Hallsby applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric, and shared the following:
On page 99 of Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, readers will find a discussion of the secret scandal focused on the case of Valerie Plame Wilson, whose secret identity was exposed during (and by) the George W. Bush administration. The case is broken up chronologically and organized according to three rhetorical tropes: repetition, caesura, and synecdoche. Page 99 is the end of the section on caesura and the start of the section on synecdoche.Visit Atilla Hallsby's website.
Caesura is a trope of missingness, hiddenness, or absence. Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA agent whose identity was leaked by members of the Bush administration, embodies the caesura because, in her congressional testimony before a 2007 House Oversight and Reform Committee, she describes herself “as a lost node in a life-giving, life-taking network of spies and technicians.” The significance of her status as caesura is that she signaled an emerging “absence of separation between America's national security state and its private, political interests.”
Synecdoche is a trope of substitution, specifically, the substitution of one ‘whole’ of reality for another. The focus of this section is George W. Bush’s folksy, but also error-riddled, speech. “During the 2000 election, Bush’s campaign marketed him as a likable, trustworthy, and down-to-earth candidate: a straight shooter who couldn’t mislead the public, because he tripped over his words and couldn’t help but say what he meant. Following several years of the war on terror, perceptions of Bush began to change, even among Republican loyalists.” Speech was the part around which perceptions of Bush's whole presidency were rearranged, substituting his folksy image with that of deliberately opaque war monger.
Like synecdoche, page 99 is a part that frames the book’s whole in a partial -- albeit useful -- way. It is partial because the Plame scandal is only one example among many that illustrate how political rhetoric in the United States has become supersaturated with the secret’s routine, recurring forms. It is useful because it clearly centers rhetoric through the language of trope and because the page resonates with events that are fresh in U.S. public memory as of February-March 2026. Readers may find “the absence of separation between America's national security state and its private, political interests” timely, to say nothing of the refashioning of the president’s image around signifiers that have been twisted and reconfigured by the prurient ambitions of American imperialists and the incumbent U.S. president.
Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie tells two stories. The first, told in chapters 1-2, concerns the epistemic, historical, and rhetorical precedents for the secret’s prolonged crises. The second story, told in chapters 3-6, features the scandal, dog whistle, leaker, and detective. Beyond the reference to John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, these chapters lend the title a performative twist: The scandal is associated with sovereign power, the settler with popular detective fiction, the leaker with the sexualization of national security state vulnerabilities, and the lie with the racist dogwhistle. Beginning with George W. Bush and ending with Joseph R. Biden, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie is prelude to a political present in which ‘the people’ are constantly reminded of what they do not – or cannot – know.
--Marshal Zeringue
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