We're on the brink of another war, possibly two other wars. We throw protests, and everyone comes. Protests feel good, like being immersed in huge, passably sanitary hot tubs with people just like us. Bubble-bubble-glub. Meanwhile nothing much changes, we're reminded daily of our overboiled noodly impotence, and I'm wondering how many people have been killed in battle during the past century.

If I ever find out, I'll make a placard emblazoned with said number, suitably captioned, carry it to public places, and ask in a loud yet mournful voice: "Isn't that enough?" Later, at home, while watching "Are You Hot?" and chatting on the phone with friends, someone will mention the loopy sign lady in passing, before resuming the comparison of risotto recipes.

Still, it would be something, wouldn't it? A concerned citizen with a mission, an activist, activating--one woman on the street, with a sign, yelling.

Signs and yelling are good; they're just not enough. More powerful action is called for. It occurs to me that, in order to make any meaningful progress on the peace front, I'll need a celebrity ally. Who then, I wonder, is powerful and crafty enough to lead the charge? With whom would I entrust the future of my fellow citizens, my family, my friends, myself, and my minions--if, one day, I should develop minions? It would have to be someone with imagination, integrity, and smarts, someone like . . . Bjork.

So, okay, she's not from here. And, reportedly, the singer so identified with her character in "Dancer in the Dark" that she nearly had a nervous breakdown or maybe did have a nervous breakdown, or two. Still, better to overidentify with the damaged and vulnerable than to underidentify, better to messily feel than to skillfully pantomime emotion as many politicos do.

Because she sometimes identifies with the weak and damaged, even though she is sometimes strong and rich, Bjork would surely do something with and for the homeless. Something other than putting them in prisons or locking them up in mental wards, something like helping them get healthy, helping to restore their homing instincts, maybe even providing modest homes wherein they might temporarily nest. Though she probably doesn't have any special knowledge of economics, I'm sure she knows people who do. And while it's true that Bjork can be impulsive and might at some point advocate war, it's likely such a war would resemble an epic game of paint-ball. For obvious reasons, Bjork Gudmundsdottir will never be elected president. However it's possible she could be deputized as some kind of mid-to-high-level advisor to the president.

We need more people who dress up as swans in positions of authority--people unafraid to wrangle with reality in seriously goofy ways--imaginative ways, smart ways. Bjork is goofy, but not the way Bush is. Bush is goofy because, beyond approval and success, he's not sure what he's looking for or what might be looking for him. He has the beleaguered mien of the legacy pledge who's tired of doing push-ups in the mud and downing shots of Jagermeister when the only thing that's ever been somewhat clear to him is that he doesn't want to be in a fraternity anyway. When he doesn't get the power or respect he wants, W. tends to lash out with pre-emptive ridicule, macho posturing, and charges that the opposition is namby-pamby. He enacts a classic conversion from weakhandism to strongarmism. In order to become a great leader, Bush needs to change this pattern and drop the fusty old-school paradigm. Bjork could help him.

While Bjork too desires success and approval, she won't turn hostile if she fails to get it. Why? Because she's secure in her powerfully loopy Icelandic diva-ness. Also in her favor, and the favor of the American people, is the fact that she's the ultimate outsider, outsider in the way that outsider artists are, not outsider in the way that people outside the Beltway are--though there's that too: both Iceland and England being a bit of a trip from DC. An outsider with insider access, Bjork is welcome in Hollywood, the one and only true power center of the world. Welcome there, even though some of its inhabitants don't know what to make of the singer and are even sometimes slightly afraid of her. Then too, there is the fact that Bjork not only has "the vision thing," she has actual visions. Okay, I'm making a leap here. But she does seem to see life through a third eye sometimes, if not a fourth and fifth and possibly sixth. In a nation where roughly 20 percent of the population believes in ESP, that's bound to be an asset. And given her imaginative and spiritual proclivities it's even possible that Bjork can communicate with the dead, which abilities would lend new meaning to the term "crossover appeal."

Bjork knows that real power begins with genuine love for, and engagement with, oneself and others. The kind of love that isn't slick or cool or contained, that is not flat affect, but spills out all sloppy and wrong and at the worst possible times. Love that tries to transcend the mean realities of this world while keeping one eye trained steadily on the street, where it sees the broken and battered. It does not, will not, cannot look away. It is generous and dynamic and unafraid to fail in epic ways, except if failing means willfully hurting the defenseless. In order to protect the defenseless in ourselves and others, Bjork would tell us what we needed to know. She would spill some political secrets as though they were milk; others she would keep, because she is judicious enough to know the difference between those secrets worth keeping and those better off shared. Bjork! Bjork! Bjork for ? something! She is gruff love, the kind that metamorphoses into swans because swans are embirdments of tough grace and gentle courage. Doves . . . doves are all right, but they lack conviction and panache. They're sleepy incrementalists, and they've had their day. It's time for swans.

