived, he had stepped off the edge of the known world. Nothing he did had the result it was supposed to. All the courtiers and advisors and cabinet members and experts scurrying around the White House, very busy, in a great hurry, carrying lots of papers, going up, going down, going sideways, making conference calls, sending memos, screaming to be heard, convinced they were right, requiring limousines and special lunches, were a bunch of rabbits and Mad Hatters, and not all their energy made one dent in what was really important, his standing with the American people and whether or not he would win reelection.

  Bush was on Air Force One. Baker was with him. They had been at a meeting in San Francisco with the Pacific Rim Business Association. Most of its members were Americans, including the majority of the board of directors, but in essence it was a front for Japanese corporate interests. Its pitch was free trade, something that was part of the Republican canon and which the president intrinsically favored. The argument against it was that the Japanese used its rhetoric to mask practices that were, in actuality, both restrictive and predatory.

  Bill Magnoli, president of America’s Exporters, Inc., had asked for a few minutes to present his case to the president.

  A million voices clamor to be heard. The king wishes only to survive. Yet he must make decisions, he must lean left or right, forward or back. On what basis can he choose? The president—who has no time for original research, who doesn’t have the energy left to reach outside the loop on every one of thousands of issues—listens to those few voices that get to present their story. Which is what makes access the prize.

  America’s Exporters had at one time actually been an American-owned company. It was now owned by Musashi Trading Company, the key company in what is called a keiretsu in Japan. As every reader of the financial pages or of Japan-bashing thrillers knows, a keiretsu68 is like a conglomerate, but larger, closer-knit, more predatory, infinitely more terrifying.

  Musashi had bought America’s Exporters for its name and for its president, Bill Magnoli, the most American guy the Japanese company spotters had ever met. Workdays or weekends, Bill was a bouncing ball of cliché. Drove a Mustang, ate grilled steaks and large desserts, watched football, talked football, played golf, boffed his secretary twice a week, his wife once a week, really liked double knits and Willard Scott, played Lotto and thought Vegas was really, really hot. He had two kids, one in college, one in rehab, and carried their pictures in his wallet. He was a go-along, get-along guy, a real booster of whatever put bread on his rather large table and gas in the tanks of the four cars he supported.

  When Bill Magnoli got up and spoke on behalf of America’s Exporters, it took a real effort to remember that he was really a spokesman for Hiroshi Takagawa, whose title at Musashi was always translated into English as “vice president for the improvement of Japanese-American relations,” but written in kanji, the ideograph version of Japanese, it could be read as “member of the General Staff, Strategic Planning for Victory in America.” It was never translated that way, and it was considered rude to even mention that around gaijin.

  At issue was military procurement, one of the ways that America has traditionally supported private industry. Private industry, in turn, has been very supportive of the military. Some chipmaker with a politician in his pocket—alternatively
described as a congressman concerned with his constituents, many of whom made their living in silicon; alternatively described as a patriotic American worried about his country’s high-tech independence in case of war—had introduced a bill requiring the Pentagon to buy only Made-in-America chips. The congressman was going to get his bill, but it would permit the Pentagon to make exceptions if . . . There was currently a debate over whether the next phrase would be “it was a matter of compelling necessity for the immediate defense, for a period not to exceed one year,” or “no reasonable alternative was available.” Obviously, the impact of the law, if any, now depended on which clause was selected and how it was enforced.

  Magnoli was cogent, colorful, concise. As well he should have been since Hiroshi Takagawa had paid a great deal of money to an American PR firm to research and prepare the pitch, as well as for an acting coach to drill Magnoli.

  The question was not whether or not Magnoli was wrong or right, whether he was an agent of influence of a foreign power, or even whether or not the president should have heard those opinions directly. The question was, why did Bill Magnoli have access?

  “Bushie, how did you happen to be talkin’ with this Magnoli fellow?” James Baker asked the president.

  “Neil,” the president said, talking about what he was concerned about, his son. “Is there an outcome indicator?” Meaning, Did Baker know if Neil would be indicted or not.69

  “It’s taken care of.”

  “If he weren’t my son . . .” Bush waved a finger. Not meaning, If he weren’t my son, I’d see to it he did hard time to set an example; meaning If he weren’t my son, no one would care. “Not some blabbermouth publicity hound.”I hope the attorney at Justice, who is told to quash this thing, doesn’t turn around and tell the world he was told to quash it70“This picking, picking at nits. They better wait and see.”