Pox Populi, Pox o' the Day

Joseph Grünpeck, Treatise on the Pestilential Pox or French Disease (Augsburg, 1496)

Nice to be in the Swill’s chair just when the shit-we-all-knew-about begins its chunky progress into that great Fan we call History, or its weak cousin, the New York Times.

Yes, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby has deposed that Dick and Dubbya “authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq.” The thing, we might agree, speaks for itself, and Scooter’s taking a (juridical) leak about the Plame-CIA leak is nothing new. The sweet dove of impeachment has fluttered over this White House often enough to become tiresome rather than stirring.

But indulge me just a bit, while I try to add “the leaky scooter” to the weird dictionary of semi-phallic, quasi-fecal nicknames at play in Dubbya’s universe (Karl Rove: “Turd Blossom”; Vladimir Putin: “Pootie-Poot”; Paul O’Neill, the ex-Treasury secretary: “Big O”; Mitch Daniels, Dubbya’s ex-budget director: “The Blade”; Dick Cheney: “Big Time”).

It gives me a positive frisson to find, for instance, that in Scotland, bless their tidy kilts, a scooter is “A syringe, squirt,” coming from the deliciously peaty verb to scoot, which may, the Oxford English Dictionary’s gods of etymology tell us, derive from “cooter, a dialectal form of COULTER,” which is “a simple plough with a single handle used for marking furrows, making drills, breaking up the soil in furrows or between rows of plants.” A squirt sprung or leaked from a Coulter (Ann, you should have told us!). Maybe from the loins of Dukes-of-Hazzard Cooter, or a Florida Cooter Turtle (Pseudemys floridana floridana). A little squib of a thing. Not even up to making its own furrows, in the grand fashion championed by “Big Time” Dick. Just turning over dirt that others have first plowed in.

So what makes Libby’s Scooter leak? If your thoughts ran (or flowed) venereally, grab a baguette! This week the French disease (yes, I know, it doesn’t drip clapwise, until matters get pretty far along) scooted back onto your screen in its most appealing form: millions of infectious French students and unionists lobbing the pavés of Paris at riot-police over a law trying to Americanize the labor-market over there. (In this case, and since we’re man-handling definitions tendentiously, to Americanize means “to increase the uncertainty of employment; reduce the clout of labor unions; disenfranchise young workers: trade new, cheap and inexperienced labor for experienced, established and expensive labor.”)

Ah, douce France! Sweet French disease! Guillotine, Danton, Marat, Robespierre—and sous le pavé, la plage, as the Situationist marchers of May 68 nicely put it. Here’s praying (ironically, bien sûr) that Scooter’s leaky scooter leads us all to the beach.