by Richard Stern

Hard to think that an American jury would convict a well-spoken, clean-featured, polite little fellow called "Scoooter." Who next, Tom Sawyer? Sure enough, a juror, minutes after the verdicts were handed over, said the jurors liked Scooter and wondered why it was he, rather than, say, Karl Rove, in the courtroom. Little Scooter looked to them like "a fall guy." As they were arriving at their logically imperative verdict, Jean Baudrillard, one of the most famous "postmodern gurus," died in Paris, age 77. For M Baudrillard, the "l'affaire Libby" would have been another "simulacrum," an event or series of events so thick with reports about itself that any underlying actuality would have been displaced. For him, after all, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (the wonderful title taken from Jean Giradoux's play, La Guerre de Troie N'Aura Pas Lieu); it was a sequence of violent, "hyperreal" events which simulated the old, genuine wars of cause, purpose, clear beginnings and conclusions. Scooter, a man of letters, might well, yesterday, have felt himself in what Baudrillard called "a desert of the real." Eleven years earlier, he'd published a novel, The Apprentice, about a group of Japanese caught in a 1903 blizzard during a smallpox epidemic. (Libby had once been so insistent about universal vaccination that his friends called him "Germ Boy.") Its blurb talks of the novel's "bestiality and paedophilia" and boasts that it is "packed with sexual perversion, dwelling on prepubescent girls and their training as prostitutes." Some of its unhappy readers were disgusted by scenes of bears "coupling" with these little girls. (One reader suggested that when Bush pardons Scooter for his indicted crimes that he include his crime against literature.) Although no reader wondered if the novel were autobiographical, I wonder now if such a sanguinary imagination might have something to do with the ease of concocting bloody wars fought by others. Irve Lewis Libby was known as Scooter after his investment banker father noticed him scurrying around the cradle. His later moves took him through Andover, Yale, and Columbia Law School, a much smoother career than that of his old companion in simulacra arms, Dick Cheney. (Scooter graduated magna cum laude from Yale; Cheney was thrown out of it.) It was in New Haven that Scooter came under the influence of one of his professors, Paul Wolfowitz, who would later draw him from prosperous legal work (Marc Rich, Clinton's notorious pardonee, was one of his clients) first to the State and then to the Defense Department. There, with Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cheney, Scooter helped work up plans for the democratic transformation of the Middle East and the recreation of what another of last week's losses, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., decried as the imperial presidency. Baudrillard delighted in a story by Jorge Luis Borges about the huge map of an empire which continued to decay as the map became larger and larger, soon displacing the empire it originally charted. With the conviction of the first of this band of simulacra brothers (Scooter was known as "Cheney's Cheney"), one wonders if the tattered record of their grandiose plans will be what survives the chaos and destruction those plans engineered.