C. S. Lewis and Stephen Miller

Images from Venus are striking in their bleakness. A plain strewn with loose stone under a featureless sky, with the certain knowledge that shortly after the probe that took this photograph transmits the image, the infernal temperatures and pressures of the planet’s atmosphere will destroy the camera completely.

It is an apt image of the bleakness of evil, the reality of the life we choose if we give in to the shadow that lives within each of us. Many writers have described that landscape from without: George Orwell describes the fanaticism of the native to a totalitarian society in terrifying terms in 1984:

Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible— and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like.
-- George Orwell, 1984 page 244

The Christian writer C. S. Lewis describes the landscape of evil best, because he had the courage to describe it from the inside. Lewis looked straight into himself, the darkness, what Ursula K. LeGuin called the “shadow”: all the ruthless selfishness and pure malice that lives in every human heart. He described what he saw and signed his name to it.

Weep

 

In 1995, Columbia Pictures released The American President, a film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Rob Reiner, and starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. The film tells the story of a widowed American president who falls for a lobbyist he meets in the course of his work. It intersperses moments of romantic comedy with serious commentary about the political process and the way it intersects with the personal lives of politicians. In the culminating speech of the film, Michael Douglas as the president makes a speech in which he defends Annette Benning's character from his political rivals, and reclaims his own sense of integrity from the quicksand of political compromise his job has pulled him into. Among other memorable lines, this one anchors the speech: "being President of this country is entirely about character".

 

 

 

While Douglas's speech contains liberal policy proposals, it does not suggest that only liberals can have good character. Gerald Ford showed himself a man of character in his short time in the office; George Bush the Elder, despite his flaws, showed himself a man of character and, during his wartime service, considerable courage. George Bush the Younger, despite his serious errors in judgment, left a positive legacy in his PEPFAR program to combat HIV in African and poor countries elsewhere. Listening to the ideals expressed in Aaron Sorkin's words, and considering the genuine achievements of Americans in law, freedom, and government, it is hard not to weep at what the United States has come to. 

 

Twenty five years ago and a phone call...

We know what happened twenty-five years ago. I then lived in Ann Arbor while Allison studied at the University of Michigan. Four memories of that living through that time as an alien on an American visa, not only the day but the weeks that followed it, stand out for me. I remember the Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor we attended, and the service on the Sunday that followed the Tuesday of 9/11. The pastor climbed into the pulpit and began his sermon with “Oh. My. God.” I remember calling my brother in Toronto to check in on him, and hearing from my sister in law that my brother was in New York. In fact, he had been at Bloomberg in midtown when the planes hit the towers, but that morning there had been a breakfast meeting on the topic of risk management in the insurance industry at Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower, and two of his colleagues had gone. One was late and survived; one was on time and didn’t.