Insecticide

In this satire, sham news articles, memos, prose, and dialogue transcriptions follow the fantastical fortunes of the George H.W. Bush presidential dynasty, whose members are human-alien hybrids in thrall to insect extraterrestrials and opposed by a group of talking fish and others.

Robinson delves into the conspiracies and extremes of the UFO and Edgar Cayce cults for this broad lampoon. The premise proposes that Texas broke off from the United States to become a right-wing/racist police state. The New England family of patrician Prescott Bush is appointed to the Texas presidency and intelligence services. It turns out that all of Earth’s ruling elite families are secretly human-alien hybrids who answer to ageless, spaceship-riding insect ETs from Atlantis. The principal insect agent is W. Averell Harriman, aka Dogsbody Harriman, a praying mantis. Dogsbody’s foes are the Lemurians, who include talking fish and mer-people. They are led by a lunar diving beetle forced off the moon by Atlantean aggression. Prominent on the beetle side: Abraham Lincoln, occasionally sighted in Texas aquatic habitats astride a horned “devil-water-cow.” The narrative becomes alt-history shaped by fish versus bug intrigues. Bush scions George H.W. and George W. are both disappointing clones, given to multiple malapropisms (“This really gets my groat, people correcting my English”). Though they are promised prominence by Dogsbody, subversion by the fishy terrorists and the maneuverings of rivals John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon thwart the Bush family’s ambitions temporarily. There are assassinations, drug smuggling, the invasion of Panama, sexual perversions, and the Reverend Moon. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the most famous Bush family escapades (attacks on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession) do not enter into the picture. The complex burlesque recalls such surreal confabulations as Robert Mayer’s I, JFK (1989) and Chuck Barris’ Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984). In its best parts, Robinson’s yarn captures the nasty wit of vintage National Lampoon political parodies; other times, it treads into bad taste, working real-life tragedies (First Lady Laura Bush’s teenage car fatality) into the kooky cosmology. The striking tale provides redeeming social value in the occasional impressions of the government encompassing amoral power blocs and game players, treating the common folk as so many insects as they scheme outrageously for control and privilege.

An engaging and scabrous alternative-universe farce about the American government.