The Billiken's Bluff

I think my new course of action will be to post/plagiarize excerpts from Don Delillo's Underworld.

This is the last book that I thoroughly enjoyed. I wish I had written it. I'm thinking about re-reading it. For now I'll post some passages that are relevant (to me, to current events, just relevant in general):

"I heard a story not long ago," he said. "They did a bomb test in the nineteen-fifties in which a hundred pigs were dressed in custom-made GI field jackets and positioned at well-spaced intervals from the blast site. One hundred and eleven, to be exact, pigs, as the story was told to me. Then they exploded the device. Then they examined the uniforms on the barbecued pigs to evaluate the thermal qualities of the material. Because this was the point of the test."

Janet didn't respond because whatever the point of the test, and whatever the point of the story, it was only making her mad.

"Picture it. Chester whites. A breed of large fat pig with drooping ears. Wearing khaki uniforms with zippers, seams, everything, and with drawstrings drawn because that's how the regulation reads. And a voice on the loudspeaker's going, Ten, nine, eight, seven."

She told him to get his arm inside the jeep.

"Is this when history turned to fiction?" he said.

She looked at him briefly.

"That's not the question you're asking," she said.

"What am I asking?"

"I don't think you're asking that question. That's a large question, and I think you are asking a smaller question and it has nothing to do with pigs in uniform. You're talking about something else completely."

I want to make small observations and use them as proof that larger questions need to be asked. I want to take history and re-write it as fiction. Or rather just transcribe it because as I watch the news it appears that much of it has already turned into fiction. Don't forget The Terminator, The Kindergarten Cop is governor of California. We laugh. This is funny, hilarious actually. We shrug it off though. Try not to think about it much. But Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually the governor of California. The 5th largest economy in the world is run by this man:



It's really more improbable than any of Arnold's movies. Movies like True Lies and Collateral Damage are more realistic, have plots that are more feasible than this:



Let's open some dialogue along these lines…

What other news stories/current events that are straddling this line between reality and fiction?