Friday, September 28, 2007

Rumsfield as Stein

The narration of The Writing on the Wall, Lynne Sharon Schwartz's novel about 9/11, includes bits and pieces of mid-September speechfiying, as a kind of background blather. At one point the two main characters see and hear Donald Rumsfield on TV saying this:

What this war is about is our way of life, and our way of live is worth losing lives for.

After hearing this, Schwartz's narrator, Renata, thinks: "The secretary of defense, channeling Gertrude Stein."

Not fair to Stein, but very funny nevertheless.