Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Mark looks at his watch and, seeing that it’s already 12:50 P.M., Tuesday, June 26, realizes that no RSVP will be necessary, and he accompanies the thugs to chez dictator .

“Colonel Nusrahana Vanipapobosa Alebua (played by a bewigged and artificially dusky Chaz Palminteri) is the despotic junta leader who engineered Bougainville’s bloody secession from Papua New Guinea. Hamstrung somewhat by having to battle internal opposition groups — groups that receive political and material support from Papua New Guinea — Alebua nonetheless endeavors to amalgamate a ‘Greater Bougainville’ by capturing the neighboring islands of Choiseul, New Georgia, and Ysabel. A draconian autocrat, the Colonel is committed to lining his pockets and those of his cronies — the scions of Bougainville’s oligarchic families who were Alebua’s classmates at the military academy. What distinguishes Alebua from the Papa Doc Duvaliers and the Idi Amins, from the Jean-Bedel Bokassas, Mobutu Sese Sekos, and Macias Nguemas, and from the paradigmatic caudillos of Latin America, is that Alebua was raised on satellite feeds of American educational television and is a wild aficionado of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Given to squandering millions on grandiose monuments, his palace is an exact replica — down to the andirons, breakfront hinges, and toilet-tank float balls — of Brideshead, the great country house from the lavish and lengthy 1980 Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Brideshead Revisited .

“His shapely 16-year-old daughter ( Baywatch Nights’ Donna D’Errico) is named Lehrerasha, after NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer.

“Lunching with Alebua, Mark is confronted with an unnerving hybrid of feral tyranny and chuffing Edwardian pretension, as Alebua — in bowler hat, sunglasses, fatigues, a brace of ivory-handled pistols holstered at his hips, and a raised-welt lightning bolt on either cheek — washes down tinned kippers and crisps with a magnum of kava, the official intoxicating beverage of the South Seas. Alebua breaks into a betel-stained grin as he discusses his ruthless suppression of tribal minorities and a cooking show he hosts, which is devoted to the preparation of dissidents. This is all something of a stretch for Palminteri, who seems confounded by his own minstrel pigmentation.

“Meanwhile, members of the elite Palace Guard wander in and out, their TEC-9 assault pistols slung in WNET and WGBH tote bags. (One of the first edicts issued by Alebua upon his ascension to power was a decree mandating that each and every man, woman, and child on this impoverished island contribute to PBS fund drives. Bougainvilleans who neglect or refuse to make these donations are ‘kabobbed’—groups of five are lined up in single file, run through with eight-foot skewers, marinated in kava, grilled, and sold by vendors at tetherball tournaments. Bill Moyers said at the time, ‘Although I don’t necessarily condone kabobbing, I think it’s an understandable reaction on the part of a government that believes very deeply in public television.’)

“The Colonel knows who Mark is. He’s seen the ‘I Feel Shitty’ video on which Mark was musical director, and he loves that video — he’s, like, a huge fan. That’s why he had him abducted. He needs the dude’s help.

“See, Alebua has an image problem. He has garnered a dreadful international reputation. The poor man can’t clap-on his 60-inch Hitachi Ultravision without seeing that brazen Christiane Amanpour incriminating his villainous regime, or some sanctimonious Amnesty International spokesman bellyaching about death-squad atrocities, or some sallow IMF wonk carping about ruinous economic policies. So he asks Mark to write a series of VNRs — video news releases — that will recast his despicable government in a more flattering light. (‘Mi wanem numbawan bullseet!’)

“Mark is fully aware that Alebua is a homicidal megalomaniac. He weighs the moral opprobrium that he’d incur working for a brutal, conscienceless dictator against the prospect of finally having some produced work to show around. He considers Pirandello, Marinetti, and Ezra Pound, Riefenstahl, Céline, and Paul de Man, and finally assuages any lingering qualms of conscience by reasoning that just as every defendant is entitled to effective counsel, every despot is entitled to a creative public-relations consultant.

“He calls Heather Schroder, ICM foreign-rights specialist (Gwyneth Paltrow in an impish cameo reminiscent of her ebullient walk-on in Kenneth Branagh’s The Porcine Mammary Gland as a Bioreactor for Complex, Therapeutic Proteins) , brings her up to speed, and then hands the phone to Alebua, who screams in unintelligible but pugnacious pidgin for several minutes before handing the phone back to Mark.

“ ‘Well, what’s the deal?’ Mark asks.

