Faux Real

On my drive home tonight a big pick-’em-up Chevy truck pulled out in front of me, nearly hydroplaning me off the road. After I finished cussing them out under my breath, I noticed a very prominent bumper sticker plastered on its rear end: EVIL HAPPENS/ when good people do nothing. Word, I thought, and continued my drive home listening to NPR’s coverage of political motivations behind the firing of federal prosecutors.

Now that there’s talk of Dick Cheney’s impeachment, my little heart suffers from pangs of regret. Call it Stockholm syndrome. See, I don’t like surprises, and as the kind of person that suffers emotional seizures at the idea of hanging out with an acting troupe or being the focus of a surprise birthday party, I love a veep like Cheney.

My love affair with misanthropic Dick “Go Fuck Yourself” Cheney started way back in October of 2000, when I first encountered his sneer during a rather even-keel debate with Joe Lieberman. Lieberman put on a political performance whereas Cheney sneered, sneered some more, made a lame joke about Joe’s singing, and generally looked like an executive at a boring corporate meeting.

“I like that guy,” I told my friends.

“No, you don’t,” they said. “He’s evil.”

“Yeah.” And my heart pitter-pattered.

Here was a guy that wasn’t full of surprises, unlike Lieberman who never felt quite trustworthy no matter the pointed D next to his name. Joe could swing either way (and he did) but I could trust that Cheney would be a smug, bitter opportunist. Cheney lent a corporate tone to the presidential race that indicated the leanings of the potential Bush administration. It would be an administration flooded with the worst of corporate culture: cronyism, secrecy, fraud, and authority, drunk on power and ever bent on the consolidation of additional power. At least with him I was sure I knew what we were up against, and to my overall disappointment, my predictions proved to be true.

But what I have always loved about Cheney is that he doesn’t pretend to be a good guy and he is completely uninterested in being perceived as one. I hate political posturing — so a dude that slouches over a table, elbows on the table even, during a nationally televised debate is a guy I can respect because this is a guy who is full-on, full-out, a piece of shit and will not make bones about it. Lord, he shot a guy in the face last year and got away with a mere apology while still circumventing nearly all of the questions about the event posed by major journalists. AND when the administration declared unending, unnecessary war on the Middle East everyone was dead sure Cheney’s fingers were in that pie. Which is why I’m so surprised with the pearl-clutching by the media with the so-called revelation that Cheney is a secretive, opportunist bastard hellbent on gaining and maintaining power. Didn’t we all know that already? Were we waiting for some holy confirmation engraved in stone?

I love that he’s predictable, I love that he’s criminal, I love that he is the Spiro Agnew to Bush’s Nixon, and I’m going to be sad when he’s back to the private sector profiting off his own administration’s evil in the Middle East. If evil happens when good people do nothing, Cheney happened to us. That’s our lesson learned, way back in 2000, and again in 2004 to our collective disappointment when only Ashcroft resigned, and again in 2006 when, again disappointingly, Rumsfeld resigned instead of Dick Vader himself — and we now know that if we care about our country’s actions in the world, merely voting for or against somebody more or less evil is not even close to enough. You never know how bad anything can get until it gets there, and for that I thank Mr. Cheney. I am always grateful for the reminder that if I am passive I am responsible, too.