I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr.
 |
Claims to fame: Former Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney & assistant for National Security Affairs; big-mouth; lightweight pornographer
Why he’s here: Certainly not for his indictment on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. As fascinated as we are by the whole Valerie Plame story, it has nothing to do with sex.
So, why is he here? Because he’s a sick freak, that’s why.
Moral apex: He wrote a novel in 1996, The Apprentice, that details scenes of incest, bestiality (hunters consider humping a dead deer), pedophilia, and — hold onto your stomach — a girl kept in a cage and raped by a bear in order to train her to become a prostitute.
Are you making this up? We wish we were.
Memorable quotes:
He said that boys from the village took the merchant’s daughter places, and word spread that she had many lovers. There were odd tales of her sexual prowess, and they said she had coupled with dogs and men and several of the boys at once. Then to their village came a young samurai, who spotted the girl as all did, and she folded him into her. She took other lovers in the village, which enraged him, but he would not be done with her…The young samurai’s mother had the child sold to a brothel, where she swept the floors and oiled the women and watched the secret ways. At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch. Like other girls who have been trained this way, she learned to handle many men in a single night and her skin turned a milky white. …
They gave her wooden penises and taught her how to handle them. They taught her how to sing out in the night and move to finish off her customers more quickly. …
— The Apprentice by Scooter Libby
Memorable observations:
The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, “turds,” armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). …Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the “mound” of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair, evergreens), quiver (a “pink underlip,” arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed (floorboards, sheets, fingers). The cast includes a dwarf, and an “assistant headman” who comes to restore order after a crime at the inn. (Might this character be autobiographical? And, if so, would that have made Libby the assistant headman or the assistant headman’s assistant?)
[I]t’s not because every member of the current Administration— yes, every single person — is a wretched, pernicious, and vilely disgusting biped-shaped toilet offering better stranded on some godforsaken Lord-of-the-Flies island that I say former Chief-of-Staff and National Security Advisor to the Vice President Lewis Libby’s novel is bad.
It’s because the book is bad, because the writing is bad, because the plotting is bad. Because after spending twenty years writing this dud, Libby has produced a vague, poorly worded novel tarted up with sex and then some murders — and those just so we know his motivation is pure. …
Holy bleeding Jesus what a pile of dreck and dross, the kind of fourth-rate mimicry of third-rate imitators of second-rate passages from the lesser short stories of a college sophomore Faulkner fan. And the whole book has that kind of empty phrasings that just drone on and on and make you feel sleepy time always. The book is only some thirty pages over 200 and I found myself struggling and slogging through it for more than a solid week, making fists and forcing myself onward, ever onward. I made coffee thinking it was me, but even with half a pot stewing in my veins, I just kept drifting. It’s not that Libby never gets off a decent turn of phrase or a poetic image or a fine insight, it’s just that there are only five of these altogether, so you get one every forty-six pages.
That’s a bit depraved, isn’t it, this kind of thing about bears and young girls? …
God, they’re an odd bunch, these Republicans.
— Nancy Sladek
Editor, Literary Review
Fun fact: It took Scooter 20 years to write this thing.
Suggested Kesuvim reading for Mr. Libby:
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
— Psalms 1:1,4
