Wry Martinis (8 page)

—
The New Yorker
, 1994

General Jack D. Ripper
Whoops Publishers, $18.95 (192p)

General Ripper is probably best known for destroying the world. In 1964, he ordered a wing of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union, triggering the Soviets’ Doomsday Machine, which blanketed the world with fallout. His decision to start the Third World War was prompted by what he now candidly calls his “paranoia” in thinking that fluoridation of drinking water was a Communist plot to make him impotent. Ripper now reveals that he’s spent the last thirty-one years undergoing “some pretty hairy counseling,” and that the therapy has allowed him to do something he never could before—cry. “I now realize that tears are the most precious bodily fluid of all.”
First printing 250,000. Film rights to Stanley Kubrick. Author tour.

Saddam Hussein
Hussein & Hussein, $20.95 (384p)

On the one hand, Saddam says he feels “immense woefulness” for the families of the thousands of Iraqi soldiers killed during Desert Storm. But then there he is in the next sentence railing against “U.S. devils” doing the “filthy work” of the “International Zionist Cabal.” However, he sounds sincere when he says, “I was wrong, terribly wrong, not to have used the chemical-biological weapons. What’s the point of hiring
all those expensive German consultants if you’re just going to sit on your hands while the Satanic Dog Bush fires Tomahawk missiles up your ass?” Crying helps, he writes, but he doesn’t like to do it in front of the women.
First serial
, Modern Dictator
magazine. Satellite author tour.

(
On Second Thought
)
Erich Honecker
Schadenfreude, $16.95 (288p)

Whatever your feelings about the man who supervised the construction of the Berlin Wall, and who for thirty years made life miserable and terrifying for everyone in East Germany, it’s hard not to feel at least a twinge of sympathy for Erich Honecker when he writes in this posthumously published memoir that “It’s a little ironic to find myself in South America, like some Nazi war criminal. I made mistakes. So I’m human. But to devote your entire life to fighting fascism only to end up in mañanaland like Mengele or Eichmann is not my idea of
wunderbar.
” Honecker says he sometimes starts crying while watching his favorite Katarina Witt “Huns of Steel” exercise video, and at one point admits to being, as he puts it, “a total wiener.”
First serial
, Der Weltschmerz.

Idi Amin Dada
Fatto & Windus, $22.95 (224p)

After years of “prayerful reflection” and “copious weeping” while living in asylum in Saudi Arabia, former self-proclaimed Ugandan President-for-Life Idi Amin writes in this peculiar autobiography that he “may have got a little carried away at times.” While he admits that he killed three hundred thousand people and “pulled some stunts that might even have given [his role model Adolf] Hitler the willies,” what appears to bother him most is “the canard” about his having sent Richard Nixon a telegram saying, “If you were a woman I would marry you.” He writes, “It is true that I wanted to bear his children, but I never asked him to marry me.” Doubtless, historians will be grateful for the clarification.
First printing 250. Print advertising. Radio interviews.

Fidel Castro
Sierra Maestra, $30 (624p)

One of the most enduring, if not endearing, twentieth-century dictators, Fidel Castro seems finally willing to admit a measure of defeat. “My doctor won’t let me smoke, the Russians won’t take my phone calls, and our engineers have to ride to work on donkeys,” he writes. “This morning I asked for sugar in my coffee and the steward said, ‘
No hay
(‘There is none’). The Minister of Defense says even if we had fuel we wouldn’t want to put it in the fighter planes, because the pilots would only defect in them. And now I must freely admit,” he adds with a
suspiro
(a sigh), “there are times when I myself feel like defecting.” He says he cries a lot, even when ordering his close friends and associates to be shot by the firing squad, “which I
nunca
(never) used to do.” Clearly, he finds this troubling. “Maybe I’m getting
flojo
(soft),” he writes, “and a good leader must be
duro
(hard).” The Comandante may not be
duro
, but he’s still feisty: “Life in Cuba is no frozen daiquiri, but at least I’m still around, which is more than I can say for the Kennedys.”
First serial
, Hola.

—
The New Yorker
, 1995

The City Planning Council today announced that it will offer tours of the industrial areas along the New Jersey Turnpike.

