The United States of Harkonnen

David Lynch's Dune is playing on AMC (BTW, I recommend the TV miniseries made in 2000 over Lynch's arty and stylistic freakfest) and it sparked a brief email communiqué betwixt my wife and myself (I'm at work, you see, and on my lunch break as I write this) which I tried to convince her that not only is Frank Herbert's Dune an unequivocable masterpiece of fiction, science or otherwise, it reads today with a rather uneasy prescience.

The spice has long been seen as an allegory for oil, especially since it is only available from a desolate desert, the planet Arrakis (aka "Dune"). I had always seen Arrakis as Saudi Arabia but what if we were to substitute that for the entirity of the Islamic OPEC nations? Could not Saddam Hussein sub-in for the Beast Rabban? Sadly, that puts the US in the role of the House Harkonnen (technically, that casting would put W as the Baron but, really, isn't Dick Cheney playing that part already?), the villains of the story. And who will rise up as Muad'Dib? The muslim world is primed for a messianic figure to rise up and rally around.

If only this adminstration read literature beyond The Very Hungry Catepillar and My Pet Goat. Perhaps, after Condi "no one could have imagined it" Rice finishes the last few chapters of Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (first published in 1994) which ends with an airliner intentionally crashing into the Capitol building during a joint session of Congress, she and Wolfy and the gang might take a gander at Dune.