Here inside the Beltway, when invited to a Sunday brunch at an undisclosed location, one attends. Given his recent behavior, I would have expected everybody to give Mike Chertoff the cold shoulder this afternoon, and they pretty much did. He cut a rather lonely figure, standing in the middle of the room, staring longingly at the knots of people who, only ten days ago, would have eagerly welcomed him.
Thus, as fate would have it, when I entered the room, he and I were the only people not securely nestled into a little group of mutually approving true believers, and, given Mike’s high and mighty position, what could I do? He’s Secretary of Homeland Security. It’s a title which I have always debated with myself as to whether it sounds more like it was invented by George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut or Gilbert and Sullivan, but whatever the most appropriate fictional provenance for his illustrious and fearsome job description, if you’re a consultant and that meshuggena latter-day Maccabee pointedly buttonholes you, schein him on at your own risk, bubbeleh. Sometimes I think I must earn at least half my income in return for tolerating sick puppies like Michael Chertoff, their mouths fizzing like rabies with the corruption of absolute power.
“Tom,” he greasily glad-handed, “So glad you could make it.”
“It’s always a pleasure to mix and mingle with Administration stars like you, Mike;” I glibly lied, “I wouldn’t miss it for all the uncontaminated tea in China. How’s it going?”
“Public service is such a thankless job,” Chertoff lamented as he shook his head sadly. “Have you ever had a hunch, Tom?”
“But of course, Mike,” I responded cheerily, “me and my girlfriend Cerise, we get them all the time up at Pimlico. We bet on the horse with the weirdest name, the longest tail, the strangest looking teeth – and damned if we don’t hit one hell of a lot of long shots!”
“You go with your gut feelings, right?” Chertoff replied, egging me on in an obvious and shameless quest for self-validation, “You know, I thought that was what this whole Administration was about – following your heart. Going with your feelings instead of your thoughts. Belief, not facts. Faith, not statistics. Emotion, not…”
“Reason,” I offered, smiling.
“Yeah, reason,” Mike smiled back at me.
“All that facts, statistics and reason stuff is totally overrated,” I prompted, exuding the best false sincerity I could manage, “the real answers never depend on that crap.”
“You can say that again!” Mike exulted. “Did Ronald Reagan ever let facts stand in the way of doing what he felt was right? Did he ever meet a statistic he couldn’t change if it didn’t match what his guts told him? Did he ever let reason influence his feelings, emotions and beliefs? No! And I never let any of them get in my way when I was a judge either. Why should I now? What was good enough for Ronald Reagan is good enough for me – and it ought to be good enough for every patriotic American, too!”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I prevaricated.
“It’s great to talk to somebody who still understands what makes neoconservatism tick, Tom,” he burbled, slapping me on the back enthusiastically. “It’s just merciless, the way the media and the liberals take everything a guy like me says out of context and twist it around like… you know, like a bunch of Palestinians.”
“They’re just jealous of your success, Mike,” I dissembled.
“Darn tootin’ they are!” he eagerly concurred, upending his drink. “They don’t realize, Tom, that when Michael Chertoff says he has a hunch – when Michael Chertoff says he has a gut feeling – that’s very, very serious stuff.”
“They’re totally out of their depth dealing with you, Mike,” I deftly fabricated.
“Way, way out,” he agreed warmly while snagging another drink from a passing waiter’s tray. “I don’t just pull hunches out of my butt, you know,” he declared, sipping thoughtfully, “why, you wouldn’t believe the trouble we go to, Tom. I base my hunches and gut feelings on detailed findings provided by an extensive network of interdisciplinary teams, consisting of the best psychics, necromancers, fortune tellers, Indian readers, cabalists, astrologers and three-card monte artists the federal intelligence community can recruit.”
“I would expect nothing less from a man of your unparalleled genius,” I blithely flattered.
“Not everybody,” he sighed, “is as astute as you, unfortunately.”
“More’s the pity,” I goaded.
