Dear "President" Bush,Anyone could guess that the Guardian is not my favorite paper, but I have to give them credit for assembling such a wide variety of sympathies on one page.
I don't know if you know Janet Street Porter, but she's one helluva sassy lady. Her motto? Tell it like it is. So let me tell you what it's like being me, right?
I've been away on sabbatical to research and write my new book, Wotchoo Lookin' At: The Authorised Biography of Sir Nicholas Serota (Faber, £35) and I arrive back in Blairland to find that for these past three years my son Marley has been lying on the green sofa in the basement in his Reeboks watching Eminem on MTV eating Big Macs, drinking Coke and surfing the internet for anything with Britney Spears on it.
What do all these have in common? Right first time, Georgie, baby. Country of origin: US of A.
What do you plan to do about it, then? Frankly, we in this country have been living under the American jackboot for far too long. As Harold Pinter so memorably put it in his recent poem:
There's a bomb/Up your arsehole/Chum/And if you want to shit it out/You can't/Chum/Because the president won't bloody let you/Chum.
The single human being I most admire in the world right now is Michael Moore. The guy's a genius. Talk about brave. If it wasn't for Moore, we'd never have discovered the link between Lee Harvey Oswald, the Osmonds, the tobacco multinationals, Pee-Wee Herman, Mark Chapman and Spiro Agnew. Nor would we now know that for four years in the 1980s Osama bin Laden was a fully paid-up member of the Disney Corporation, working first as a stoker on the Casey Jones Railroad Experience in Disneyland Florida, and finally as a key member of the Three Bears in the Goldilocks House in Disneyland Paris.
How to solve the whole Middle East thing? It would even be hard to solve just the Iraq problem in 200 words. But at least we can try. So first, George, let's for God's sake let bygones be bygones. I don't agree with your foreign policy, and - who knows? - maybe on reflection you don't agree with certain aspects of my forthcoming series of media studies seminars (Jade Goody and the Meaning of Big Brother) at the University of Oxbridge (formerly Thameside Polytechnic). But here's my advice - and it's advice I literally beg you, George, to take.
Take a few hours off. Light yourself a scented candle, dim the lights down low, and pick up Anita Roddick's wise and beautiful book, Lessons I've Learnt from the Peppermint Shower Gel Tribe of East Africa. Then read it, George - read it, and, believe me, you'll never want to go to war again.
And Janet agrees with me.
Bel Littlejohn
Columnist
UPDATE: Actually, it's four pages. harry and commenters are not amused.
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