One
Pointe Sinistre lies at the southern end of the Bay of Lolómé, a two-mile-long succession of gradually diminishing stone escarpments that look from a distance as though a school of giant dolphins had piled one atop another and decided to go to sleep there. The highest and largest abuts the stark scrub-clad Mountains of Lolómé that separate the barren coast from the desert interior. The smallest, at the foot of the mountains, plunges into the perpetually boiling sea.
It is a setting made for drama. Many have taken place there over the centuries. On this day in spring when the calendar is racing toward the year 2000, the newest and perhaps most ominous will presently engage the attentions of the entire world and particularly those of the President and State Department of the United States of America.
For America, for Greater (and Lesser) Lolómé, and indeed for everyone on the face of the planet, it is the worst of times.
There is no “best” to counterbalance. The best is in hiding, under fire, trying to escape, suffering agonies, dying under torture, being “ethnically cleansed” from homes and cities, starving, succumbing to shotgun wounds on battlefields, in streets and schoolyards, being exploded by bombs, subjected to mental and physical abuse, rape, battery, incest, expiring by the hundreds and thousands every day as a result of crimes occasionally understandable but far more often capricious, wayward, and, in a curiously weird sense, carefree.
Hypocrisy, Greed, Corruption, and Cruelty ride the globe. In every land, on every sea, the good and the well intentioned struggle endlessly against the forces of dissolution and chaos that attack their societies. Nowhere in all the vast expanse of humanity’s desperate strivings is there any really convincing evidence for hope.
Hope, like God, exists because humanity cannot endure the ghastly closing years of the terrible twentieth century without it. But even a partial roll call of humanity’s agonies discloses how flimsy are the foundations upon which it rests.
In such a world there are, of course, those who profit and survive quite happily.
They are people like The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, who sits on the highest peak of Pointe Sinistre in his heavily fortified pink concrete fortress and thumbs his nose at the United States and its annoying President, at the United Nations, and at everyone else, including many, desperate but defeated, in his own land.
His domain is not, to the casual glance, all that important. It is only geography—and, more recently, his newfound, evil friends—who have made Greater Lolómé important to the world; that, and Sidi’s longstanding ambition to conquer and absorb annoying Lesser Lolómé, which sits like an angry boil atop the misshapen “head” that the fanciful can see in the map of Greater Lolómé.
Greater Lolómé is actually a rather small part of the earth’s surface; it is “Greater” by definition of its President, which he has persuaded the world to accept. It certainly does have many more square-miles of desolate emptiness than Lesser Lolómé. Unfortunately, however, it is Lesser Lolómé that has the oil.
Greater Lolómé has almost none. Greater Lolómé has strategic position, but this, if truth were ever told in international affairs, is about all there is to Greater Lolómé and its approximately ten million illiterate, poverty-stricken, barely subsisting tribal peoples.
But due to the devious shrewdness and grimly unrelenting tenacity of The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, Greater Lolómé now looms much larger on the world scene than many a nation ten times its size and ten times higher up the ladder of civilization.
“Civilization,” indeed, is not a word to be applied lightly to any nation in these final years of the twentieth century, let alone one so backward and so supremely touchy as Greater Lolómé. The very word is suspect. It is unfair, unjust, prejudicial, subtly and insidiously Eurocentric. “Civilization” by whose definition? “Civilization” on whose terms?
The word, when used to subtly but definitely derogate Greater Lolómé, does not take into account the major achievements of its peoples—their overwhelming and unstoppable urge to breed and breed and breed, regardless of the fact that if the population were one-third its present size it still would not have enough to live on…its peoples’ deep love of the land and their deep respect for nature, as shown by the haphazard and indiscriminate grazing and hunting that over the centuries have resulted in the destruction of most of its major wildlife, virtually all of its major vegetation, and nine-tenths of its arable topsoil…and the reverence for human life—and the tourist dollar—that have preserved the ancient but still officially sanctioned rituals that periodically destroy several hundred of its most promising and most rebellious youths…all of those things, in fact, which prompt the secret, and sometimes not-so-secret, admiration with which Greater Lolómé’s admirers compare its simple, instinctively-at-one-with-nature ways with the crippled commercialism of their own “civilization” in the West.
It is no wonder, then, that Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi sits in his bristling pink concrete compound—“the Pink House,” a reference as instantly recognizable throughout the world as “the White House”—and thumbs his nose at the United States and at all who agree with its critical official approach to his country and particularly to himself. He knows he has the sneaking, if not always openly expressed, admiration of his part of the world, and of many in the West too.
It is a time for the thumbing of noses, a time for the collapse of “civilizations,” a time for the schemes of Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi and all like him, everywhere.
“When you look around the world,” as Sidi’s fellow President, he of the United States, often says, “what do you see? One hell of a mess, one hell of an unrelieved, ghastly, fucking mess. How the hell are we ever going to get out of it?”