“What do those limousine liberals who spend all day reading the New York Times know, anyway? They say ‘Oh sure, there goes Chertoff, telling the world he’s got a gut feeling that Al Qaeda will “strike somewhere, sometime, probably before the end of the summer;” so what? My wife, my kids, their nanny, the maid, the pool boy, the grounds keeper – any of them could have come up with that. Maybe we should ask them what they think about Al Qaeda.’ But you know where they go wrong with that kind of talk, Tom?”
“Oh, on just about every point, Mike,” I cooed in an ingratiating tone.
“You bet. I never develop my hunches by myself. You can’t work in a vacuum, Tom. You can’t just surround yourself with social insulation and arrive at solutions to important problems relying on nothing but your own brain talking to itself. Only a complete fool would do that!”
“Only a complete, utter and worthless fool,” I replied, making perhaps my first truthful statement of our conversation, and tactfully avoiding recognition of the many exemplars of complete, utter and worthless foolishness, which, if truth were to be told, abounded around us like bison in Yellowstone.
“Correct!” Mike fumed. “Do you have any idea how many times my personal Hunch and Gut Feeling Analysis and Development Task Force threw the tarot before I made my prognostication last week?”
“Many more times than some liberal senator’s baby sitter would,” I told him, “of that I have no doubt whatsoever.”
“Absolutely, my friend. Would you believe, four hundred and sixty two times? And then there was the I-Ching workup – now there was a serious forecasting effort! Two hundred and fifty six bundles of the best yarrow stalks went into that hunch I announced last week, Tom – two hundred and fifty-six! Not to mention the omen analysis – we spared no effort, Tom, I can tell you that! The team slaughtered nine oxen, fourteen goats, twenty-two sheep, three dozen chickens, four peacocks, two ibex stags and a pregnant camel – then a panel of eleven qualified oracles read the entrails for signs and portents while six more peered into the smoke from the sacrificial sandalwood pyre where the carcasses were ritually burned. I personally traveled to the work site – it’s way out past Camp David, Tom, totally in the sticks, you know – and supervised the entire process. That’s just a partial example of the lengths that Michael Chertoff will go to in order to work up a sincere and accurate gut feeling.”
“And I’d say that’s typical of the thoroughness which characterizes your legendary management style, Mike,” I laid on thick as I sensed his ego taking charge, “you’re simply light years ahead of those mediocrities in Congress with those pathetic little eight balls sitting on their desks.”
“I personally analyzed no less than nine star charts for Osama bin Laden, and six for Ayman al-Zawahiri, and scores of charts for the minor players. That’s just on the enemy side. There were dozens of charts for the United States, charts for every state in the Union, plus all our territories and possessions; charts for the federal agencies – including DHS, of course – charts for the Iraq invasion, charts for the construction of various national monuments, all that kind of thing. Then there were the charts for the UN, the Coalition, the Shi’ites, the Sunnis, the Kurds, the Iraqi leadership, all of them Tom – did you know that Nouri al-Maliki has Saturn, Neptune and Mars in the sixth house? Charts for the foundation of the other involved countries and their leaders – it took all that, just to get started. Then there’s the necromancers. We have people who can channel the 9/11 bombers, Tom, and when they start talking, you better listen, know what I mean?”
“Or accept the consequences if they don’t,” I observed.
“No kidding! People like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have absolutely no idea how to utilize diviners, either. It’s an art that’s also a science, with a little bit of crafts and humanities thrown in. Over six hundred hours of serious psychomantum work by a team of eight seers, dowsers and witches went into my decision to declare a hunch – and not just with crystal balls, either! Oh no, my people did things first class – they used tilted mirrors, bottomless pools, bowls of liquid mercury, giant rubies – the works! Why, that team discovered four significant corrections to the Nostradamus Quatrains before they even submitted their draft results to me!”
“A coterie of dilettantes like the liberal establishment could never even imagine how to proceed in such a situation,” I improvised.
“I think you’ve put your finger on something there,” Chertoff mused, “their lock-step, narrow-minded attachment to the precepts of secular humanism render them incapable of thinking outside the proscenium arch of so-called ‘reality,’ thus putting them at a distinct disadvantage with respect to the neoconservatives, who are completely unencumbered by such quaint, outmoded paradigms.”
