Evil generally tries to cloak itself in the appearance of goodness or righteousness or a semblance of reason. But sometimes, unexpectedly, it shows its snarling, bestial face with shocking clarity. It’s just there, unfiltered, unmasked, vivid and voracious like a huge open maw, fangs dripping with blood from a fresh kill. This is what we saw when the ignorant, drunken adulterer now in charge of the American war machine spoke to CBS on Friday. He was asked about reports that Russia was providing intelligence to Iran about US military positions in the Middle East. The drunkard shrugged off the danger this would pose to the American troops who’ve been ordered to take part in the maniacal war crime he and his boss, the child-raping tyrant, have unleashed in the region. “We’re not concerned about that,” he said.
You could see and hear the orgiastic glee in his whiny drunkard’s voice as he envisioned the mass death of the Iranian suckers who “think they’re gonna live” when he would happily kill them all in order to “win” this Hitlerite war of aggression. He is envisaging a schoolgirl or fruit seller or grandmother imagining and hoping and thinking “they’re gonna live” until he eviscerates their bodies with a missile or a 2000-pound bomb. The thought of their dashed hopes – (“they think they’re gonna live” but ha ha, they ain’t!) – makes him smile, it puffs him up, it fills him with perverted psychosexual pleasure.
Many, many evils have been done by American officials, in our lifetime and long before. One of the reasons we are where we are right now is that for too long most of us have been unable or unwilling to recognize this, and so we have allowed sinister tendencies to embed themselves in our power structure, to perpetuate themselves in our policies, to hollow out our institutions – and our values – with rank corruption and moral depravity, always disguised as goodness and righteousness, or, if the evil is so egregious it can’t be ignored altogether, as nothing more than “good intentions gone awry” or the work of a few “bad apples.”
But I think we are now witnessing something new under the sun: the complete, final stripping away of any pretense (or sincere, if misguided belief) that the American government is not inflicting murder and destruction for no other reason than the sheer, evil, perverted pleasure of wielding this power of life and death over other human beings. The pious hypocrisies of the past are gone: we now have power, red in tooth and claw, exalting in murder and corruption for their own sake.
But recall the words of Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” Hypocrisy recognizes the appeal, the truth of virtue; it says: virtue does exist, people long for it and support it, therefore we must go around it with subterfuge and lies and “spin.” It leaves space for virtue to act, as we’ve seen occasionally in our history, with, say, the Watergate hearings, the congressional exposures of CIA crimes in the 1970s, in Supreme Court decisions that advanced our liberties, and in all the other ways, large and small, that our institutions have acted as if virtue does exist, as if raw, stupid, greedy, murderous power was not be-all and end-all of human existence.
The latter is what the drunkard’s sneering words assert: there is nothing but raw, stupid power, nothing but corruption and greed, nothing but masters and slaves on this earth. The drunkard and the rapist – and their entire movement and everyone who supports it – are, in the most essential sense, the enemies of humanity, the enemies of what it means to be human, the enemies of every advancement and enlightenment our species has achieved over millennia of pain and suffering and yearning and struggle.
The choice is as stark and clear as it has ever been. In the words of the great protest song by Florence Reece of Sharps Chapel, Tennessee: “Which side are you on?” Or if you prefer the Scriptures, the call of Joshua: “Choose this day whom you shall serve”: the sneering, open evil of the drunkard and the rapist and their demented MAGA legions and their death-dealing, reality-shredding techno-oligarchs – or the fragile but enduring truth of our shared humanity, our shared mortality, the joys and tragedies and meaning and mundanity common to us all. Is this not worth fighting for against the sneering husks, the ravenous beasts who rule us?
