Johnny rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard

While I was listening to "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" on the train in the station at Dresden, I realized that it might be worthwhile to explain why George Bush's characterization of the terrorists as "evildoers" is dumb.

If you should confront the Devil, you should resist him, humble him, and humiliate him. The Devil is an agency dedicated absolutely to destruction and misery and if the opportunity arises to lay him low, it is noble and right to take it. That (and the egoistic arrogance that leads him to call the Devil "ol' son") is what led Johnny to take up his fiddle against Ol' Scratch. That's what gives the song its righteous power (well, that and the totally awesome face-melting violin solo near the end).

The Devil's motivation is simple, at least in Charlie Daniels's non-Miltonian take on the Devil. He's out to fuck shit up, steal souls, and wreck lives. He also seems interestingly to be working under a deadline, but the implication that the boss of evil is himself answerable to a higher agency is a subject for my future book about curiosities in song lyrics and so won't be treated here.

So, why's the Devil bad? Because that's what he is. Why does he engage in evil? Because that's what he does. It's his nature.

It should be obvious by now that I mean to draw a disanalogy between the terrorists and the Devil. I mean to resist the George Bush fairy tale about the world and explain why you should too.

If George Bush can sell to the stupid mass of American people the familiar, churchy, comforting story that something Devil-like out there is trying to fuck up their lives and that he is leading the crusade against that Devil-like thing, he'll get to go on exploiting the Army and the Iraqi people to pursue his financial interests.

Well, you might be saying, that's a reason to doubt his motives, but that's not a reason to reject his characterization of the Muslim terrorists as evil. So let's look a little deeper. First, though, I'm going to have to explain why dumb Manichean Americans and Muslims alike want to characterize the world as an Us-versus-Them situation. In order to do that I'm going to tell a story about a time when I was driving to buy my mother some groceries.

It was the summer of 2006. I was driving on a winding road not too far from the rear exit of my parents' subdivision. I was on my way to Winn Dixie or Wal-Mart. The road was a two-lane highway cut into the side of a limestone deposit. One of the security operations my brain performs without my conscious willing is an operation involving monitoring the distance between the front driver's-side wheel of the oncoming car and the double yellow line dividing the lanes. If the wheel approaches closer to the double yellow line, I pull my steering wheel just slightly to the right, to maintain the maximum amount of distance between our cars so that I will have as much time as possible to react in the event of an accident. A white oncoming van's front driver's side tire got closer and closer to the double yellow line, causing me to subconsciously edge my car closer and closer to the shoulder. By the time half of the oncoming van's width was in my lane, my conscious mind was wholly engaged with the danger posed by the oncoming van. Already I was on the shoulder, and the oncoming van pressed farther and farther into my lane. There was a drop of five or ten yards past the shoulder, so escape from the road was not a possibility. The van approached closer, and I jerked the wheel to the right to avoid being struck by it. This caused my car to begin to skid. I turned into the direction of the skid at the same moment that the endangering white van passed my car. I regained control of my car but was now in danger of launching my car off the side of the road, into the abyss. I jerked the steering wheel hard to the left, to bring my car back onto the road. A second skid began, into which I had to turn. This caused it to feel as though my car would flip, but that initial burst of inertia calmed down into nothing more than enough energy to cause my car to fishtail. I attribute my calm during this process to my having been frequently beaten as a child. Whatever in the brain produces emotions was disconnected during this time, and I was acting in absolute calm to preserve my life. This reflexive sangfroid persisted until I arrived at the traffic light half a mile up the road. Then, as I acclimated myself to the absence of danger, I became _infuriated_. I had been wronged by the driver of the white van. He had nearly killed me, and for nothing. I wanted to turn my car around, flag him down, pull him by the forelock from the van he had irresponsibly been licensed to operate, break his nose with a palm heel, spirally fracture his wrists, and break my knuckles in the process of turning his face into a blood pudding. He had wronged me; he was absolutely wrong. He was wrong and I was right. I was right and I was innocent, and I was furious. He had nearly killed me, and for nothing! I wanted to see him suffer!

That temporary insanity, in which I felt completely right and felt that he was completely wrong, is something like what the fundamentalist Christian or Muslim feels. No further explanation is necessary for them; they've decided that they're right and that everyone else is wrong. Precisely this attitude is what the Bush administration relies upon in order to go about its nefarious business.

The two ingredients needed to whip a people into a genocidal rage are righteous conviction that they are right and the feeling of having been grievously wronged. The actions of September 11, 2001 provided both of these. This is why the Bush Administration refers incessantly to that day. They want everyone as irrational and hateful and scared as possible. Exactly like the fundamentalist Muslims who want their followers to characterize the non-Muslim world as the House of War. Those of us who think that theism is a bunch of shit aren't evil, just because we think that there's not a God. There's a lot more to the world than is dreamt of in these Manichean philosophies.

Likewise, there's a lot more to Muslim terrorists than that they're "evildoers". They're actually deluded, religiously insane people. Please don't think that in so characterizing them I mean to say that they deserve our understanding. They don't. If I were in charge of the world, I would make them forever powerless and mocked, in agony that no one else subscribes to their stupid worldview. But to understand why this group of people engages in terrorist activity, we have to look even closer.

Whenever the news ("the news") reports on terrorist bombings, they always mention the political affiliations of the bombers. "Two Palestinians in the West Bank blew up a bus today," "Three Irish Republican Army members killed a bus full of schoolchildren in Cork". What they don't mention is that these people were theists, and that their theism drove them to commit these murders. It wasn't just that they were incidentally theist. Their theism was central to their motivations for murdering others.

See, if George Bush were to start a discussion about the reasons that the terrorists are doing what they're doing, it would quickly lead to an indictment of theism, since theism is a producer of righteous anger and hatred and of characterizing the world as divided into two groups of people, one of which is righteous and the other wicked. And he would never do that, because he himself is a theist and profits politically from precisely the kind of theism that leads to the terrorist bombings. In fact, he has managed to coerce an army into carrying out terrifying bombings on civilian populations. How similar this makes him to the terrorists is up for debate.