Cheney’s Bizarro world, where down is up

FOR those bewildered by Dick Cheney’s response to the British troop withdrawal from Iraq as a sign of progress in the war, I have an explanation. It’s his Bizarro genes. One of our vice president’s antecedents was no doubt from the square planet Htrae, to which Bizarro, Superman’s evil opposite, once fled, populating that world with characters who invert logic.

Non-Superman fans probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but like life on the other side of Alice’s looking glass, nothing quite makes sense on Htrae. Well, it makes sense to the Bizarrans, of course, but not to the rest of us.

Even their words mean the opposite of what they intend to say. For instance, as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia explains, in the language of Bizarro, “Me am going to kill you” means “I will save you” and vice versa. Properly applied, it could refer to wars of liberation.

I became aware of the Bizarro connection after British Prime Minister Tony Blair made his troop withdrawal announcement. Informed of this, Cheney, a tough guy not opposed to shooting his friends or giving the verbal finger to his enemies, should have responded with indignation and rage. I mean, how dare they do this to America! Instead, he offered the floating smile of the Cheshire cat and said it just proved that we were making progress.

The twisted logic of his Bizarro roots was apparent.

You may be wondering why, if pulling troops out of Iraq is progress, we are sending 20,000 more troops into combat in what President Bush regards as a surge. While that may seem the antithesis of progress to you, it doesn’t to someone whose grandfather or great-grandfather was a Bizarran.

Calling it a surge rather than a buildup, don’t you see, challenges the accepted definition of the word and contorts it to mean a withdrawal. So while the troops are disembarking in Baghdad, they are actually leaving the combat zone, although it seems otherwise. Feel better about it now?

Increasingly, we are assuming characteristics of Htrae, where right is wrong, up is down, good is bad and war is peace, to speculate on just a few of the possibilities. I suspect that several members of the current administration possess Bizarro DNA or at least Bizarro tendencies and see things that do not exist. George Bush himself, for instance, saw weapons of mass destruction under every flowerpot in Iraq. But when they turned the pots over, nothing. I think he’s still convinced they’re there somewhere.

Now he is beginning to see evil in Iran, which may or may not be another illusion brought on by alien physiology rather than Earth logic. God knows what he might do if he decides that Great Britain, in its abandonment of the American crusade, is his enemy.

I am not without hope that Cheney, a comic book figure himself, is right. There is a certain rationale that would accept as progress the total withdrawal of all armed personnel from Iraq, including the Muslim militants, until there is no one there except civil servants, oil millionaires and fruit stand vendors. No one would have to worry about car bombs or missiles, and they could go about their daily lives without fear of being blown into confetti.

I mentioned similarities between the Bizarro world and Alice’s world behind the looking glass, where reality also takes a couple of peculiar twists and turns. Long before the existence of Bizarro, there was the Mad Hatter’s tea party, which included the March Hare and the Dormouse at the same table discussing perplexing inanities, much as Bush’s Cabinet gathers to ponder world events.

At one point, responding to the Hatter, who insists on posing meaningless questions, Alice says, “I think you might do something better with the time than waste it in asking riddles with no answers.” A real Cabinet member would never, of course, say that to a president of the United States seeking justification for an invasion of a sovereign state, but the parallel is unavoidable. He could have done something better with his time than going to war.

Fantasy often parallels history, adding skewed possibilities to existing realities. One gets a better view of events when they are illuminated by satire. But we should never cross the line into believing that fantasy is reality or we become apostles of Bizarro or the Mad Hatter, bogged down in a world of confusion and contradictions.

Unfortunately, there is no Man of Steel to save us from the Bizarrans who are running the country and no looking glass to climb back through in an escape from the Mad Hatter’s tea party. We’re just going to have to cling to the hope that things might get better, even as they’re getting worse. It’s an application of the Bizarro Law that seems to work every time.