It’s been just over sixty years since Margaret Wise Brown and illustrator Clement Hurd brought us the bedtime classic, Goodnight Moon. Now, Little, Brown is publishing Goodnight Bush: An Unauthorized Parody by California authors and artists (and Star Wars fans) Gan Golan and Erich Origen.
Upon first opening Goodnight Bush, I was struck that it smelled just like my old copy of Goodnight Moon. This is due to the diligence of the design team which painstakingly recreated the look and feel of the original down to the ink and paper. Every page is chock full of things that change over the course of the story, my favorite being the three lines of cocaine next to G W’s bed which slowly disappear one by one. Also, while in Goodnight Moon the clock runs from 7 PM to 8:10 PM, the clock next to the Bush Bed is stuck at 9:11 PM.
There are also some strange connections between Goodnight Moon, the authors and the Bush admin. It is on Laura Bush’s list of favorite books on the White House web site, and during Bush’s first term, the traditional Christmas gingerbread White House included a Goodnight Moon Room. Origen and Golan met while working for Rumsfeld at a small dot-com start up and Golan unwittingly purchased Clement Hurd’s (the illustrator of Goodnight Moon) old Volvo, which he drives to this day.
I would love for Stephen Colbert to tuck me in tonight and read me this bedtime story.
Q&A with Origen and Golan on working for Rumsfeld (aka: “Rumstud”) after the jump.
Is it true you two first met while working for Donald Rumsfeld?
EO: You mean Rumstud?
GG: Yeah, Erich was a writer and I was an art director for this really obscure dot-com start up. Early on, I had to read through the CVs of our board of directors, and the main guy had one that really haunted me. Ford administration? Pharmaceuticals? Banking? NATO? Who the f– is this guy? Only when I later heard the name on the news, announced as Bush’s new Secretary of Defense, did I put it all together. It was none other than Donald Rumsfeld.
EO: The great part was he would randomly make phone calls to our office. Our boss, who sat about fifteen feet away from us, would suddenly get very serious and stiff, and give these very clear, monosyllabic responses.
GG: The same way you’d answer questions if Darth Vader was on the line.
EO: Asteroids don’t concern me. I want that ship!
GG: To this day, it’s not clear to us why Don Rumsfeld would have the slightest interest in our obscure little startup.
EO: Well, I was writing about BattleBots on Comedy Central. He probably thought we were developing drones or something.
GG: Everyone knew the entire venture was ill-conceived, doomed to fail, and based on totally faulty projections. So maybe that was the attraction for him.
EO: Especially after what happened to the Death Star.
GG: Admiral, take the Princess and the Wookie to my ship.
EO: Don’t ask what I intend to do with them…