Stranger than Fiction

Did you see that thing about Bush reading Camus' The Stranger on his vacation? Can you believe he admitted that? How dumb are his handlers?

For those of you not familiar, Camus' existentialist masterwork is about, as Jon Stewart so eloquently put it the other night, "a Westerner who kills an Arab on a beach for no reason and dies with no remorse." I love this book. It's an intense look at the inside of an existentialist's mind-- not just asking, "What is the point for all of us?" but more specifically, "If you've ever wondered how some people can just kill and not care, here's a peek at that kind of mind." Or at least, that's how I felt reading it. His description of shooting the stranger because the sun is glaring in his eyes is chilling. And for the perfect soundtrack, the Cure's first single, "Killing an Arab", is based on the book.

Apparently, especially for the Cure, there was some backlash because it was an Arab man that dies, but to me the significance was that he was a stranger, an immigrant, and instead of welcoming or being kind to someone far from home, Meursault kills him. It's the opposite of the Good Samaritan story. The vast cross-cultural aspect, a European and an Arab, makes for a more stark contrast (as opposed to a Frenchman and a Spaniard, for example). But I digress.

Why would they think that telling the world that he read The Stranger improves Bush's image? Was Karl Rove hit on the head? Or was it meant to make him look like some crazy maverick? Maybe they don't want the Bad Guys to see him as a lame duck so they are making him into Kim Jong Il, "He's craaaazy, so watch out! He kills Arabs and then for fun, he reads books about killing Arabs! He's one bad mother--" "watch your mouth!" "just talkin' 'bout W..."

When will these insane people give us back our country?