Evil comes calling
I saw it all. I wasn’t there in person, mind you. I only saw it on television. It FELT like I was there, though. I could hear the lies. I could smell the hatred that had hatched many years before. I could inhale the evil.
He stood there and bragged about his Iowa win. He talked about what he would like to do to them. “Them.” Migrants, immigrants, call them what you will. As he stood there, evil gleaming off of him, he began to dehumanize them.
They’re coming in from all over. They’re criminals, he said. This is how he described them, these brave people running from their countries’ woes, seeking a better life here in the USA.
They are criminals, he explained. They are former mental patients. I could feel him. I could feel him MAKING IT UP AS HE WENT ALONG. Why couldn’t everyone see it, I wondered? They’re former mental patients. They have come here, and now many of them have vanished.
How in hell would HE know who these people were? How would he know the truth when he has never told it? Not even once? He called them terrorists. He besmirched them. He wanted to destroy their characters, people he’d never met and would never meet.
I saw it all. On Monday night, I looked true madness in the eye. I gazed out at pure sociopathy, the kind of sociopathy one usually hopes never to see in front of them. Monday night, tranquility was disturbed. It was disturbed only briefly as evil came to town.
Evil did not stay in Iowa. It presumably left on its way to another state to cast its darkness there. I saw it all. I also saw — desperation. When sociopaths get desperate, they also get pathetic.
I saw evil come calling, to Iowa. I looked evil in its eye. Evil could not see me, but it would have seen my contempt, hatred, and nausea if it had. But the good thing about this brand of evil is one can turn it off, which is what I did.
I snapped off the TV, and I sat quietly. I thought about this: “victory” in Iowa where so many came out to vote AGAINST evil. I thought about Evil’s audience — a total of one hundred thousand people — one of the smallest audiences in Iowa Caucus history.
And then I smirked. And I knew. Evil was going forth into the great night — but its ability to create mayhem was all but gone. One hundred thousand Iowans. So, below expectations. It’s such a low number.
Evil had been defanged. Evil was going far, far away to a place that would receive it unsmilingly. Evil came calling in Iowa, one snowy night. It didn’t stay. It never stays anywhere for long. The bars that will soon hold it however, will demand a much longer stay.