In the case of this President, the use of the pronoun we has a much wider application than it does when used by President Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi. The President of the United States, or POTUS, as he is referred to in the language of his own Secret Service, of necessity takes a broader view than the President of Greater Lolómé, or POGL. But not even the POTUS, at this juncture, can contribute as much to the world’s growing disarray and ever-growing chaos as the POGL (whom the POTUS refers to, in moments of real exasperation, as “Old Three Esses,” or “Seedy Sidi”).
It is not surprising, perhaps, that the chaos of the world, creeping across every border, challenging the stability of every nation, eroding the safety and the stability of every society and every people, should have brought to power such a man as The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi.
For thirty-eight of his forty-seven years he was known in his desert tribe, and in the army which he joined at eighteen, simply as Sidi Muhammed Bakki. It is only in the last nine that he has proclaimed himself to be Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, which in Arabic means Sidi son of Sidi son of Sidi. His proclamation establishing this name was ostensibly to honor his father and grandfather, ignorant wanderers of the desert. Sophisticated and skeptical observers, of whom there are many among the media covering the area, are sure that this was only a preliminary to declaring himself king or emperor, probably under the title Sidi III, which would give him a ready-made dynasty and further his obvious intention that his son, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, should succeed him.
“Young Sidi,” as he is known (or “Jerk, Junior,” to POTUS), has come home from a happy four years as a drunken womanizer at Harvard University to become general and commander of his father’s Special Guard. He has already made it clear that his talents in the fields of corruption, torture, rapine, and general mayhem are equal to, if not greater than, his father’s. So the instant dynasty idea is logical. Monarch and heir are already in place, and all seems set for many more years of cruel and ruthless tyranny over Greater Lolómé.
Except, of course, for the evil Americans, whose constant fulminations against him give Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi his only real uneasiness. Agents of the Great Satan have tried to unseat him before, without success, but they are not giving up. It is only the unexpected assistance just offered him by one (or is it more?) of the region’s major monsters that give him the renewed energy and greatly expanded military muscle to meet the Great Satan’s continuing onslaught.
So far, this is secret to the world; but unknown at the moment to Sidi, the technological devils of the West have struck again. The word has already reached Washington, and busy minds are at work trying to devise a response.
It will be an interesting battle of wills in which only Sidi’s iron nerve and desert shrewdness will once again sustain him in a contest of whose successful outcome he will be quite sure…although not, of course, entirely sure. There is always the chance that Washington may outsmart him. On the basis of past performance in the area, this is not likely; but it cannot be ruled out. It will almost surely feature another attempt by America to use the ruler of Lesser Lolómé in its sinister games—a weak reed, Sidi thinks contemptuously, if ever there was one.
Sheikh Mustafa bin Muhammed, Descendant of the Prophet and Eternal Ruler of Lesser Lolómé (known to POTUS and world media as “The Mouse”), is one more in the string of mad old men in camel’s hair caftans who have so greatly disrupted the region and the world in recent years. He is a tiny, shrunken, seemingly somnolent eighty-five-year-old, a weird fanatic whose whispery old voice has a hypnotic effect upon his own peoples and many others in the area. His principal achievement recently has been to father his 107th child, a daughter, at age eighty-three.
In Washington they will soon be debating whether his preservation in power is worth having the ambassador to Greater Lolómé, William “Big Bill” Bullock, “campaign contributor supreme,” as he is referred to dryly in the professional Foreign Service, approach Sidi and threaten him with dire consequences if he attempts any attack on The Mouse.
Such a mission, if ordered, will be one of the things the President will mean at a Rose Garden photo opportunity when he responds solemnly to his clamorous questioners of the media that he is “considering several different options…but will definitely rule out any use of American troops.…”
The Mouse has served American interests before, and now, as he sits in his palace—not quite so grand, but equally as fortified, as Sidi’s pink excrescence—he is thinking in his shrewd little mind that he will, if the occasion arises again, be equally compliant, but, this time, will exact a greater price for it than he has before.
There have been times, particularly on the occasion four years ago when Sidi attempted to take a page from the book of his secret patron and launch an outright assault on Lesser Lolómé, when The Mouse was so grateful for American aid that he asked from America only the gift of continued independence for himself, his extended family, and the patch of enormously oil-rich desert Allah has seen fit to give them. To his secret bafflement, this was all that America wanted—just that Lesser Lolómé continue to produce relatively low-priced oil and to act, as its geographic position has given it the ability to do, as a barrier against onslaughts by Greater Lolómé upon oil producers farther north who are even more wealthy and even more destructive of “human rights” than he is.