By virtue of her empathy for creatures, plants, and all things organic, Bjork is a natural environmentalist. She's a bit of wayward lichen wending its way hopefully through the stale, dusty corridors of power, past tumbleweeds and cacti, past hemlock and poison oak. Though earthy, Bjork's no Luddite. That the singer's latest album was composed largely on her laptop is testimony to the fact that Bjork embraces technology as she does nature. In interviews the Icelander has been depicted rejoicing over a bowl of fresh blueberries in her hotel room while on tour one week, and rhapsodizing over the peanut butter sandwich she's just made for her son the next.

She is sultry and wholesome, independent and nurturing.

She is credibility personified.

In Bjork I trust.

At this point some among you are no doubt asking why--why Bjork? Sure she's winsome in a quirky pop-star kind of way, and yes she can act, and even mother children. But really . . . Why trust a singer/actress who limns the actual, who ventures into society and finds it one size too small, who seems capable of discovering real meaning only by metamorphosing into flaming flowers and making hot nasty love to glaciers? But see, that's exactly why I trust her. She knows that we are all everything and that, as everything, (e pluribus unum, or something), we are connected (d'oh) in organic ways to love and power and peace and that the bellicose yahoos in the White House might really change in small yet meaningful ways if they were to, just once, take a feather from Bjork's quill and dress up as egrets or swans or ducks--or even eagles, the hardbeaked birds at the symbolic root of our nation's founding.

Envision Bjork, jester-in-chief, issuing pecking orders Capitol Hill elites. One by one, the distinguished men and women would reluctantly don faux feather, beak, wattle, and take to the South Lawn at lunchtime. There they would peck, preen, waddle, flap, attempt to fly (do everything but sing, really--if they sing it's all over). Once they tap their inner Bjorkness, once they connect to their swan-ness, they might just discover their desires to morph into all sorts of things. If indulged, these serial morphings could result in the sudden and dramatic development of keen empathies and strange bedfellows. . . . Which, in turn, might lead to the burgeoning of twisted and illuminating perspectives. Then who knows what would happen. Perhaps these formerly stolid politicos would begin to reconsider their relationships with their wives, husbands, mothers, daughters, fathers, brothers, sons, and possibly maybe rogue nations. And then . . . then, we might just be getting somewhere. Because while there is no room for wishy-washy moronism or half-baked idiocy in the White House, there is room for complete and utter foolishness.

The more I think about it, the wiser I believe it would be to present Bjork with a prominent perch in the aviary of power. We would have to award honorary citizenship, of course, but that shouldn't be too tough. She could be appointed Minister of Don't-Be-Meanism. Her motto: "Reinvent! Renew! Eat blueberries!" Her first directive to Congress: "Srow tea cups down zee mountainside into zee sea and spy close-leeeeeey as 1,000 tiny tempests swim swirling-ly, secret-ly ahh-all to shore. . . ." I know for a fact that George W. has an inner Bjork--an inner swan, or at least an inner swan costume. He is not all hawk and Dodo. I know that the simple goony side of him that peeks through the cracks in his otherwise stubbornly bewildered mask is the best of him, perhaps his only glimmer of genius and certainly the wellspring of his sometimes-dormant humanity. Bjork could help Bush overcome his morbid fear of humiliation. He has occasionally demonstrated a talent for self-ridicule that could be cultivated. Sometimes one has to fly before one can fly. Sometimes a man has to become a bird in order to become a better man.

Bjork will take W. under her wing and help him achieve higher consciousness via the practice of therapeutic surrealism. B. is a poster-woman for the new (and improved and, most important, not French) surrealist activism. New surrealism is relevant because, let's face it, the world is surreal, has been for ages. If we just accept that, we'll all feel better, more attuned to our surroundings, each other, and the universe at large. We might also rediscover that the universe is gargantuan and that we can't possibly contain it--nor can we kill it. Or, as Bjork might put it: "Zee cosmos clamor-ors wiz zee perfect beauty of echo-ing chasmmms and gor-geous chamber-er-ers. And you never will find zem or destroy zem. . . ."We could destroy others, however, and ourselves, but, well, that would never happen.

Because we're smarter than that.

Because, as Bush has said, we control our own destinies.

Bjork could guide W. through a rebirthing process whereby he would emerge as not-just-his-father's-son but as, well, a swan. Rather than hatching with a silver spoon in his mouth, he would be taught humility and gratitude by being fed regurgitated food from a surrogate mama bird's mouth. He would learn to peep and coo rather than snarl and bark. Thusly, Bush would experience the innocence and vulnerability of a baby swan, the wings of which are both extremely strong and extremely delicate. He would tremble with wonder and fear, while around him hawks and eagles would circle and scry. The newly hatched W. would possess qualities of empathy and creativity heretofore unimaginable in any politician. This kind of forced metamorphosis may seem drastic, but in drastic times drastic measures are called for.

Oh my goodness.

Next time I will label it. ;-)