Confessions of Ben Rhodes, Speechwriter & Deputy National Security Advisor
By David Golding
Sure, I’ll yuck it up with the press about my novel, Oasis of Love, but the truth is if it wasn’t as good as Jonathan Franzen it was at least no worse than Jonathan Safran Foer, that cocksucker, vegetarian, limp-wrist, he’s never saved hundreds of Yazidis on a hill, he’s never bombed the shit out of ISIS, he’ll never write a Nobel Prize acceptance speech (not at this rate), he’ll never know how to strike the right balance between humanism and war, he lacks seriousness, testicularity, is what I’m saying, Franzen’s a different story, what Tolstoyan scope of vision, almost like a drone of the heart, a sad and susurrant drone hovering over the parched desert of history, what murderous clarity, like how Midwestern housewives are all secretly dying for cock and like how environmentalists end up becoming frackers, because in the end one never knows where one’s going, I gave Obama Freedom to read and we all agreed, that dork Franzen got to the messy heart of this strange country, the blood and semen-stained heart (I used to write poetry, too), he’s tough, like me, almost as tough as James Foley (would I flinch in the awful daring of a moment’s beheading?), but the truth is fuck James Foley, what was he doing in Syria anyway?, doesn’t he know he can get all his news from the State Department?, I told Obama, Absolutely not, no ransom money for some journalist interloper, a free press is a privilege not a right, I told him, Don’t watch the video, I’ll watch the video for you, I’ll take on all the sins of the world for you, like Judas did for Jesus according to certain Gnostic readings, the Yazidis too are Gnostics, noble aboriginal monotheists in the cradle of our beautiful civilization, our beleaguered civilization, I’m going to write a screenplay or a lyric poem about the love between a Yazidi woman and a Navy Seal, or maybe an American novelist, no I shouldn’t get carried away, a Navy Seal is better, I told Obama, How would it look if at the very moment of our standing side by side with our ally Israel we capitulated to a sentimental politics of life, to Munichian appeasement, let him die, the same way we let Erdogan and his thugs gas the Syrians, we’ll blame it on Assad but behind closed doors we’ll let them know what we think of them, there are so many dirty people in this world, a luxury to think you can hole up in Williamsburg and write novels, on 9/11 I was there and I heard the orgiastic call to arms, I saw those beautiful flame-licked towers fall softly like winter rain, I heard the call to a new seriousness, I wish I’d come up with term “the new seriousness,” I wish I’d written that Claire Messud novel about those over-sexed creative-class types whose empty lives come undone under the cruel and glaring sun of 9/11, that was good, I could have done it with more virility, but good nonetheless, Hitchens, now there was a man, Samantha Power, now there’s a woman, Power and Slaughter, what strong names for the New Woman, leaning-into the abyss of the future, their hot mouths on my strong cock, we all need a fantasy life, even the President on occasion, I’d take Power softly but firmly up the ass, I wonder if she can get me a gig at the Kennedy School when this is all over, if they gave it to Ignatieff why not me?, imagine the happiness, on the side I’d write novels, of course, my true calling, it won’t matter that I’m going bald, lots of attractive bald writers, I wish I looked like Arthur Koestler, now there was a man, I’d settle for Orwell, I used to want to be Hemingway but now I know he was impotent, I’ll show them what I can do, I want to castrate Putin, that would be satisfying, instead I’ll write a novel that ethically castrates Putin, or I’ll reread The Brothers Karamazov and write an essay showing how Putin is an incarnation of Russian nihilism and Russian will-to-power, I’ll imply he’s gay, bare-shirted, all that unnecessary cartoonish machismo, must be compensating, sometimes I want to punch an Arab, I’m just saying that any honest American man must face up to that, the desire to punch an Arab, it’s okay to have a fantasy life, Netanyahu doesn’t need a fantasy life, he can just kill Arabs, lucky bastard, the balls on him, bombing UNRWA schools, Power wasn’t too happy about that, she has a U.N. fetish, understandably, but seriously I tweeted Ramadan greetings to the world’s Muslims, Oasis of Love wasn’t all that bad, I thought the mega-church stuff struck the right oracular Mailerian balance between populism and cynicism, do you think they caught the allusion to Baudelaire, oasis of horror in a desert of boredom, not the best title I’ll admit, I should have called it Oasis of Whore, ha ha, I’m not a failed novelist, I’m just a man who knows what he wants, I’m not the kind of guy who says the novel is dead, I know it’s a taboo thought but who was the Proust of the Papuans?, the Tolstoy of the Zulus?, I don’t believe in experimental writing, in the same way that I don’t believe in revolution, I think the avant-garde led to the gulag, I think the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a good idea, all my MFA friends are calling themselves socialists these days, that worries me, the state needs its writers, after all, in the same way that it needs its executioners, or in a similar way, Vargas Llosa’s still standing strong, Eli Wiesel’s still standing strong, that was a nice touch in the New York Times about the biblical history of child sacrifice, the Jews rejected child sacrifice, now it’s your turn Hamas, you Moloch-lovers, you idolaters, I should crib from that for a speech, a little lighter on the theology, but writers aren’t what they once were, that’s true, maybe the novel is dead, I’m not a failed novelist because the novel is dead, such sweet melancholia, now is the age of the new seriousness, from the ashes of history must rise the phoenix of the new novelists, me, Ben, Homage to Kurdistan, I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work, a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, in the shit and the piss of the human spirit, not my first Nobel Prize speech, ha ha, but the first one to which I’ve attached this accidental insignificance of history, my name, Benjamin Rhodes, for our nothingness differs little, good people of Sweden and Norway, it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the audience of this speech and I its author, etc. etc., I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Yazidi girls used under the Security Fence and I thought well as well Obama as another and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his cock was pulsing like mad and yes I said yes I will yes, etc. etc., for a man of genius like myself there are no errors but only sinecures of discovery, in the beginning was the Deed, not the Word, that loser, that cuckold, that imposter, the Word, the scrotum-crushing Word, yes I will.
From October, 2014
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