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Evil and the Oval Office: A Spiritual, but also Naturalistic, Perspective on the Bushite Regime
By Andrew Bard Schmookler (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)
The lust for power is one of the ways that human brokenness can reveal itself: those who have been victimized by evil in the form of the abuse of power come to believe that fulfillment will come from wielding power on their own. But it always remains a form of brokenness because, as Alan Watts once said, we can never get enough of what we don't really need. And so some of those who crave power find that the craving is insatiable.
And so we have witnessed people like George W. Bush, and Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney, ascend to positions of enormous power, and then proceed to conduct themselves as if their only concern is to expand their power still further. From that brokenness, they shattered the order of the world with their imperialist ventures in the cradle of civilization. And with that same insatiable lust they also set about breaking the best structures in America with their assault on the Constitution of the United States, which the Founders constructed to set limits to the power of their office.
For Cheney and Rumsfeld, in particular, I would imagine, the lure of rising to command the might of the world's unchallenged single remaining superpower must have been irresistible. No need any longer to exercise the care that the cold war required, when Mutual Assured Destruction required sobriety and restraint even of those who controlled awesome destructive power of the American arsenal.
And when an ignorant and incurious man with a bully's love of swagger and of humiliating his enemies and rivals presented himself as a potential "commander-in-chief" whom they might command, the forces of evil working through such broken men broke through all restraint to become a global bully. One more aspect of the spread of brokenness was the transformation of what was perhaps the most trusted and respected dominant power in the world's history into a pariah nation, despised and feared even by its traditional friends.
But to make the bridge between the micro-level of such broken souls and the macro-level of this unmatched global power, evil needed to use the middle range of these interlocking structures of that brokenness which is at the heart of evil, the socio-cultural-political dimension of the American civilization.
American culture has among its many deep-seated currents several that could provide the means for such broken individuals to be carried forward to positions of great power.
Among these is the imperialist impulse. This is an impulse that has been present throughout American history, but hitherto it has generally been kept more in check than under the Bushite regime.
Another is the impulse of unbridled greed. This impulse is the explicit fuel of our economic system. It is, moreover, also enthroned by the design of our publicly-traded corporations, as the inherent tendency and spirit of our largest empires of wealth and production. And these empires, in turn, provide an outlet for some other broken souls whose inability to get enough of what they don't really need manifests itself in the form of an insatiable lust for wealth.
And finally there is the twisted form of religiosity which has at its core the perception of the world as an arena of unceasing warfare between the righteous and the evil-doers, with no possibility for reconciliation and harmony in the human realm. This is a form of religiosity that glories in envisioning the imposition of the One Right Way on all by force, either by Holy War or by God's vengeance against His enemies at the end of days.
And these are indeed the main forces that have coalesced over the past generation to bring into control of America, during this Reign of the Bushites, a truly fascistic mentality one that is at war with other nations, at war with the opposition, at war with reality and the truth. Broken from top to bottom.
The rise to dominance of such a fascistic mentality might well have happened at this time in America regardless of the circumstances at play in the world, given the breakdown in America's moral structures (as discussed in "The Concept of Evil").
But what I felt I glimpsed not long ago, in a moment of deep but only partial insight, was that the extraordinary circumstances of America suddenly coming to possess a power wholly unmatched in the global sphere magnified the vortex of forces pulling evil toward that central node of American power, the Oval Office.
As the bumper-sticker says: "Frodo Failed, Bush has the Ring."
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