SERENITY, REVISITED

Is this surprising?

The President and First Lady sat down last week for their annual interview with People ...

“I must tell you, I'm sleeping a lot better than people would assume,” [President Bush] said....

No more so than this was ten days before the Iraq War started:

As war with Iraq draws inexorably closer, President Bush is described by friends as not just determined, but surprisingly serene about the most profound decision he will likely ever make.

Or this:

People who have met with Mr. Bush have been struck by his tranquillity. "You would never have known that he was sitting on a powder keg," said Don Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," who recently spent 15 minutes with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "He was amazingly calm and wanted to talk about Harry Truman and not Saddam Hussein."

As I noted back then, those statements put me in mind of a passage from fiction:

You may find this curious." Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing. His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue."

That's Thomas Harris in Red Dragon, describing Hannibal Lecter.

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(People quote via Shakespeare's Sister.)