Delusional, Greedy, Cowardly And A Bully
Almost forty years later, the feeling comes back.
Summoned by unwanted memory.
A singular moment during twelve years of being surrounded by murderers, high level drug smugglers, robbers, rapists - often genuinely frightening men. Except for that one event, I had never feared for myself.
The room, perhaps 30 feet wide and only slightly longer, was just shy of packed. The audience explained by the fact that this was the only show in town and a break from the monotony of day-to-day, always-the-same life.
Sunday Mass in an 1,800-man maximum security prison.
I had long before stopped wearing vestments, choosing instead a Roman-collared shirt and stole because, armed with a razor blade, a floridly schizophrenic inmate had destroyed a whole set of vestments months earlier.
I don’t remember the assigned readings of the day.
I just remember the darkness, the almost overwhelmingly heavy feeling.
Evil is palpable. A blanket that weighs you down. A dense, immaterial, sulfurous fog that fills the air.
That Sunday, it was burdensome. Like an invisible but very real cloud of inexplicable heaviness.
I couldn’t identify or pinpoint the source and the sensation did not hit all at once. It crept over me. Slowly.
By the time I had completed the Consecration, it was impossible to deny. He or it was there. Distributing Communion, I just wanted to be gone. Out of there.
“I’ve got to get out of here. Clean off the table,” I instructed my inmate clerk with the same breath I used for the final blessing and dismissal.
I simply needed to get as far away as possible.
Prison is a living case study in evil. Twelve years working in prison was like earning a Ph.D. in evil.
Evil is a coward. The cowardice of the bigoted (white) sergeant whose office was immediately next to mine will be to his eternal shame, even though he is (probably still) incapable of shame. Day after day, he summoned the same Venezuelan-born inmate to his office and, sitting behind his desk, gave a silent nod before two other inmates grabbed and pummeled the sergeant’s victim. He neither dirtied his hands nor broke a sweat. [When I learned what was happening, I was able to arrange an immediate – that night – transfer of the inmate.] The sergeant was never disciplined because evil rots from the inside and destroys systems and nations.
Evil thinks first and always about itself – himself or herself. There’s a rule young people should be taught repeatedly throughout adolescence and young adulthood. I learned the phrase in my first weeks in prison: “He who rolls first wins” and the first-roller is almost always the instigator and evil one. As an example (almost but not quite straight out of Law & Order): A group of kids gets involved in a crime, perhaps a robbery or an alcohol/drug-induced incident; the police separate them for interrogation; the first one to pin the blame on others and sign a confession gets off (or a lighter sentence). Evil will sing like a meadowlark and blame everyone else. It’s never evil’s fault.
The damage of evil rolls through two, three, maybe four generations. Consider the descendants of Cubans who spent years in Castro’s prisons and the children of the “disappeared” of Argentina’s or Chile’s dirty wars who were “adopted out” to friends of the regimes and are only now being “reunited” with the families from whom they were kidnapped. Ask the children of Ukraine who have been stolen from their families, culture and homeland by the Trump-friend Putin and “adopted” by Russians. Ask the sons and daughters of men and women who became addicted to (and died as a result of) the Sackler family’s “safe” opiate – Oxycontin. [Rejecting a settlement the family proposed in order to shelter their wealth in a yearslong case, Trump-appointed conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch noted, “they seek to do so without putting anything close to all their assets on the table.” The Sacklers will roll merrily along and thousands of children of overdosed and dead parents will be reared by their grandparents, aunts and uncles or complete strangers.
Evil is self-deluding and the delusions are contagious. I’ll never forget the federal prisoner and former bigtime drug importer who told me “I only did this (importing millions of dollars of cocaine) for my son. He’s autistic and I want to get him all the help possible.” Behind bars, he missed years of his son’s life. Or the third wife who spoke of her husband on Fox News on September 26, saying “He’s really a family man, he loves his family….” The “family man,” who once bragged (Opie and Anthony show. November 2005) "I mean, I won't do anything to take care of them. I'll supply funds and she'll take care of the kids. It's not like I'm gonna be walking the kids down Central Park." The family man who told Howard Stern, “She takes care of the baby and I pay all of the costs." Who paid to cover up an affair with a Playboy model while this third wife was pregnant with their only (his fifth) child and who had another affair just months after she gave birth. The family man who was recorded talking to television personality Billy Bush of Access Hollywood on the set of Days of Our Lives, where he was making a cameo appearance:
“I moved on her, actually… I moved on her,… I did try to **** her. She was married… I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married… I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ‘em by the….” (From The New York Times unedited transcription of the tape, October 8, 2016.)
Evil bullies. Endlessly. Bullies. Into submission. And expects others to ingest and repeat the lies.
