I've walked for miles and my feet are hurtin'. It's a temporary condition caused by walking on concrete in Washington, D.C. I went there to read to an Albertson College alumni group, but took the opportunity to look around. A number of ACI alums are in Washington, administering companies and NGOs. They supervise Harvard and Yale grads. Albertson College people peak out toward the ends of their careers rather than at the beginnings.
That's another column. What I'm worried about now is my visit to the presidential memorials: Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's, and FDR's. I also found the names of two people I had known from high school engraved in the black granite of the Vietnam Memorial.
It was a long and finally grim walk. I came away thinking that America was lucky to have had moral giants leading it now and then. FDR, in particular, brought this country through the Great Depression and World War II while he was physically weak and ruling mostly by moral authority. I wondered how FDR would have asked the country to face 9/11.
It was a dangerous thought because then I wondered what George W. Bush's memorial would look like. All I could think of was a Saddam-sized statue, bronze but with feet of clay, with the words "Mission Accomplished" engraved in black granite behind it. Then I thought this country's luck must have run out because instead of moral giants running the country, we have moral pygmies.
Not everyone would agree. Bush was elected because of a noisy born-again morality, one reinforced by nightly talks with God. But we haven't heard much about talks with God lately, except from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who claims that Bush is really talking to Satan. Ahmadinejad's the one who gets to talk to Allah, and Allah says Bush is a moral pygmy.
Such claims help explain the fundamentalist mind, and it's easy to see that the presidents of Iran and the United States are joined at the moral hip. If you PET-scanned them at bedtime prayers, the same regions of their brains would be lit up like Christmas trees, or the Persian equivalent of Christmas trees.
Americans who wonder how other countries view their fundamentalist president can use their own views of Ahmadinejad as a rough indicator: He's an ideologue whose place in history has been shaped by an apocalyptic religion. He hates evil and will use military force to fight it. He is sure of the righteousness of his cause and knows his enemies—in this case, the Jews—must be killed or captured. He believes in the imminent arrival of a prophet who will bring Allah's rule to our world.
You can dismiss Ahmadinejad as a harmless whack-job who has yet to get his hands on a single nuclear weapon, but he's right about Bush talking to Satan. The White House won't admit this, but an FBI voice-analysis of Bush's late-night phone calls has proven it hasn't been God that Bush has been talking to. It's Satan, the Prince of Deceit, pretending to be God.
"The only recording of Satan's voice we had was from the early J. Edgar Hoover years, when Satan was still singing in the celestial choir," a highly placed FBI source told me. "That was before the Fall. Satan used to sing like an angel. Now, after years of whiskey and cheap cigars, he sounds like Richard Nixon. Bush fell for it anyway."
It all makes sense. Bush and his minions seem to be out to do Satan's bidding in the world, whether it's by fudging the definition of torture or using extraordinary rendition or eroding the writ of habeas corpus or neglecting the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In Congress, they have taken bribes, sexualized their relationships with 16-year-olds, spent this country into bankruptcy, used "collateral damage" to describe dead children, and put Social Security on the block. They have taken pride in a deliberate obtuseness and C averages in college. They have corrupted the rule of law, which even on good days is what separates us from the beasts.
Or the Beast.
These things have Satan's fingerprints all over them, as does the claim that they're being done in the name of Jesus.
So, in addition to sore feet, I'm worried, and the feet will probably heal before the worry will. In the 19th century, the German poet Heinrich Heine said, "Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ." He also said, "When the heroes quit the stage, the clowns come in." In the 21st century, the words may apply, but the situation is more serious.
