Monday, May 22, 2017

Trump's battle of good vs. evil sounds like George W. Bush, kind of warmed over for 2017

Flashback to 2004 here and The President of Good and Evil:

Bush's tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and June 16, 2003. In these speeches he uses the word "evil" as a noun far more often than he uses it as an adjective-914 noun uses as against 182 adjectival uses. Only 24 times, in all these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do-that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, or even evil people, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.