« KiteFest | Main | Order of the Stick »

June 22, 2007

Of Veeps and Villainy

I’ve never liked Dick Cheney, but he’s never engendered in me the visceral hatred I still (I’m a little ashamed to say) feel towards George W. Bush. The President is stupid, arrogant and dangerous, but Dick Cheney is only two of those things. He’s just too masterfully effective to evoke any white hot rage from me, no matter how hard he tries:

Dick Cheney, who has wielded extraordinary executive power as he transformed the image of the vice presidency, is asserting that his office is not actually part of the executive branch.

In a simmering dispute with the National Archives that heated up yesterday, Cheney has long maintained that he does not have to comply with an executive order on safeguarding classified information because his office is part of the Legislature.

Cheney, whose single constitutional duty is to serve as president of the Senate, holds that the vice president's office is not an "entity within the executive branch" and therefore not subject to annual reporting or periodic on-site inspections under the 1995 executive order, which President Bush updated four years ago.

Andrew Sullivan a few months back pointed out that George W. Bush’s administration, for all the enormity of the damage it’s done, is totally devoid of literary merit. You need some kind of doubt to be a tragic character, but Bush and his entourage (with a few long departed exceptions) have been so free of shame or internal conflict that writing a play about them would be like writing a play about a robot. They seem to be able to feel pride and confidence and anger and arrogance, but never pity or uncertainly or existential fear.

But there are other great characters besides tragic ones. Dick Cheney is really making a run for another kind of literary status: I think the vice-president could make a first rate villain.

Not a Snidely Wiplash villain. A true Shakespearean monster. Not tragic MacBeth, who has a lust for power (don’t we all), but an Iago or a Don John who are brilliantly, magnetically bereft of motive. Take Aaron from Titus Andronicus:

LUCIUS. Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON.
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day,—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill:
As, kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men's cattle stray and break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly;
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

I don’t imply to speak ill of Aaron by comparing him to the Vice President. He’s one of the great monsters of literature, and he’s so pure in his evil it’s hard not to root for him, even when he’s murdering nurses, facilitating rapes, and convincing ex-generals to cut off their own hands for his amusement.

I suspect that this level of malignancy is what Dick Cheney aspires to. And in many ways, I think he’s succeeded. Cheney has been so relentless in his push for war, so crafty in his assault on the Constitution, so bald faced in his lies, so out-of-control in the damage he inflicts on the nation that it’s hard not to compare him to the greats.

In the future, I hope that artists will be able to make something beautiful of Cheney’s reign the way Shakespeare made something horrible into Richard III. It seems that they will have plenty of material to work with.

Posted by Drew at June 22, 2007 01:25 PM