Pumpkinry.
Like many of you, I am a devoted follower of Fafblog!, the world’s only source for Fafblog. I was especially keen on last week’s nigh-exclusive interviews with many movers and shakers, including Dr. James Dobson, Donald Rumsfeld, Osama bin Laden, and Jesus Christ. But the capper to Interview Week was a sit-down with An Enormous Pumpkin:
Fafblog!: Now I understand you are deliverin an address at the World War II memorial this Monday.
An Enormous Pumpkin: That’s true. It’s a great honor, even for such a huge pumpkin.
FB: Can you tell us what it’ll sound like?
AEP: Mostly silence, with some rooty settling noises, seeing that, as a pumpkin, I am incapable of speech.
FB: That’s very appropriate and thoughtful.
AEP: I certainly thought so.
Color me stumped. Certainly, a conversation with An Enormous Pumpkin is important in the scheme of things, but is it really vitally important? Enough so to deserve the attention of Fafnir, Giblets, and the Medium Lobster? It did not appear so. And yet it had. A puzzlement. —And so stumped I remained, until I popped by the Whiskey Bar for a quick one. Billmon had the historical perspective I needed, in the course of comparing Ahmad Chalabi with Alger Hiss:
Handsome and Harvard educated, well connected in Washington circles, Hiss started out with the media and the weight of “respectable” opinion on his side—particularly since his accuser, journalist Whittaker Chambers, was an eccentric flake. But young California congressman Richard Nixon, newly assigned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, heard Hiss testify and decided he was lying. Nixon wound up in control of a three-man subcommittee charged with investigating Chamber’s accusations.
Hiss’s story had holes in it, but he might have avoided prison if he hadn’t sued Chambers for slander. As evidence in the case, Chambers produced a roll of microfilm of classified State Department documents allegedly passed to him by Hiss for delivery to the Soviets. Worried that someone might steal the film, Chambers hid it in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm—thus stamping the documents for all time as “the pumpkin papers.”
Signs! Signs and wonders! Thank you, Fafblog!
(But wait—does that mean that Giblets & co. know Chalabi is really as innocent as Hiss never ceased claiming to be? Will a tell-all book yet tumble from An Enormous Pumpkin, telling us what we need to finally make sense of it all? Is a zombie robot Richard Nixon about to claw his way out of Linus’s pumpkin patch with a bag of toys for all the good children? —Holy shit! George Tenet just resigned! Or was pushed! Golly, politics sure is weird.)
OK, you made the Hiss connection and the Peanuts reference. I'm just going to make a desultory mention of pumpkin juice, then go back and sulk.