TARGETING BUSH THIN `CHECKPOINT' HAS PRESIDENT IN THE CROSS HAIRS.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

When Robert Altman's American epic ``Nashville'' came out in 1975, he was asked in interviews why the film's unhinged assassin shot the country singer at the climactic political rally and not the presidential candidate sitting in a nearby limousine. Ah ha, was Altman's canny response - so you'd accept shooting a politician?

Novelist Nicholson Baker has gone Altman one better with his controversial new booklet (at 115 pages, it scarcely qualifies as a book) ``Checkpoint,'' which offers a dialogue between two old buddies: One, Jay, tells the other, Ben, that he plans to assassinate President George W. Bush as an act of protest of the war in Iraq.

Altman's film was responding to the bloody 1960s, in which two Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were all gunned down (President Gerald Ford was the target of two 1975 assassination attempts after ``Nashville'' was released). Since then, as America slid into apolitical slackerdom, celebrity attacks have become more in vogue (John Lennon, Rebecca Schaeffer - even the 1981 attack on Ronald Reagan was inspired by a demented fixation on Jodie Foster).

But Baker seeks to wrest the notion of assassination back to its urgent, world-altering origins; ``Checkpoint,'' along with Jonathan Demme's recent remake of ``The Manchurian Candidate,'' implies a blood lust in the zeitgeist among normally placid liberals.

Making any threat against a U.S. president is illegal, but Baker's novella - really more a one-act play, as the book is nothing but dialogue - circumnavigates this with a legal loophole, a 1969 Supreme Court ruling declaring that speech advocating violence or the commission of crimes could not be suppressed.

Nonetheless, you can imagine the aneurysms bursting in the skulls of conservative commentators once this book went on sale Tuesday. That its publisher also distributes Bill Clinton's memoir will fire up conspiracy theorists (though if a work of fiction advocated killing Clinton, you can bet that Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh would argue that it merely reflected the tenor of our troubled times).

``Checkpoint's'' troubling debate might be more interesting were it any good. Instead, Baker is merely content to continue his role as something of a lazy provocateur - he also wrote ``Vox,'' a similarly slender dialogue between two participants in phone sex (which won fleeting notoriety when it was revealed that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy of it to Clinton). He's a trendy bad boy, like Bret Easton Ellis, whose ``American Psycho'' essayed the dismaying life of a consumerist serial killer, or Dale Peck, a gleefully irresponsible book critic whose recent ``Hatchet Jobs'' attacks writers far better than he (Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Ian McEwan) with all the critical acumen of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

Baker writes the purported transcript of a recorded conversation in a D.C. hotel room this past May, after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. Ben and Jay are old friends, yet practically none of their past camaraderie is discussed. Early on, Jay - who's clearly a couple of beers short of a six-pack - informs Ben of his intentions, and Ben, reasonably enough, blanches. Ben's not so appalled as to prevent the conversation from veering off into insipid small talk (he shares that he's become something of a shutterbug).

When Ben suggests that he might try to stop him, Jay suggests such efforts would not succeed: ``And then you would leave. And your leaving would ensure - would absolutely guarantee - that I would go ahead.''

``Ben: Oh.

``Jay: How is Julie?

``Ben: Ummmm. She's fine, she's doing well, she's good. She's fine.

``Jay: And your son, how's he? How old is he now?

``Ben: He's thirt ... no, that's right, he's fourteen.

``Jay: Whoa, fourteen.

``Ben: Yep.''

There's the banality of evil, and then there's the evil of banality. Many other sources have offered far more trenchant arguments against both the war and Bush's presidency.

Baker wrote ``Checkpoint'' in response to an account of a random atrocity visited upon Iraqi civilians he read in an Australian newspaper. He, doubtlessly earnestly, wants to address the impotent rage felt by many who opposed the war, who were further alienated by the Bush administration's obstinate refusal to allow that any who disagreed with them were entitled to their considered opinions. (Such fury transformed Michael Moore's ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' into a box-office blockbuster.)

But Baker's extreme methods seem destined to backfire - few literate liberals will champion this book; they'll more likely be compelled to agree with pundits who deem it unconscionable agitprop (``Manchurian Candidate'' has been something of a box-office disappointment, as well).

One can vociferously disagree with Bush, yet the worst any American would wish for the guy is that he'll be cashing unemployment checks come January. It's not like the president actually believed the war was wrong and, cackling while looking for a handlebar mustache to twirl, pursued it anyway.

Baker has undeniably hit upon a hot-button topic, but his exploitative approach helps Moore's film assume the gravitas of a PBS documentary; Baker's own work more closely approximates that of a lurid Fox network reality series.

David Kronke, [phone]

david.kronke(at)dailynews.com

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``Checkpoint: A Novel''

By Nicholson Baker

128 pages, Knopf; $15.95