The State of the Onion
by D.T. Harris

I'm hungry, and not for the usual. Not for 10 minutes alone with some greasy beauty from the three major food groups (fat, sugar and salt). Today, hard-shell fries and a really good banana shake are far from my mind. And so is spending even 10 more seconds bearing witness to the current reality embodied by "the country." I can't swallow one more story about how different life is, now, compared to how it was before the Sept. 11th suicide bombings.

Nausea, thy name is more news about how someone's powerful husband, once a titan of commerce, is really an innocent victim of the vileness of others. Or how America has now "won" a "war" and "liberated" a country like Afghanistan by littering the place with unexploded cluster bombs and a rearmed and reinvigorated web of feudal warlords. Even though, at the moment, no outside countries seem willing to provide the troops and resources necessary to create an interim, national peacekeeping force, it's possible the warlord lawlessness that racked Afghanistan in the 1990's won't happen again.

It's possible, Mrs. Lay, that your husband had business sex with the whole world and never knew it. And it's possible, Mr. President, that Enron is really not the story of your life — a big-deal fraud.

I'm both hungry and fed up, so I head for The Onion. Not the one in America's Dairyland; I'm going to the frumpy rumpy one, here, in the Great American Swamplands — a "rustic" shamble of wood and other, unidentifiable building materials, the only building on Dan Ogalallee Swamp Overlook Road, a place where reality lost its varnish a good time back.

Harriet Beecherson is in her usual spot at the counter, finishing her third glass of iced tea as I sit down. "Don't ask," she says, gently patting her "virgin blush" lipstick with the corner of a paper napkin that has dancing clowns on it. I shake my head and smile. I know "shut up and listen, young man" when I hear it.

"Heard the latest?" she asks between napkin pats. "According to a poll taken just after the recent State of the Union Address, Texas Swing Research — the folks who, until last November, did all of Enron's song-and-dance, funds-transfer studies — has determined that the President's approval rating is now at 130 percent, and rising."

"Sounds about right," I say, watching her slide a glop of potato salad across her plate with a fork. "So tell me, Harriet, how is it, when you are fighting a 'war' and you take 'prisoners,' they are, somehow, not 'prisoners of war'? They are 'battlefield detainees,' even when this 'war' is so fluid it has no 'battlefields,' and the 'detainees' are now detained on the other side of the planet?"

She picks a piece of bacon from her BLT, slides it in her mouth, chews twice and swallows. "As Secretary Rumsfeld might have put it recently — for these people, coming from the bleak and desolate landscape of Afghanistan after years spent dedicated to the destruction of everything America holds dear, this must seem like a Club Med vacation, with free airfare. How could they complain? The place is crawling with palm trees."

"When you say it like that," I offer, "I suppose being held outdoors in a large dog pen, the tin roof providing shade from the tropical sun for an hour or two each day, might seem luxurious. Maybe, after all this is over, the facilities can become part of the Administration's new Social Security retirement plan."

Harriet is unmoved as she finishes her sandwich. "'Over'? Who said anything about anything ever being 'over'? You're forgetting the point: Evil ever walks the earth; thy Black Hawk and thy night-vision goggles, they comfort me. The fundamentalist's Bible is a war story, honey. If you want peace, you need to die first."

"Thanks, I'll remember to put that on my 'things to do' list," I say.

"You're just piqued because they let Darth bin Vader and his board of directors slip away. You aren't seeing the master plan."

"There's a master plan?"

"Of course. At the start, before you know how things will turn out, there's the 'novice' plan. You do something and see what happens. Then, as events evolve and develop a life of their own, it's 'ride 'em cowboy.' This is the 'master' plan."

"I think I'm beginning to smell the onions," I say, glancing toward the kitchen.

"And there's the matter of the uniforms."

"The uniforms?" I ask.

"The uniforms — one reason why the 'detainees' are not 'prisoners.' According to what the Shriners came up with at all those Geneva Conventions, war is a formal affair. If you don't want to dress for it, you can't expect to be treated like a real soldier."

"Well it's a good thing those rag-tag colonists — dressed in whatever they had as they terrorized and ransacked the British ships and storehouses of Boston, or hid behind the rocks and trees as they ambushed the well-turned-out cardinal-red lines of British troops at Lexington and Concord — didn't have to worry about ironing their articles of war."

"Get over it, Bobby," she says, reaching for her purse on the next stool.

"I am over it. The problem is that so many people are still buried under it."

E-mail D.T. Harris at calamostreet at aol dot com.