WEEKLY REVIEW
It was hurricane season. It became clear that Karl Rove
had leaked information about Valerie Plame to the
press. In response, President George W. Bush, who had
previously announced that he would fire anyone in his
administration who was found to have leaked Plame's
identity, announced that he would actually fire only
proven criminals. "I don't know all the facts," said
Bush. Bob Woodward offered to serve some of Judith
Miller's jail time. Suicide bombers killed at least 170
Iraqis, including twenty-six children who were waiting for
American soldiers to give them candy, and Saddam Hussein
was charged in the death of 150 Shiites in 1982. Eleven
U.S. soldiers were charged with beating Iraqis, and a
Florida man, worried that his three-year-old son might
become a gay sissy, was accused of beating the boy to
death. Bernard Ebbers was sentenced to twenty-five years
in prison, a dangerous monkey named Buddy was loose in
Columbus, Ohio, and Dennis Kucinich was in love. The
atomic bomb turned sixty, and former British Prime
Minister Edward Heath died. A thirteen-year-old boy in
Kalamazoo accidentally burned down the family meth
lab. Four six-hundred-year-old papal seals were found in a
toilet shaft in Germany, and a native Alaskan was
sentenced to seven years in federal prison for killing six
walruses.
NASA postponed the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery,
London began to scan the bodies of tube passengers, and
Disney World started scanning the index and middle fingers
of all visitors. People in Colombia were granting amnesty
to militia groups in exchange for peace. "A few months
ago," said one man, "I would never have dared walk out
here to show you this grave." Three Texas teens were in
trouble for teabagging a fourth. Eating-disorder and
female-self-esteem expert Liza Berzins collapsed in a
Connecticut supermarket after huffing nitrous oxide from
whipped cream canisters, and in Traverse City, Michigan, a
woman drowned in a vat of cherries. A Brooklyn woman was
acquitted of manslaughter due to lack of evidence; she was
accused of killing her husband after he mocked her for her
lack of callypgian rondure. A St. Charles, Illinois, man
was accused of seducing an Akita through a chain-link
fence, and in Enumclaw, Washington, after a man died of
internal bleeding from having sex with a horse, police
were investigating a reputed bestiality farm. "We've got
more investigating to do," said a sergeant. A blind man in
Florida got lucky with his guide dog, a yellow lab named
Lucky.
The twelfth major U.S. investigation into Guantanamo Bay
found that forcing an inmate to behave like a dog was not
inhumane. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who returned to
Pakistan after three years in Guantanamo Bay, said that
writing poetry kept him sane while imprisoned. "They may
have weapons and missiles," he wrote, "but we can find no
sign of manhood in this army." A study found that the
blood of newborn babies contained an average of two
hundred industrial chemicals and pollutants including
pesticides, perfluorochemicals, and waste from burning
garbage. A Bear, Delaware, woman was charged with
injecting her two-year-old son with human feces. The
United States was spending twice as much per capita on
health care as was spent by twenty-nine other
industrialized nations, and prayer was found to be no help
for heart patients. California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger decided to quit his job editing muscle
magazines, which paid at least $1 million a year. "I
pledged to put the people of California front and center,"
he said after receiving a great deal of press
criticism. It cost $75 to bleach your anus in Los
Angeles. An explosion in a Chinese coal mine killed
eighty-one miners, a three-express-train crash in Pakistan
killed 132 people, and a typhoon struck Taiwan. The NHL
and Player's Association came to an agreement. A Tennessee
man was charged with desecrating a venerated object and
sent to jail after he burned an American flag. Hoping to
stave off the development of super-intelligent monkeys, a
panel of scientists issued guidelines on the insertion of
human stem cells into monkey brains. William Rehnquist
announced that he would not retire from the Supreme Court,
the bones of a mammoth were found in Silicon Valley, and
an eight-year-old Malaysian boy caught a fish which jumped
into his throat and choked him to death.
-- Paul Ford
Permanent URL for this column:
http://harpers.org/WeeklyReview2005-07-19.htmlGeneral URL for the latest Weekly Review:
http://www.harpers.org/MostRecentWR.htmlCopyright 2005 Harper's Magazine Foundation
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