Nicholson Baker: Checkpoint

BEN: “Buggers” or “beggars”?

JAY: Take your pick. I printed out one of their web pages, where is it? Yeah, here. Here. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. It says that their products “help ensure peace and stability around the world.” Have you ever in your life heard anything more patently false than that?

BEN: That’s a little over the top, I must say.

JAY: Fort Worth, Texas, is where they make the F-16, the killer plane. There’s all this tough talk of “lethality” and “extreme lethality.” They sell these weapons and warplanes all over, and the countries that buy them, like Turkey, buy them with aid money from the United States. So in other words, we pay other countries to buy these machines from Lockheed. Holy mackerel-economics! Cheney’s wife was on the board of directors of Lockheed from something like 1994 to 2001. She was getting a hundred and twenty thousand a year for helping to guide and oversee this merchant of misery. Lynne Cheney, this merchant of multinational MISERY, man. It’s staggering when you take time to think about it for more than twelve seconds. And here she’s all in a flusterment about the nasty lyrics of Eminem.

BEN: Eminem is no favorite of mine.

JAY: Well, no, he’s not Zappa. But that woman, I’m sorry to say, is the real obscenity.

BEN: Oh, Lynne Cheney did some good things when she was at the NEH. You’ve got to lighten up a little. She’s not a viper. She was just on the board of directors.

JAY: How could she be on the board of that company and look at herself in the mirror? How can she look at her husband in the mirror? Halliburton and Enron and all that. Enron wangling to profit from the pipeline across Afghanistan. It’s a sickening spectacle.

BEN: Do you think they look at each other in the mirror?

JAY: Probably they do from time to time. But you know, the straightforward corruption is never worth wasting too much time over. There are always going to be corrupt people who sip from the firehose. No, it’s the death-dealing. It’s the creation of suffering and hate. That’s when you have to move.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, okay, but — yeah, all right, all right, this is all relevant and useful information. Dick Cheney is the shadow warrior — it does certainly seem that way. And Lynne Cheney was until very recently in the pay of the arms merchants. But that’s just the Cheneys. And you’re talking about—

JAY: I’m talking about direct action against the guy who’s nominally in charge. George W. Tumblewad. If you as the guy in charge allow killing to go forward, if you in fact actively promote killing, if you order it to happen — if you say, Go, men, launch the planes, start the bombing, shock and awe the living crap out of that ancient city — you are going to create assassins like me. That’s the basic point I’m making. You are going to create the mad dogs that will maul you. And that’s what he’s done.

BEN: Oh, Jay. My head, my head. I have a job. Let me have those bagel chips, will you? Oh, man. So, I take it, um, you’re no longer in the lobster business?

JAY: I had to bring that effort to a close.

BEN: Why? Seems like the fresh air, you know.

JAY: I saw one too many lobsters. They’re primitive creatures, extremely primitive. What goes on in those cold heads down in the murk at the bottom of the bay? Some people get terrified looking up at the emptiness of the night sky. I get that exact sensation looking at a lobster.

BEN: So you’ve been between positions?

JAY: Well, no, I’ve been working for a landscaping company in Tennessee, moving flag-

stones around, stone benches. For a while I had this idea that I wanted to get a job in a real factory, so that I could be part of something important, some manufactured product that went all over the country and went into everyone’s life, I wanted to punch a clock, whomp, time to work, just do the same thing over and over, go into autopilot, and that’s when I started to get a troubled feeling.

BEN: A troubled feeling, you? Hah hah hah! Who would have thought!

JAY: I still had this childish image of a factory in my head, which is obviously no longer a true idea, because face it, we’re not making anything anymore. It’s kind of scary.

BEN: Well—

JAY: What do we make? Huh? Do we make TVs, do we make shoes, do we make pillowcases, do we make electric motors? Do we make radios? Clocks? Dishes? Forks? Knives? What do we make? Hammers?

BEN: We make pickup trucks.

JAY: That’s for sure. We make light trucks for fascist fiddlefucks to drive around in.

BEN: We make corn syrup.

JAY: Corn syrup. That we do.

BEN: Military hardware?

JAY: There you go. Unmanned CIA robot attack drones. We do make those. Although I bet if we could we’d be outsourcing our attack drones to the Chinese. Slap an FAA sticker on them and sell them to tiny fearful countries.

BEN: The Chinese-made attack drones would probably be more reliable. Cheaper, too… What? What? What is it?

JAY: Oh, just remembering. Three men are standing on a bombed-out hillside in the mountains in Afghanistan. Do you recall that episode? They’re loading up a camel with some shrapnel that they’ve gathered to sell for scrap across the border in Pakistan. They’re scavengers. Finally here’s something American that actually helps them survive — the bomb shrapnel itself. A gift from the skies. And then a Predator attack drone flies by, rmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, very slow, rmmmmmmmmmmm, odd-looking plane, headless, and its camera gets a fix on them, and it turns, rmmmmmmmmmmmm, and some CIA drone jockey sitting in front of a screen sipping lemonade thinks, Woo Nelly, tall guys, long beards, robes — robes? ROBE ALERT, ROBE ALERT, ROBE ALERT, one Adam-Twelve, men wandering on the hills near the caves! Al Qaeda operatives! Could be Mr. Bin himself! So the CIA guy takes another sip of lemonade, pushes a few buttons, and suddenly the three men see this flare of a Hellfire missile, they hear the hiss of it, and they pause, and for some curious reason it’s coming toward them, it curves a little, it seems to know where they are, and boom, shreds of blood and tissue, moaning people. I knew, I knew when those towers came down, I knew we would be bombing somewhere very soon. It’s what we do. We get as far away as we possibly can and then we deliver the goods.

BEN: Does Lockheed make those Predators?

JAY: No, somebody else does that. They make the Hellfire missile, though. I do know that. And I’ll tell you something else. Lockheed has a joint venture with Israel’s state weapons company, Rafael. It’s called P-G-S-U-S, Precision Guided Something Something United States. PGSUS. Israel supposedly makes forty-five percent of this missile and Lockheed makes fifty-five percent of it. That way it can be deemed a U.S. product and not an Israeli product. It’s called the Popeye II missile. Any chips left?

BEN: Finish the bag.

JAY: So here we are in an attack on Arab cities shooting Israeli-designed missiles at them. And so lo and behold then you’ve got people in robes in Baghdad who are holding up bits of bombs that say “Made in Jerusalem.” I mean, that’s a guarantee, that’s an iron-clad guarantee that you’re going to have decades of smoldering hate. Terrorism out the wing-wang. I mean, damn! We can’t even make our own missiles anymore. I’m going to kill him. No shit. Four billion a month we’re spending for this war.

BEN: Yeah, can you imagine the rail network we could build with that?

JAY: I’m telling you, he’s one dead armadillo.

BEN: We still make antidepressants. That’s a cheery spot on the horizon. The pharmaceutical industry. Don Rumsfeld’s old stomping ground.

JAY: Pills, pickup trucks, and war, that’s it.