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Well, this is it, kids. Welcome to The Madness of King George, The Sequel.
I was thinking on the way in to work this morning about how I remember hearing some historian ask the question, "Was Hitler an evil genius, or a genius of evil?" I don't remember how he explained the difference; but no matter what happens, I doubt future historians will ever put "Bush" and "genius" in the same sentence. There are a lot of things being crowned at today's coronation, but genius--evil or otherwise--is not one of them.
A long time ago, having been a big fan of C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, I was foolish enough to check out his science fiction. *Perelandra,* the middle book in Lewis's Space trilogy, is deeply weird in many ways; the basic situation is that the protagonist, the allegorically named Dr. Ransom, and some hated colleague of his wind up shipwrecked on the surface of Venus, where, as they discover, God is starting over; Venus is the new Eden, and he has created a new Eve, who is still in her state of prelapsarian innocence. Ransom's obnoxious colleague becomes possessed by Satan, who uses him as a means of trying to tempt the new Venusian Eve into disobeying an arbitrary command that God has laid down; it's Ransom's job to try to stop him. What I was remembering in this car this morning is the way I was freaked out by Lewis's depiction of the Satanically possessed obnoxious colleague. When the Venusian Eve is around, Satan is articulate, intelligent, charismatic, and persuasive in his attempts to convince her to disobey her creator. However, when she's not around, the demonically possessed obnoxious colleague lapses into a state of almost-drooling idiocy. He does torment Ransom when they're alone together, but it's by doing things that are maddening precisely because they're inane--like constantly repeating Ransom's name. Ransom finds the contrast disturbing; meditating upon it--there's a lot of meditating upon things in *Perelandra*--he decides that it must be because Satan has decided not to waste any energy being any smarter than he has to be. He's smart about trying to tempt people to do evil, but apart from that, basically he's sort of a dumb animal with a vicious streak.
Today, on January 20, 2005, I can appreciate that view of evil a lot better than I could when I read the book. You would think that evil would get scarier as it gets smarter. But actually, what we are seeing now is that in a way, evil is at its most dangerous when it's dumb. The gang in charge now is, like C. S. Lewis's Satan, very smart abotu a couple of things--all of these things having to do with the manipulation of American public perception, and the consolidation of their own power through their takeover of the media and the institutions of government. And about just about everything else, they're idiots. They can get into wars, but they can't win them. They can break the economy, but they can't fix it. They can pillage and loot, but they're not very good at rebuilding. And the sad thing is, they don't have to be. They have us all by the short hairs; they don't have to care what our lives are like, and their own will always be pretty sweet as long as they're in charge. The way they look at it, their power is so strong that they can afford to be stupid.
Well, to some extent, that works at home--at least it'll work until the economy gets *so* bad that there's another depression and nobody has anything left to lose. Outside our immediate sphere of influence, however, it's not working too well. After deploying all the Machiavellian schemes at their disposal to start the Iraq war, this administration actually fought it in the dumbest way imaginable. We literally *did not plan* for the period following the victory everyone kept saying was inevitable; I guess Rumsfeld thought it would be cheaper to make that part up as we went along. Well, in the days after we dragged down Saddam Hussein's statue, instead of securing the country, our soldiers were standing around watching looters run in and out of buildings, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. The situation got away from us as soon as we 'won,' and it's been getting steadily worse. And my prediction is that under this administration, you're not going to see it get any better. They don't know how to make it better. Because intellectual flexibility--which is what you need if you're going to adapt to an unexpected situation and work out a new way of coping with it--was not one of the things this crowd learned at Evil Overlord University. That course was cut from the curriculum a long time ago, on the grounds that it was no longer relevant.
With the help of his gang and the media, Bush can apparently fool a little more (or less, we still don't know) than half of the Americans who vote, most of the time. But outside our own borders, he's not fooling anyone. And he may be having a great time inside Fortress Coronation tonight, but if he thought the first four years of his term were HARD WORK, well, he ain't seen nothin' yet.
Brace yourselves, folks; the next four years are going to be awful. We've learned since 2000 that evil does more damage when it's stupid. Because when it's stupid, the only way it has of dominating anything or anyone is through brute force; and any time you use brute force, you beget brute force. All this guy knows how to do is make things worse. Even if--belatedly--this administration realizes it had better start lumbering toward a clue, it will never make it. They're too bloated, too degraded, and too dug in.
The irony is that they are overseeing the destruction of the American empire they are so lustily expanding. With a gutted economy, an increasingly poor and disenfranchised populace, an overfunded yet at the same time overextended military, and no real allies in the free world apart from Airstrip One, we are more or less where the Soviet Union was in the late 1980s. Right down to the mujaheddin.
Remember this when you look back and judge us, kids: we wanted things to turn out differently. We tried to pull our country back from the brink. Slightly less (or more, we still don't really know) than half of us voted to write a different end to this story. But we lost. Our punishment for that will be to live through the end of the American era. I hope whatever world power rises from the smoking ashes of our global dominance treats us more reasonably and more compassionately than we have treated them.
Yee fucking ha,
The Plaid Adder
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