It's absurd

Bush says he spent his summer vacation reading Camus' The Stranger, as well as -- get this -- "three Shakespeares."

The reference to Camus reminded me of good old Dr. Gene Scott, my favorite televangelist, who would spend endless hours spouting nonsense about the Amityville Horror, Atlantis and the "prophecies" inscribed into the Great Pyramid. Every ten minutes or so, Dr. Gene would remind the rubes that he was no mere promoter of pseudoscience -- nosirree, he had received a real ejikashun at Stanford yoo-niversity, where he wrote this big ol' paper on Sartre's Being and Nothingness (or Being and Not-Being, as Dr. Gene preferred to call it). Scott considered that paper his intellectual trump card: 'You can't call me crazy! I once read a hard book! When I tell you the Amityville Horror is real, you can believe it!'

Confession: I never read Being and Nothingness, although I'd love to know how Dr. Gene viewed it. I did read The Stranger. (How many years ago, you ask? Don't be rude.) And I can't help but wonder how W would summarize it, presuming he really did manage to plough through it:

'Well, it's about this guy who kills an Arab, and how it's like that's okay, because who gives a shit about anything, y'know?'

The Stranger is an absurdly appropriate choice for our current prez. After all, the book is about an unthinking protagonist who kills an Arab without good cause. Toward the end, he is told that he can save his life if he feigns a religious conversion, but he refuses to lie about his atheism. That's probably the point where Camus lost Bush.

Dan Quayle, in an attempt to prove that he was no intellectual lightweight, told reporters that he tried to read Plato's Republic once a year. Wags snickered: 'And one of these years, he might even succeed.' Quayle, like Bush, made an appropriate choice: Socrates proposed a rigid class system and a society based on myths and lies.

Incidentally, the last book I read was a collection of early Batman stories "by Rob't Kane," as he then styled himself. Did you know that Catwoman was originally called "the Cat"?