When She was Good. . .

When she was good,
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad,
she was horrid
--There Was a Little Girl,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When I'm good I'm very good,
but when I'm bad I'm better
--Mae West, I'm No Angel (1933)

Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?
--Dr. Evil, Austin Powers (1997)

Look at the faces
Listen to the bells
It's hard to believe
we need a place called hell
--Devil Inside, INXS
________________

Mssrs. McCain and Obama held forth on evil at Mr. Warren's Orange County megachurch warren this past Saturday. I did not view it, but if you are a glutton for punishment, the video is here. Our friend tw sent Al Jazeera's take, which predictably mocked U.S. provincialism and hypocrisy.

What strikes me, aside from the obvious dissonance (a pastor leading a political debate at his church, and the candidates actually addressing the topic of evil) is the ease with which the term "evil" has entered the political lexicon.

Seventeen years ago, Time magazine ran an issue devoted to the topic: "The Nature of Evil: Does it Exist, or Do Bad things Just Happen? (6/10/91)" It was an interrogative, and the featured essayists came down on either side of the matter. Sixteen years later Time fronted an issue which took the matter of the existence of evil for granted: "What Makes us Good/Evil? (12.3.07)"

The 1991 cover is a blackout, implying a void, an unknown quantity. This not a Loony Tunes cartoon, and there is no devil with a pitchfork on one shoulder, angel on the other. It offers neither a prescription nor an easy answer.

Contrast 1991 with 2007, which feature an interior view of the brain, with dotted lines pointing to different regions for "good" and "evil," implying that the very chemistry of our mind is wired to produce one or the other result. The "Good/Evil" construction posed in the question implies a duality, but it does not suggest the possibility of the absence of either quality. This is a quasi-scientific, anatomical rendering of the origin of evildoing.

In just over 15 years, pop culture has gone from engaging in a dialog on the possibility of evil to the presumption of its existence; in fact, its indwelling within the human character. We were once bad or good. Now the dichotomy is anted-up. We are either good, or we are evil.

This dialectic is firmly within the purview of a religious dialog. However, it certainly is not a humanistic one. Roll back at least 250 years to a fork in the road, and do not choose Jefferson, but rather the Rev. Jonathan Edwards' sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." How would the U.S. Constitution rest on that bedrock?

What does this imply about our mores in 2008 AD?