Unmitigated Evil

Unmitigated evil lives in me. I know this because every time I see a picture of the ailing Pope, I wish he'd just die already. He's been ailing for a long time, so I've had this thought a lot.

The Pope's never done me any wrong. He just happens to be a very influential person with whom I don't usually see eye-to-eye. The fact that I disagree with a guy who's infallible just burns me, and maybe that's why I want him dead.

But the more I think about it, the harder it is to come up with a rational explanation: I've never been excommunicated; I was not molested by a priest—or at least not that I can remember... (Defrocked priest Paul Shanley was recently found guilty of sexual abuse based on the testimony of a victim whose memories had been repressed for years.)

So my current theory is that I hate the Pope because I'm evil.

Evil is so in, though. Historians will probably point to Bush's invocation of the "E" word ("Axis of evil") as the beginning of the fad, and sure enough, it catapulted Kim Jong Il to stardom. Around the same time, the Internet was running rampant with the rumor (now confirmed) that Dick Cheney is actually Darth Vader. And lately, even sweet little Condi Rice has been dressing like a Sith Lord. Maybe she thinks that goes over in Europe: after all, Prince Harry's a Nazi, and the French are evil, too, right?

The New York Times recently ran an article stating that psychiatrists and forensic scientists are more and more willing to describe some killers as evil, because there's no other way to explain why our language needs words like "vivisection." One such scientist, Michael Stone, has even articulated a sort of "How Evil Are You?" personality test. He uses various violent criminals to set a baseline, and scores people on a 22-point scale.

I am curious if one of the questions is, "Do you wish the Pope would just die, already?"

I figure if I'm going to be evil, I should get myself some cool black boots. I wonder where Condi got hers?