Evil or Emptiness?

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Few spectacles are as existentially profound as American politics. Our public discourse is a contest between people who are, in their mediocre way, satanic, and people who really aren't there at all.

    First, a quick bracing dip in utter evil: the administration edited and distorted intelligence and exploited September 11 to manipulate the country into war. Then it asserted its right to imprison anyone it pleased, American citizen or not, secretly, without trial, representation, or charge. Then it opened up a worldwide system of secret internment facilities, while frying the citizens of Fallujah with phosphorus incendiaries. Then the Vice President of the United States declared his frank enthusiasm for torture.

     Indeed, one might wonder whether the Bush administration is torturing people in order to fight terrorism, or fighting terrorism in order to torture people.

     Democrats would never declare their enthusiasm for torture. Why? Because torture doesn't poll well, and thus to endorse it would violate their sacred honor.

     Under the inspiring leadership the Clintons, John Kerry, and John Edwards, the Democrats have achieved sudden decisiveness in opposing this wretched war. Of course, all of those people (I use the term loosely) were enthusiastic proponents of the war when the thing was put to a vote in the Senate.

    The President and Vice President seem a bit irritated by this reversal, but they and we surely should have expected it.

    Our idealistic Democratic statespersons say they were deceived into supporting the war by the administration. But the yellow cake/aluminum tubes/once there was an al-Qaeda guy in Baghdad argument was as pitiful then as it is now. They wanted to be persuaded, for the same reason they all loved the Patriot Act: because their moral compass always points to the true north of their own aggrandizement.

     I seem to remember "Kerry-Edwards: For a Stronger America." I vaguely recall a 2004 Democratic convention that was a festival of idiot militarism, at which John Kerry "reported for duty." Would that I could forget.

     The position on the war of Kerry and Edwards and Billary has been an exquisite barometer of the polling, from clearly pro, to sheer confusion, to bold opposition. It is worth pointing out that as these folks gaze mesmerized at the polls, people have been dying.

    If you put your position on war at the mercy of polling numbers, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that you actually believe. Their advocacy of the war was meaningless; their hemming and hawing through the election was meaningless; their opposition now is meaningless.

   If murder polled well, these people would tax you to have you hit. When the murder numbers went south, they'd mutate into beatific Gandhian pacifists. That is not a hypothetical assertion.

    By comparison, the Republican position is clear, consistent, principled, honest. It would be altogether admirable if it weren't absolutely disgusting.

    Thus, American politics presents us with an interesting dilemma, a kind of pointed cosmic test. Satanism or nihilism? Hell or the void? Eternal damnation or perfect extinction? Evil or nothingness?

       Before I cast my vote, I have one question: how are Satan's job approval numbers?