Bowing To Evil

The questionable victory was celebrated with bonfires that smelled, faintly, of sulfur. He stood on the stage, his smile revealing a gash of yellowish-white teeth in the spotlights. He didn’t speak of unity or prosperity. He spoke of “cleansing fires” and “beautiful, necessary ruin.” And the crowds, disillusioned and angry, ate it up. They called it “straight- talk” and “fighting for what we believe.”

Behind closed doors, the “cleansing” was palpable. A delegate, pleading for disaster relief after a hurricane, left weeping after the “straight-talker stated  with the gleefulness of a child, how the suffering would “scour the weak from the ledger.” His eyes glowed like red banked coals as he picked up a pen that scratched like a claw the paper as he signed, yet, another executive order. This one slashing funding from healthcare and education to construct what he called “monuments of our new truth.”

His evil wasn’t bureaucratic or detached. It was intimate. Often he would call reporters to his office not to announce policy, but to complain about their coverage, which he called “fake news,” of the horrifying impact his policies were having on his impoverished supporters. He was not only a tyrant seeking power for power’s sake; he was a sadist of misery, a voyeur of anguish. He fed on fear and suffering not as a side effect, but as the entire point. The flawed process had not only installed someone who would do evil things. It had willingly opened the door and bowed to evil in order to dine with the devil.