Then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, January 11, 2021: “Let me be clear to you and I have been very clear to the President. He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No if ands or buts.”
McCarthy’s statement following his glad-handing, smiling January 28, 2021 meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago: Crickets.
Senator Mitch McConnell, speaking from the Senate floor, January 9, 2021. “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mr. Trump on April 11, 2021, addressing major Republican donors and referring to Senator McConnell: that “dumb son of a bitch.”
Vice President Mike Pence: We won’t even go there.
Evil is insatiably greedy. Enough will never be enough. The same politician who rails against China and its “unfair” trade policies vis-à-vis the United States has been busy hocking $59.99 God Bless the USA Bibles ($1,000 if you want one personally inscribed by the former president – who was not the author of a single verse). On October 9, 2024, CBS New, citing global trade records reviewed by The Associated Press, reported, “a printing company in China's eastern city of Hangzhou shipped close to 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States between early February and late March.
“The estimated value of the three separate shipments was $342,000, or less than $3 per Bible, according to databases that use Customs data to track exports and imports. Based on the Bible's retail price, the potential sales revenue could be about $7 million… If applied to his ‘God Bless the USA’ Bible, the [Trump advocated] 60% tariff on the China-printed books would boost its $59.99 price to $95.98… Trump didn't say where the ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles are printed, or what they cost; a copy hand-signed by the former president sells for $1,000. Trump also didn't disclose how much he earns per sale.”
Evil constantly portrays the other as “the enemy.” In a September 20, 2024 letter addressed “Dear Church,” Rev. Elizabeth A. Eton, Presiding President of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America wrote:
“The recent national spotlight on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, clearly has fanned flames of hate and stoked threats of violence. The rhetoric has created discord and mistrust of people who have already suffered civil unrest in their nation and been granted legal protection in the United States. History shows us that this kind of hatred often carries negative national and global consequences. Our church teaches that immigrants are children of God, made in God's image and worthy of respect and lives of dignity. God calls us to witness boldly to this truth when people tell dehumanizing lies that perpetuate racist tropes and support white supremacist narratives.
“As people of faith, we and others look to God's command to ‘not bear false witness against your neighbor’ (Exodus 20:16). Martin Luther explains: ‘We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light’ (Martin Luther, Small Catechism, Eighth Commandment; Book of Concord, page 353).”
Evil cares only about its own interests. According to an October 2,2024 165-page government brief, on January 6, 2021, when an aide rushed into the White House dining room where Mr. Trump sat, hoping the then president would “take action to ensure Pence’s safety,” the then leader of the Free World “looked at him and said only, ‘So what?’”
Evil never takes responsibility and puts the blame on others.
Donald Trump never took responsibility for the fact that COVID-19 exacted a higher infection-related and excess all-cause death toll in the United States than in 20 peer countries throughout the pandemic; he never publicly recognized that COVID-19 had less of an impact in the most-vaccinated states in the Delta and Omicron surges. (“COVID-19 and Excess All-Cause Mortality in the US and 20 Comparison Countries, June 2021-March 2022.” JAMA, November 18, 2022)
He never accepted responsibility for “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Evil never pardons a perceived slight or injury.
Imagine a grown man still nurturing as grudge almost eight years after he lost the popular vote in a presidential election and threatening to have his former opponent arrested and thrown in jail. Imagine as grown man – who avoided the draft with “bone spurs” and claimed not getting sexually transmitted diseases as his greatest challenges during the during the Vietnam era – threatening to arrest generals and former members of his own cabinet and imprisoning them in Guantanamo for publicly shaming him. Evil never pardons a perceived slight or injury.
During my almost twelve years in the Florida Department of Corrections, first timers received an eight-digit ID number. With each subsequent incarceration, they worked their way through alphabetical prefixes. One evening I stepped in to check on a “Bible study” being conducted by an outside volunteer group. Standing in the back of the room an inmate was waving a Bible over his head and declaring, “I don’t know how it happens! I don’t know how it happens! Every time I come to prison this Good Book ends up in my hands and I get saved!”
I returned to my office and looked up his records. He was on his “M number” – his fourteenth time in state prison.
Fourteen bibles.
Fourteen times “getting saved.”
Sometimes, some things never seem to change.
That’s not to say things – even evil - cannot change. Whether yours is any of the more than 2,000 editions of the Bible published in the United States or was printed in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou by the New Ade printing company and marketed by CIC Ventures, a company owned by Mr. Trump, it still contains some version of Micah 6:8:
This alone, O Man, does the Lord ask of you.
This, my son, and nothing more:
To act justly.
To love tenderly.
And to walk humbly with your God.