At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It’s a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a danger. A world in which you will always need a gun, and to shoot somebody with it, instead of just lusting for both.
Because the world isn’t actually like that—because, in general, people are just people, and mostly want to live peaceably and get along with each other—most American conservatives must mainline Fox News (or Newsmax, or whatever) directly to their brains at all hours in order to remain within the fantasy that both sustains and degrades them. In this respect, Dick Cheney got luckier than most American right-wingers could ever dream. Fanatics with brown skin crashed commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, at a time when, as vice president under the harebrained and banally evil George W. Bush, Cheney for all practical purposes ran the most lethal death-dealing apparatus in the history of the world. He got to spend seven years deciding who the bad guys were and how to kill them. He got to scrawl the simplest possible moral calculus across the world in blood. He lived the dream.