“Human rights” form a concept that not only The Mouse and his family, but also Sidi and the great majority of their fellow rulers of sand and palm find hard to understand. They all have their rights, and that seems sufficient to them. The proposition that their subjects might have some too seems the most outrageous affront to common sense that they could possibly imagine. Mustafa bin Muhammed takes care of his people in every material way, giving each of them out of his own oil-rich pockets an annual stipend enormous by their standards, providing those who wish to leave the desert with free public housing, building major highways (one north-south and one east-west), airports, and monumental buildings each adorned with his own mammoth statue, dispensing the bounties of the desert with a firm and evenhanded generosity. If this means that they must submit also to the most rigorous control of their thoughts and actions, if it means that they must dutifully bow down and worship the autocratic decrees (and sometimes rather odd sexual preferences) of Mustafa bin Muhammed, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, and all the rest of their autocratic fellow rulers, well, that seems to The Mouse and his likes a modest price for their peoples to pay.
“Human rights” form a nice concept for the self-righteous Americans to rant on about, but The Mouse often wonders why they do it. Their own record is not always that great, and why they think they have a right to impose their own special version of “human rights” upon everyone else he cannot understand. It only makes him, and all who must bear the brunt of the constant flood of pious preachings from Washington, restive and contemptuous—particularly when America’s own interests are involved.
On the occasion when America’s show of force saved The Mouse from being swallowed by the President of Greater Lolómé, the United States could have used the opportunity to enforce some genuine rights upon Lesser Lolómé—to insist on the establishment of a genuinely representative, democratic legislature, for instance—to require Mustafa and the hundreds of what the present President of the United States refers to privately as “his Rolls-Royce relatives” to abandon some of their selfishly profligate habits and adopt a more circumspect way of life—to establish a genuine system of justice, doing away with the harsh and lethal punishments which are meted out automatically for the most minor infractions of Mustafa’s laws and proclamations—in short, to generally loosen up and lighten up one of the area’s most oppressive tyrannies.
But America did not do this. Its then President, greatly enamored of the cousinship of kings and always desperately seeking “the stability thing” in any international crisis, did not wish to be too harsh with his fellow head of state, Sheikh Mustafa. Also he was too busy nurturing the myth of “joint United Nations action” as a shield behind which to hide (as The Mouse, Sidi, and their fellow tyrants construed it) American hesitations and cowardice. And so the moment for change—and for courage—passed. And in the minds of The Mouse, Sidi, and all their fellow rulers, America went down still another notch in the subtle ranking of fear and respect by which men and events in their area (and, indeed, throughout the world) have been judged, and responded to, as far back as history runs.
Next time, Sheikh Mustafa tells himself as he studies with great unease the reports his spies have brought back this day from Greater Lolómé, he will demand of America that it assist him not only in turning back any renewed assault from his southern neighbor but also that it will get rid of Sidi once and for all. The Mouse also has an heir—twenty or thirty of them, actually, all fine, well-educated, shrewd young men with glib British accents and three-thousand-dollar tailor-made British suits, skilled in evasion, deceit, and the ruthless, insidious ways of their region’s ancient diplomacy. From their ranks he is ready to choose a ruler for Greater Lolómé.
When Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi and Jerk, Junior, have been staked out in the desert for the buzzards to pick out their eyes and entrails and ants to eat the rest, The Mouse will be ready to name a favorite son to assume the throne of Greater Lolómé, and in due course, upon his own demise, reunite the two countries into that truly Great Lolómé from which they were originally carved by the ignorant pens of the impatient British, back in the days before an ironic Allah—too late for Western recapture—revealed exactly what lay beneath the endless, empty wastes.
No one in the region except Sidi and The Mouse knows at this moment the potentials for new troubles that have suddenly developed. But even so, there is a sudden ominous tension that seems to be occurring throughout the region. No one outside the two Lolómés (and the nasty powers responsible for it) has anything solid upon which to base apprehension, but in every capital the instinct, subtle as a fleeting desert wind at twilight, is beginning to alert them all. Most do not know where the threat will come from, when it will burst into the open, but many are becoming convinced that it is there. In that chaotic part of the world anything can happen at any time. It has, from time immemorial, and it will, into time unforeseeable.
In Washington, too, the tension is rising. Everything, these days, comes back to Washington, where men and women, burdened with the constantly demanding problems of their own troubled land, would give anything if they could to be left alone to take care of their own national housekeeping without having to worry about everyone else’s. But at this point in history, they seem to have no choice.
“Somebody has to do it,” the incumbent President of the United States says with a weary irony, aware that the way America does it is not always, by any means, the wisest, the soundest, the most constructive—“But,” as he adds with a troubled sigh, “there doesn’t seem to be anybody else.”
This attitude, which is often articulated publicly in the White House, the Congress, the media, and by the average citizenry of the great Republic, often draws scathing rejoinders from other peoples resentful of what seems to be complacent, egotistical, unasked-for burden-carrying.
They do not see the fears and uncertainties that underlie it.
America at heart is no more confident than anyone else.
But somebody has to do it.
And nobody can do it better.
Or so America’s leaders manage to persuade themselves.