A troubling lack of pure evil
Where to find a refreshing dose of vileness in the Age of Obama?
Friday, June 12, 2009
Remember the good old days? When the air was thick like curdled paste and the days were long like sad, lonely sighs and evil -- sweet, dependable evil -- was like some sort of predatory perfume salesgirl and we were all trapped in the same apocalyptic department store?
It used to be so easy. Every day, every headline, every pronouncement or misunderestimation from Dubya brought a new opportunity for your colon to clench and your breath to turn sour and the universe's skin to crawl. A single glance at Karl Rove and you were instantly swarmed with visions of tiny worms eating through the flesh of a sweet little bunny until it turned black and rotten and Rick Santorum. You had but to utter the words "Trent Lott" in the presence of children and the screaming wouldn't subside for three straight days. Remember?
Oh, what a time it was. Evil was everywhere. Evil was a our global modus operandi, our de facto worldview, the way we brushed our teeth in the morning. Hell, evil was so prevalent, there was an entire axis of it. We had evil tyrants and evil dictators and evil mullahs, all lighting their Cuban cigars with a burning American flag, each hell-bent on out-eviling each other in some sort of wacky game of Pin the Tail on the Cheney.
But now, well, not so much. The Age of Obama has brought both a terrific upswelling of general positivism and a concomitant grand lightening up/toning down of outrageous verbiage and ranting extremism among the hotheaded-dictator set, and with it the strangest thing of all: an apparent global decline in overt, easily identifiable flameballs of tangible evil.
Just look around. The entire reptilian Republican party, our cherished font of evil ideas and evil intentions, is now just a cute, leaderless sideshow of circus freaks, all bluster and tantrum and Sarah Palin's kooky gams. It's quite a spectacle: One of the two major political parties in the United States is now entirely run by a blowhard talk radio cow, an insane Fox News comedian and a crusty bomb-thrower dug up from the vault of 1988 (Hi, Newt!)
And the evil tyrants? Struggling for relevance, mostly. Saddam's long gone, Kim Jong-Il is a batty coot, Iran's Ahmenijhad's bark is far worse than his bite, and even harmless thugs like Castro and Hugo Chavez are stunned to humble reverence by an American president who abides no such childish bulls--t and exudes actual integrity and preternatural calm.
(There are, of course, exceptions: Africa's Robert Mugabe is a true monster, but he's also something like 185 years old, a vile dinosaur mercifully not long for this world).
Hey, times have changed. The world is in flux. It's not so easy to be a cutthroat, greedy tyrant anymore, not in this economy. After all, evil is expensive, what with all the costumes and gleaming black Escalades and the aforementioned cigars. You think those goat skulls come cheap? You seen the price of sacrificial virgins lately? Currency devaluation is a bitch.
Do not misunderstand. Many nations are still astonishing breeding grounds of violent repression and torment and ignorance. From Sudan to Saudi Arabia to China, there is no shortage of nauseating news, battered civil rights, totalitarian lockstep groupthink psychobabble.
But let's try and keep it in perspective. Because as a proudly insular and terminally fearful nation, the evil emanating from other nations largely strikes the U.S. only in the abstract; we rarely feel it directly. Hence, as Bush worked so hard to teach us, it must not really be happening.
For Americans, evil still has to hit closer to home to make itself known. We must be able to reach right out and touch it (or, in the case of the GOP and its wild fetish for homosexuality, reach out and deeply fantasize about it).
So, where to look? Wall Street? AIG? Right wing extremist fanatics/O'Reilly Factor fans opening fire in abortion clinics and churches and Holocaust museums? A little.
How about religion? Strange to watch the Mormon church make a play for its little share of evil, by way of its sad, ferociously homophobic love of Proposition 8. It was a valiant try, but they have a long way to go before they can even approach the astonishing achievements of the Catholic church.
Really, how do you possibly top a story like the recent report from Ireland, the stunning tale of all those nuns and priests beating and raping, molesting and humiliating literally thousands of orphaned children in Catholic "reform-school" workhouses over a 75-year period? How can you even come close to that level of horrific brutality? All the Mormons have is a few years of strapping electrodes to gay BYU students to "cure" them of their homosexuality. Child's play, really.
I suppose the good news is, despite Obama's hippie socialist insistence that we all try to ease up on the hateful divisiveness and start cultivating some empathy and shared responsibility, and despite how he's guiding us through one of the most dramatic and perspective-altering transitions/redefinitions in our short history, it turns out classic, black-hearted evil still abounds in our culture. It's just a little less easy to spot.
Witness, say, the long-forgotten R.J. Reynolds tobacco company ("Passionately dedicated to evil since 1890"), currently struggling, like many supervillains of the past, to maintain its diabolical cred in this new era, especially given the drop-off in smoking rates and the company's diminishing capacity to bring death and disease to millions.
R.J. Reynolds has apparently been test-marketing a new tobacco product, some sort of melt-in-your-mouth pellet candy thing, called Orbs, tasty little lumps of toxic tobacco packaged in nifty metal tins, just like breath mints. No smoke, no inhaling, no spitting. Just pop one in your mouth and let the fresh, lethal goodness leech straight into your bloodstream. Cancer never tasted so good!
Pretty evil, yes? It gets better. How about the fact that the U.S. Senate is about to block the damnable product because it's so clearly, albeit subversively, aimed at attracting children? "Tobacco candy," they call it. "We're just giving undereducated, cancer-ready adults what we tell them they want," the evil corporation says. They're both right.
So there you have it. All told, I'm not that worried. This is America, after all. I know we can do it. We have the ingenuity, the imagination. Our megacorporatons and our neoconservative politicians and our gun-wielding sociopaths are famous the world over for innovating new and exciting ways to reek of pure evil.
Hell, we still have Monsanto, ConAgra, Halliburton, Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland, Yum! Brands, Wal-Mart, most of the coal industry, Tyson meats, Fox News and the everpresent Catholic church, plus a few dozen others who will happily stop at nothing to maintain their long-standing evil empires, no matter what that damnable do-gooder president says. Isn't that reassuring?
