Last night, after a series of stressful developments in life, I found myself crashed on my couch for the evening reading Naguib Mahfouz's Akhenaton: Dweller in Truth. The book is basically the account of a young scholar's quest to learn the truth about Akhenaton's reign by interviewing people who were involved in the events. Each had a different view of the man based on that person's experiences and suppositions about life. It really reminded me of all the accounts that circulate about George Bush, why he does things, what his character is like and so on. This is part of the reason I don't like to play those games...I'm not sure you can come to a definitive truth about people around you, much less figures on the general world stage.

I also had a random George Bush thought while watching Babylon 5 the other day. The episode was "Comes the Inquisitor." The premise of the main plot was that the Vorlons wanted to test Delenn, for reasons which are initially unclear. Even though the show is sci-fi, there are also a lot of themes commonly associated with fantasy: The Shadows, one of the "Older Races," are returning after 1000 years presumably to spread their dominion over the galaxy, and the Vorlons, the other Older Race, have been watching and laying the groundwork to allow the Younger Races like humans to resist when the time comes. JMS has compared Kosh, the Vorlon ambassador, to Gandalf, though he's really more like Wheel of Time's Moiraine, and Delenn and Captain Sheridan to Aragorn and Arwen, as well as King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake. Anyway, Delenn knows she is a figure prophecied to come (and you find out how prophecy can be in sci-fi during the third season), and thus the nature of the Vorlons' test: Basically, the Inquisitor they send - a human they took from Earth in the 19th century are prepared for this task - keeps asking "Who are you?" and things like her name, title, personal history and such aren't good enough as answers - they want to know if she's the right person for the time. As it turns out, she proves she is when she offers to sacrifice herself for one other person, alone with no one ever knowing, and hence forego the glory of saving the galaxy from the Shadows. What's really cool is that it eventually comes out that the human once considered himself divinely appointed to rid London of corruption, to which end he became a murderer of prostitutes (Jack the Ripper) before the Vorlons took him and showed him the error of his ways while turning him into this Inquistor tool. Anyway, I just wondered how Bush, who reportedly believes God chose him to be President on September 11, would do on this test.