According to news sources, President George W. Bush has now read a book of greater magnitude and scope than “My Pet Goat.” Impressively, he actually quoted Camus, in a speech that he, y’know… must have written himself, since he read the book six months after quoting the author.

“We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that ‘freedom is a long-distance race.’ We’re in that race for the duration”

I’m impressed with the President’s ability to choose the most apt, non-sports-cliche metaphor in the exhaustive literary tome, which weighs in at a whopping 144 pages and is assigned to Freshman English students all around the country (’cept me). However, the book might have been a bad choice. Amazon’s synopsis:

The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus’s compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt–all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it’s not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he’s imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial’s proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities–that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother’s death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts–so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

When is James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson going to condem Bush for reading such an amoral/immoral story? Whatever happened to the good old American values practiced by believing that “if it ain’t Bible it ain’t true?” Bush risks losing the support of the Religious Right if he continues to read elitist French authors like “Kaymus.” (Amoral is bad enough… but it was written by one of those anti-American cowardly French bastards? HERESY!)

Reading is fundamental.
Not reading is Fundamentalist.