The story of how the Bush administration used that primordial rage to build a Rube Goldberg-like bridge all the way to Baghdad is an age-old tale of wartime hysteria, racism and ignorance. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was part of the Arab/Muslim world, and in conditions of hysteria it becomes possible to sell people on grand clash-of-civilization theories. After 9/11, the neocons in the Bush administration insisted that the Arab/Muslim world had become an incubator of terrorism and violent religious extremism, and we needed to punish it. Traumatized and enraged by the terrorist attacks, and ignorant of Middle Eastern history and politics, Congress and most of the media went along. And most of the American people, looking for an enemy to blame, went along.
Just how potent the forces of vengeance and resentment are can be gauged by the wild popularity of right-wing figures like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage. These resentful demagogues -- who sounded like Conrad's demented Kurtz, hysterically calling for Bush to take the gloves off and exterminate the brutes -- gave voice to the inchoate passions of millions of Americans, who correctly perceived that the Bush administration, for all its fancy talk, was really bent on good old all-American revenge. Once unleashed, the desire to take vengeance is very hard to stop. The violent self-righteousness of war supporters like Andrew Sullivan, who accused opponents of making up a coastal Fifth Column, stemmed from their certainty that revenge was not just morally justified, but necessary. America was finally unshackled, its noble and "authentic" fury unleashed; anyone who got in the way was a combination of Neville Chamberlain and Tokyo Rose.
Revenge is a universal impulse, as old as humanity. It is enshrined in the lex talionis, the notion of "an eye for an eye" espoused by the Code of Hammurabi (written circa 1760 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia, a land that is now putting that precept to dreadful uses) and the later Mosaic Law of Judaism. It underlies the concept of retribution, which is one of the pillars of criminal justice. Similarly, just war theory accepts that punishing an uncorrected wrongdoing constitutes a just cause for war. A paradigmatic case would be Pearl Harbor: The U.S. was justified in declaring war on Japan to punish it for its unprovoked attack.
But -- leaving aside the fact that we had no actual cause that would justify punishing or taking revenge on Iraq -- revenge is a primitive form of justice, one that civilized societies have always struggled to sublimate into a higher form. As Francis Bacon wrote, "Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out." Individual revenge undercuts the legal capacity of the state; it is only justifiable when legitimate state authority fails (hence the plotlines of a million Hollywood movies).
Which takes us back to the dramatic genre that Bush has plunged us into. Jacobean revenge tragedy (so called because it flourished during the early 17th century reign of King James, who followed Elizabeth) is a dark and disturbing literary form, spiritually gloomy, grotesquely violent and often shockingly obscene. Revenge plays, which were influenced by the dramas of the Roman playwright Seneca as well as the writings of Machiavelli, are almost invariably set in a mythical Italy where every evil flourishes, usually a ducal court ruled by a despotic monster and populated by panderers, poisoners, prostitutes and evil courtiers. Their protagonists are bitter, obsessed men bent on revenge for earlier misdeeds, who engage in complex subterfuges to kill their enemies, usually in the most painful and bizarre way possible (they often taunt their dying victims). Ghostly visitations, real or feigned madness, and various skulls and other body parts, which are sometimes used as murder weapons, are typical. (In Thomas Middleton's "The Revenger's Tragedy," the protagonist, unsubtly named Vindice, kills one of his enemies by smearing a skull with poison, then tricking his lustful victim into kissing it.) In the climactic scene, the protagonist often presents a masque or a play within a play, during which he kills the villain or villains, and is usually killed himself. (Unlike Seneca's Greek dramatic models, but like Saddam's execution, the deaths in revenge tragedies take place very much onstage.)
Jacobean revenge tragedy reflected a disillusionment and spiritual crisis that gripped England after the reign of Elizabeth, a loss of Renaissance optimism. Always dark, the genre became increasingly nihilistic. Its protagonists, initially upright figures, become more and more unpleasant, until they are morally indistinguishable from their enemies. In one of the bleakest revenge tragedies, John Webster's "The White Devil," one of the main characters, Lodovico, vows vengeance before he has even been the victim of any wrongdoing. Their world becomes one of free-floating hatred. Their characters, devoid of depth, move meaninglessly about like chessmen on a vast board until they fall bloodily over.
The grand exception to the narrow, terror-filled vision of revenge tragedy is, of course, Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Hamlet also grapples with revenge, but unlike all other revengers, he questions its very nature, its cosmic justification. Caught between the blood-for-blood imperative that was still alive in 16th century England, and the Christian injunction to overcome evil with good, and rising above both, Hamlet raises questions about morality, duty and existence itself that are not even dreamed of in other revenge tragedies, and that continue to inspire and unsettle us today.
It may seem a stretch to compare the political beliefs of George W. Bush and his right-wing supporters with a death-obsessed, grimly self-destroying dramatic genre that is now more than 400 years old. Certainly the parallels cannot be drawn too closely. But the comparison sheds light on Bush's moral vision. Like a protagonist in a revenge tragedy, Bush sees himself as surrounded by evil, one-dimensional villains, whom he has sworn a solemn oath to defeat. Like Vindice, he figuratively carries around a skull -- in his case the shield of a policeman who died on 9/11 -- to spur himself on.
But like so many revenge tragedy protagonists, Bush is fatally flawed. By taking revenge against a foe who had not actually injured him, he opened a Pandora's Box of gratuitous violence, one he cannot now close. In a larger sense, he is trying to play the part of Vindice in a Shakespearean world, one far too complex to be comprehended by his black-and-white morality. By failing to grasp that the world is larger than his simplistic vision, and insisting that he must carry on to the climax and kill a villain who can no longer be identified, Bush is trapping us in a failed chess game, condemning us to a bloody perpetual check. He is threatening to repeat dramatic history and himself become a villain -- a blood-drenched avenger no longer morally distinguishable from the evildoers he is fighting.
And the final act in this grim drama, Bush's absurd call for a meaningless "surge," resembles one of those hideous masques in revenge plays during which the protagonist kills his enemies, then is killed himself. This little play-within-a-play may demonstrate Bush's resolve and put off the unhappy ending, but it is real men and women who will die for his dumb show.
Bush's revenge tragedy has run for far too long. It's time to bring the curtain down.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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