“A lot of people drive through Elizabeth on their way to somewhere else,” said Harry Bethner, vice president for tourist development. “From a moving car, it looks like just a lot of pipes in the air with chemicals and smoke or even fire coming out of them. If we could get people to stop and smell the roses, we think they might come away more refined themselves. And if they don’t like looking at chemical plants, we have nice rest rooms.”

It might take some stretch of the imagination to envision the more than fifty-mile shipping canal between Houston and Galveston as something other than a bleak industrial waterway. But the state’s Port Authority
thinks that with “a little fixing up and some plumb luck” it can convince tourists that it might be fun to pass the time in pedal boats, observing up close the many varieties of mutant catfish while trying to avoid being shredded by the giant propellers of tankers and cargo vessels.

“We think it’s a natural,” said Joe (Bob) Gorman, Jr., who is overseeing the plan for the Port Authority. “People could fish, though they might want to check with that center in Atlanta before eating anything they catch. And if you’ve never paddled to get out of the way of an ultralarge crude carrier, well, shoot, you haven’t lived.”

Calling Phoenix “the billboard capital of the United States,” the city’s Department of Cultural Preservation announced today that it will conduct specialized tours of its billboards.

P.D.C.P. Commissioner Faith Quigley said the plan “isn’t just to try to show people every billboard in Phoenix. That’s like trying to see everything in the Louvre.”

Instead, tours will be organized by theme: Colas, Fast-Food Chains, Bail Bondsmen, and Cigarettes are among the first. Future themes will include Muffler Repairs, Topless Bars, Gun Shops, and Immigration Lawyers.

The Las Vegas Tourist Development Board announced today that, in partnership with La Cosa Nostra Offshore Legitimate Partners Ltd., it would license tour operators to take visitors to the secret final resting places of alleged gangsters.

One concession, Shut Up and Get in the Trunk Tours, will begin operations next month. Owner Frank “Teddy Bear” P., who explained that his last name “ain’t nobody’s business,” says he will “give the customer more than just a look at some—shall we say—real fertile spots in the desert. We’re gonna give them the whole nine yards.”

Tourists will be “forced” at “gunpoint” to get into the trunks of dark sedans. The “trunks” will be air-conditioned and equipped with comfortable
seats, wet bars, and slot machines. “It’ll be real nice, I guarantee,” Mr. P. said.

A tourist board spokesman said the tours should draw a variety of customers, from amateur archeologists to forensic scientists. He called the plan “part of Las Vegas’s continuing program to become America’s No. One family destination.”

—
The New York Times
, 1996

My very fellow Americans: Today, here, on the steps of this historic building, I am announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.

Yes, there are a lot of other people running for President, but I firmly believe I am uniquely qualified for this, the highest office in this great nation of ours, and I intend to explain why.

First, however, let me address a more urgent question, and that is the future facing our children’s children’s children’s children. And their children. When their time comes, our time will have passed. But they will look back and say, “What was all that about?” Someone will have to answer. And that someone is why I am running. My friends, today I say to you, I want to be that someone.

There is a wise saying where I come from. It has been handed down over the ages, and it goes something like this: “Do not give away your socks unless you like going barefoot.”

Well, today I am taking off my socks and giving them to the American people.

I do not particularly like going barefoot. But if that is the price of democracy, then I say, “So be it.”

I know that people will look at me, in that wonderful American way of ours, and say, “It is cold out, and your toes are turning blue.” But I know also that there are larger things at stake than blue, or even brittle, toes.

But that is only part of the reason I stand before you barefoot, ready to run many miles in order to earn your trust. Sure, there will be times
when I take an airplane or a car or a train, or even a bus. I will do what I must, just as I must what I will do. And that, my friends, is my pledge to you today.

We live in a time of great challenge. All right, perhaps that is putting it strongly. Perhaps it is old-fashioned to speak bluntly, without vacillation or verbal varnish. So be it. Some have urged me, “Don’t be blunt.” But if this election is about anything, it is about not hiding one’s light of conviction under a bushel of demurral. So to speak. It is about standing up and saying, “Here I am.”

Well, friends,
here I am.