The Pet Goat
My Pet Goat is the name popularly given to the book President George W. Bush was reading, as part of a photo op, in front of a public school class of children when he was first notified of the September 11, 2001 attacks. After learning of both airplane impacts at the World Trade Center, Bush continued to quietly stare at the book for seven minutes, prompting complaints, notably in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, that the President was indecisive in the face of the terrorist attacks. Bush's reaction has also been interpreted as showing that Bush was able to project calm in a crisis; the class teacher later praised Bush for his comforting treatment.
The film incorrectly called the story My Pet Goat, but it is actually "The Pet Goat", and is only one of several stories contained in the book Reading Mastery Level 2, Story Book 1 (ISBN 0026863553), a children's reader written by Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner, and published By Sra, May 1, 1997. Nevertheless, the belief that My Pet Goat is the book's name remains widespread.
The Pet Goat is the story of a girl's pet goat which eats everything in its path. The girl's parents want to get rid of the goat, but she defends it. In the end, the goat becomes a hero when it butts a car robber into submission. A sample passage:
- A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard. But the goat did some things that made the girl's dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps.
Shortly after Michael Moore's movie was presented in theaters, Amazon.com was sold out of all copies of the book and there was a backorder of over a month. Some anonymous jokers wrote satirical reviews of the book, for example: "Presidential material, through and through! [...] The tempo, the choice of words, and the layout on each page captured my imagination so much that it took me about seven minutes to recover my bearings." (Amazon has since deleted these reviews.)
