Word: evil
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...takes a Prius three trips to Sam's to carry the same load of paper towels and salsa that an Expedition could manage in one, is the Prius evil? While only 1% to 10% of SUV owners actually use their vehicles' off-road and towing capacities, it's wrong to say those extras are wasted on the majority. Surely many of the buyers made the rational calculation that off-roading and towing might be useful in an emergency. (At a time when everyone is duct-taping the windows, it doesn't seem so crazy to think you would...
...possible that neither side in the debate about evil quite knows what it is talking about. Philosophically and theologically, both are fighting the last war. They are talking about a world that no longer exists, or rather, they fail to see what evil lies in the world that now exists...
President Bush uses the word in an in-your-face, born-again manner that takes its resonance from a long Judeo-Christian tradition that sees radical evil embodied in heroically diabolical figures. This personalized evil is the kind that is insinuated by the sauntering Tempter in the first scene of the Book of Job, when God and Satan speculate like racing touts about whether Job can go a mile and a quarter on a muddy track. In Bush's usage, evil has the perverse prestige of Milton's defiant Lucifer. Evil emanates, implicitly, from a devilish intelligence with horns...
...word evil--brandished so often by George W. Bush and just as regularly scorned by those who oppose him--could use some serious parsing...
Bush's critics, hearing the word, go ironic. They put evil in quotes and think of Dana Carvey's Church Lady: "Well, isn't that special, Saddam? Who's your little friend? Could it be Satan!!!???" They mock Bush for what they see as a primitive, frightening and atavistic use of a medieval term that should probably be banished from civilized discourse in a multicultural world...