[Newspoetry] George W. Bush Declares War on Language

[Joe Futrelle]

I flipped on CNN when I heard about it.  The cockpit voice recorders
had been recovered and it had come out that the hijackers had used
language to plan and carry out their attacks.

I saw the last of the headlines scroll past.  The pundits fell silent,
so I flipped on the closed-captioning.  There was nothing left but the
punctuation.

Realizing what was happening, I quickly ran out to buy a newspaper,
arriving just before they came to replace every copy with the late
edition: all pictures.  By the time I got back home the new street
signs with icons and rebuses were being put up.

On the news they had somehow doctored the crash footage so that the
planes were covered with text.  A map of the world appeared in which
America and its allies were blank and Afghanistan, Iraq, and the
occupied territories were filled with Arabic script.

I tried to call you but the phone just played that annoying three-note
melody, then silence.

There was nothing to do but watch T.V.  The weather channel was
probably the easiest one to understand.  Sitcoms were reduced to
sequences of tableaus with occasional sight gags, the effect of which
was oddly reassuring.  The news was baffling, with charts and icons
flashing by at such a rate that I could barely recognize them.

When George W. Bush finally came on to address the American people
from the oval office, he stared into the camera for over a minute
without uttering a word.

Then he began to flail his arms wildly, like someone just learning to
ride a bicycle.

--
Joe Futrelle
editor-across-chief
Newspoetry dod com