We Are Still Married by Garrison Keillor Page A

never got hot enough, and soon the hordes broke through, miles of them—wave after wave of squat, flat-nosed horsemen on their ugly steeds galumphing through the streets, waving their hairy fists, rolling their little red eyes under their long black eyebrow, grunting and blatting and howling, bellowing at women in a coarse, unintelligible tongue that sounded like irate geese.
    Over the next three days, as additional hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Hloths, Wendells, and Vandals swarmed into the Windy City with relentless, locustlike ferocity and burned churches and performing-arts centers and historic restorations, and dragged away monks, virgins, associate professors, and postal employees to be sold into slavery, and seized great stores of treasures and heirlooms and sacred vessels, and tore down libraries and devastated three-star restaurants and traded away the Cubs and Bears, Mr. Bush was said to be conferring with John Sununu, meeting with the Cabinet, weighing his options, on the verge of taking some kind of dramatic action. To those close to him he appeared burdened but still strong, upbeat but not glib, and then in came Robert Teeter with a poll that showed that seventy percent of the American people thought the President was doing an excellent job with the barbarians. Mr. Bush was seen as confident and in charge but not beleaguered or vulnerable or damp under the arms, the way Jimmy Carter was. Most Americans admired the way George Bush played down the story and wasn’t weakened or distracted by it. They felt that he was doing exactly the right thing, and they viewed Chicago as a place where a lot of pretty rough stuff goes on most of the time anyway.
    So the President didn’t make an address to the nation on television but simply issued a statement that barbarianism is a long-term problem and must be met with patience and wisdom, and the answer is education, and everything that can be done is being done and will continue to be done. It called for bipartisanship. That evening, a White House croquet tournament went on as planned. The President appeared calm but interested.
    The barbarians made their squalid camps in the streets and took over the savings-and-loan offices. (“Savings and loan” sounds the same as the Hun word chfnxnln, which means “henhouse.”) They broke out all the windows and covered them with sheepskins, they squatted in the offices around campfires built from teak and mahogany desks and armoires, eating half-cooked collie haunches and platters of cat brains and drinking gallons of after-shave. Their leader, Mogul the Vile, son of Generic, squatted down beside a speakerphone on the thirty-eighth floor of American National and called the White House and babbled and screeched for more than twenty minutes. His English was horrendous. He seemed to be demanding a ransom of three chests of gold and silver, six thousand silk garments, miscellaneous mirrors and skins and beads, three thousand pounds of oregano, and a hundred and sixty-six billion dollars in cash.
    The President, who did not speak to him personally, pondered the outrageous demand. He appeared quiet but wakeful, thoughtful but not grumpy. On the one hand, a major American city was in the hands of rapacious brutes, but, on the other hand, exit polling at shopping malls showed that people thought he was handling it OK. So he flew to Kennebunkport for a week of tennis and fishing. He appeared relaxed but hearty, animated but restrained.
    A few days later, the Hun sacking of Chicago was old news. It had already happened. Mr. Bush, in striking a note of determination right at the beginning and then refusing to be stampeded into action, had outflanked the entire story and avoided any loss of public support. The press covered the pillaging up north, but most of the press was in Washington, not Chicago, and what could you say about Huns that everybody didn’t already know? Huns perspire heavily; they despise