“ ‘Here’s what we got,’ says Heather. ‘You do the work, you get 15,000 Bougainvillean kipas per video, unlimited expense account, sumptuous living quarters. You don’t do the videos, you’re kabobbed. My inclination is to take it.’

“ ‘Fifteen thousand kipas … is that good?’

“ ‘It’s pretty standard for a coerced VNR.’

“ ‘What about a kill-fee?’

“Heather reviews her notes.

“ ‘If your video is not acceptable for release, they will give you an opportunity to revise it. If the revised video is likewise unacceptable, they kill you.’

“Mark accepts the job after Heather is able to cajole Alebua up to 15,500 kipas — because he loves that video (‘Mi laik lukim “I Feel Shitty” mas time. Sena bwoyna! Numbawan!’).

“The Colonel forsakes his Melanesian pidgin only once in the course of the movie. While playing miniature golf with Mark and Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt (portrayed with unexpected gravitas by Charles Nelson Reilly), Alebua, who’s about to putt into the mouth of a political prisoner, looks up solemnly from his ball and says, apropos of nothing in that sunny afternoon’s affable, inconsequential banter, and in crisply enunciated, declamatory English: ‘The world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night.’ Zumwalt says nothing in response, impassively plucking shreds of artificial turf from the honed crampons of his miniature-golf shoes. After a time, though, Mark, visibly discomforted by this brooding silence, weighs in with: ‘Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner. Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels. Lonely as I am, together we cry … I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day. Take me to the place I love. Take me all the way.’

“The three of them then stare blankly in different directions for several minutes.

“Summoned to the Presidential Palace at dawn the following day, Mark immediately starts peppering Alebua with ideas: ‘One — if you’re gonna do the whole cult-of-personality, ubiquitous monument thing, I’d spend a few extra kipas and go with Portrait of Dorian Gray Statues. They’re piezoelectric polymer animatronic figures. The more vile, ruthless, and paranoid you become in your murderous drive for absolute power, the more horrifically scabrous the statues of you become. They’ll scare the living shit out of your population. Two — you know what most dictators do that’s really stupid? They’re too secretive about their medical condition. That’s exactly the wrong way to go. Absolutely everything about you — from the consistency of your bowel movements to your HDL count — should be announced in shrieking front-page headlines. The daily vicissitudes of your dermatologic health should be treated like biblical events. If you have an ingrown hair on your ass, I want to see flags at half-mast, I want to see endless streams of grief-stricken workers and schoolchildren converging on the Presidential Palace, singing dirges, laying wreaths, weeping, throwing themselves onto their knees, beating their brows against the ground until they’re bloody and unconscious. Three — you gotta start licensing merchandise. You come up with a logo — say, six intellectuals en brochette. You grant manufacturers the right to incorporate it on their products. We’re talking royalties of, like, 7.5 percent on the wholesale price. I’m telling you, chief, in terms of merchandising, Bougainville could be the Oakland Raiders of the new millennium. Every homey, wannabe, slacker, club kid, yuppie, and soccer mom in the U.S.A. is gonna want to wear Bougainville caps, Bougainville insulated parkas, Bougainville windbreakers, T-shirts, and boxer shorts. And you do, like, baby bibs, toothbrushes, sheets, lunch boxes, drink coasters, chip-and-dip bowls, kids’ vitamins. And you do a rotisserie chicken and a book club. Four — you absolutely, positively, must do a scent. I’m thinking a mass class fragrance at around thirty-five bucks for a two-ounce eau de toilette spray. We call it Génocide (zhen-o-sid). The name’s got a kind of goth panache to it, and it focus-groups exceptionally well with your target audience—18-to-35-year-old married working women with dashed expectations. For top notes, I’m thinking, like, nuoc mam, bull semen, halvah, and Altoids. Tag line: ‘The acrid aroma of savage machtpolitik and unwavering intransigence gives me goose bumps … It’s Génocide .’ Herb Ritts does the campaign. Print ads, outdoor posters, television … I see a whole id-driven barbarian stud-muffin-conqueror creamy European chattel-concubine concept. The whole pillage our city, burn our library, take me with you’ fantasy. I see a couple — you and maybe, like, Claire Danes — caressing in the sea against a limitless sky, tinted crimson to match the bottle and packaging. The idea is Clean, Fresh Romance, and the Annihilation of the Civilized World. It’s like Ralph Lauren meets Pol Pot, if you will.’