“Why, that’s exactly what Derrida said about the bourgeoise’s inability to understand literary deconstruction, except that you’ve turned it completely inside out, so now, it makes a sort of pluperfect sense,” I gushed with completely fabricated enthusiasm (and facts), “both capturing the transcending essence of the idea while simultaneously debunking its misappropriation by the degenerate poseurs of the Left.”
“People say I’m good at that,” Chertoff allowed with studied modesty, “I’ve been slitting losers like Derrida up the gillet since my Harvard days. Now, let me tell you, the fortune tellers we had on board for that hunch announcement – they were absolutely world class. Genuine Gypsy crones from the most remote regions of Transylvania, buck-naked shamans from the upper Amazon, top-notch witch doctors from the Congo, bevies of smoldering vodun priestesses from Haiti, thirty-third degree Masonic Soothsayers; I tell you, Tom, they’re so good, we have to declare their stock market predictions Top Secret, and then the information goes straight into burn bags right after the team gives it to us – the Federal Reserve won’t let the stuff out of the building. And our staff of Indian readers – they’re just unbelievable, Tom! Forget about being able to remotely view Osama bin Laden’s cave, hell, they can do that standing on their heads!”
“So, your Indian readers know where he is?”
“Nah,” Chertoff shook his head, laughing, “all they can see is cave walls and that godforsaken West Pakistani countryside that all looks the frigging same, so what can you do? But these are real pros, Tom. They can read the minds of the dead people our necromancers channel! And the cabalists – oy gevalt – such talent! Our guys, well – you know how some cabalists can use numerological techniques to find predictions in the Bible, right?”
“Oh yes,” I agreed, “I’ve heard of that.”
“These mavens we got on staff, Tom, they can use the same techniques to find predictions in Moby Dick!”
“Oh, my God,” I insincerely but convincingly fawned, “that’s real Cabala if I ever heard of it!”
“Exactly,” Chertoff allowed himself to exult quietly, “why is it someone like you can understand my methods so easily, but trying to explain them to some Democrat in the House of Representatives is like nailing a herd of Jello cats to a marshmallow wall?”
“Leonardo di Vinci was misunderstood,” I inventively misconstrued, “You’re like that,” I falsely analogized.
“You know, Tom, I hate to say it, but you’re probably right,” Chertoff beamed, basking in the glow of my well-crafted tapestry of untruths.
“Ah, what about the three-card monte artists?” I enquired, seeking to keep Mike’s self-esteem building session going full tilt.
“Oh, them,” he chuckled, “sharp as surgical steel razors, every one. Cleaned everybody out – I must have lost about five hundred bucks myself.”
“Well, it’s clear to me at least,” I continued, “that the average Joe or Jane Sixpack’s premonitions of impending disaster and eminent doom can’t hold a candle to the highly refined, exhaustively researched and meticulously developed hunches produced by the Executive Office of Homeland Security. I mean, there are gut feelings and there are gut feelings…”
“And the only thing they have in common is the words that the ignorant use to describe them,” Chertoff interjected triumphantly.
“You bet, Mike,” I falsely agreed, “and what’s lacking is an appropriate way to describe what it is you and your staff of psychics, necromancers, fortune tellers, Indian readers, cabalists, astrologers and three-card monte artists really produce. I’d say ‘prophecy,’ but the term has too many other potentially confounding connotations…”
“Future vision, maybe…” Chertoff murmured with a far-away look in his eyes.
“Informed foretelling…” I suggested.
“Foresighted augury…” Chertoff whispered.
“Portent forecasting…” I offered.
“Presaged prognosis…” Chertoff intoned.
“That’s great,” I lied, “I think ‘presaged prognosis’ says it all, and does so both uniquely and precisely.”
“Yes,” Chertoff nodded, satisfied. “That might work. I’ll have to run it past Dick Cheney first, of course.”
“Well,” I winked knowingly, “there he goes. No time like the present.”
“Amen to that,” Chertoff chortled with great apparent satisfaction.
“Carpe diem,” I cheerfully bade as Chertoff turned his attention to a dark, hulking form plodding deliberately toward a slowly writhing knot of fulminating evil tightly congealed around Condoleezza Rice.