The Shadow Presidency

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

-The Shadow

Hale: Nurse, though our hearts break, we cannot flinch; these are new times, sir. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court-the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!

-Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Let's try this again.

When I was in grade twelve, the school play was The Crucible. When the play was initially cast, I was to play Governor Danforth, the hard, hanging judge who dominates the Salem witch trials for the last two acts of the play. Then a friend of mind quit and I was promoted one spot to the role of Reverend Hale, quoted above, who starts out utterly convinced in diabolism and related nonsenses and winds up renouncing his role in the trials and preaching against the very idea of witchcraft trials.

I recently read the play again for the first time in the intervening six years, and of course was struck again by how good a play it was and how many good roles there are in it and so forth. I was also struck by the extent to which political hysteria can be and usually is sincere.

By this I mean that the judges at the trials certainly believed, like Hale, that the Devil was alive in Salem, and that it was their duty to root him out, whatever the cost. I rather think that some of the girls who accuse the "witches" by acting possessed also believed they were genuinely possessed, certainly in the later scenes of the play. As Miller himself put it, "the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact."

So you get sincere, frightened people condemning their neighbours to death for witchcraft. And then, three hundred years later, different sincere frightened people blacklisted other neighbours of theirs for being Communists, or suspected Communists. And now, we have an American President willing to use wildly disproportionate military means in a fuzzy, ill-defined "War on Terror" that's already engulfed one unrelated country and threatens to engulf another. In doing so, he's being cheered on, of course, by sincerely frightened people.

Miller puts the crux of the problem with the witch trials, and the Red Scare, and the war in Iraq and the proposed bombing of Iran succinctly: "So often, the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind." When people are calm, they realize, generally, that you can't prosecute or kill someone for their dark thoughts, and that what matters is what people do. When they're frightened, a muttering beggar becomes a witch, a New York playwright becomes a revolutionary in waiting, and an poor country with a military not even within shouting distance of the Americans or Israelis becomes an imminent threat that has to be taken out NOW.

Miller again (all of this is from 1996, believe it or not):

One thing more—something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares.

Obviously, building a nuclear bomb is doing something. But far more important to my mind is the question of whether anything will be done with it after it's built, and whether the possible disastrous consequences of a nuclear Iraq outweigh the well-nigh certain disastrous consequences of bombing the place, with nukes or not.

The final observation I'd make about hysterias like this one is that they create their own momentum: As I've said before, I attribute a significant fraction of the impetus behind the Iranian nuclear programme to a desire to avoid Iraq's fate, and an entirely understandable belief that the only way to permanently deter American aggression is to get the Bomb. This, of course sets off alarm bells in Washington and elsewhere that are in context understandable themselves, and around and around we go. And all of this-well, most of this-springs from a belief that intentions (Saddam Hussein, maybe) are to be taken just as seriously as actions (Osama bin Laden).

So who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? George Bush does, and more importantly, he's gonna do something about it. The trouble is that while the Shadow really did know, George is only guessing.