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Letter to the editor

Words of war fill 'Hocus POTUS'

Though his work is fiction, Malcolm MacPherson offers a piercing - and often painfully funny - account of the early days of the Iraq war.

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published September 23, 2007

Hocus POTUS
By Malcolm MacPherson
Melville House, 366 pages, $24.95 

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When Rick Gannon sees a Saddam Hussein look-alike in a Baghdad market not long after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he proposes hiring the guy and throwing pies at him.

A friend wonders if he's kidding, and Gannon says, "If people in low places could still throw pies in the faces of people in high places, we wouldn't be here."

Gannon is the con man hero of Hocus POTUS, Malcolm MacPherson's pie in the face for a lot of people in high places in Iraq and Washington.

MacPherson is a former Marine, a longtime journalist and the author of 13 books. In 2003, he covered the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad for Time magazine, bunking in the former Republican Palace in the Green Zone. He has turned that up-close experience of the early days of the war into bitterly funny fiction in Hocus POTUS POTUS being the security abbreviation for President of the United States.

As the novel opens, Gannon has been forcefully disinvited from his position as a consultant to the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, a fatuous crony notable mainly for his photogenic hair.

After committing the unforgivable error of telling the ambassador the truth, Gannon finds himself heading out of Iraq aboard a cargo plane with two Iraqis (a businessman and a soccer star), a TV cameraman, a retirement-bound U.S. intelligence officer, a sweet young pilot and 17 tons of American currency, guarded only by a teenage reservist whose previous career was stealing cars.

Given that "profiteers from around the planet had descended on Baghdad like monkeys on a ripe banana," Gannon doesn't hesitate to hatch a scheme to hijack the money.

Alas, it fails, and the whole crew is imprisoned in a Baghdad soccer stadium. That's just the beginning. MacPherson spins Hocus POTUS into a Three Kings-style war caper with a heart, and a plot that twists and turns all over the place.

Gannon is a classic cool, charming con who "moved through his life like some action figure, relentlessly, inexorably, a Terminator of the ridiculous and irresponsible."

His nemesis is Kristin O'Houlihan, a "former entryway acquaintance at Yale of the president's cute twin daughter, Barbara. That led her into the White House and through channels of privilege to Baghdad," back in the day when young GOP hotshots thought Baghdad was the place to be.

Kristin is obsessed with finding the WMDs that Bush used to scare the nation into war, detests Iraqis and has so little sense of real conditions in Baghdad that she makes her exasperated driver stop at every stoplight, even though the power is out.

MacPherson makes fierce fun of Kristin and others in power, but never of the soldiers and Marines on the ground, whom he depicts as having a much clearer sense of reality. Take this soldier who tries to answer Kristin when she laments the Iraqis' lack of interest in her tender mercies toward them, mainly donations of soccer balls:

"The lieutenant took his helmet off and was scratching his head. He was a smart-looking young man. 'I guess, Ma'am, if you invented writing and literature and architecture and law and . . . well, hell, western civilization, you'd think you don't need our help.' "

Kristin is so desperate to find some WMDs before Bush makes a U.N. speech that she hires two street thugs, Ali and Jar, to help. They previously worked for Uday Hussein, feeding bits and pieces of former prisoners to his pet lions, so they have some inside savvy.

They do turn up evidence that maybe the source of Saddam's rage wasn't politics at all. A search of his inner sanctum reveals a long list of rejections from creative writing programs at American colleges.

The passage MacPherson quotes from one of Saddam's notorious romance novels suggests an unlikely literary model: "Ever since my younger years, I've seen many dictators. From Libyah to Kwu'wait; it's certain I've seen all manner of dictator. But I've never seen anything like our king in any illustrious region. That splendid, modest King of Kw'iraq certainly plays excellent pinball."

Literary ambitions and homagesto the Who aside, the WMD hunt powers an intricate and hilarious scam by Gannon and his pals. MacPherson is walking a tightrope with this novel - in the real world, this war isn't anything to laugh about. But he sets Hocus POTUS in the earliest stages, when the corruption still overshadowed the bloodshed. The cluelessness of the book's bad guys would seem like outrageous comic exaggeration if we didn't see daily evidence of the results in the news.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

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Festival of Reading

Aidan Delgado and Malcolm MacPherson will appear on a panel, "The Iraq War: Roots and Realities," along with David Andelman (A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919and the Price We Pay Today), at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading, on Oct.27 at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. For information, go to www.festivalofreading.com.

[Last modified September 20, 2007, 14:19:32]