Dick Cheney: Evil Loves a Vacuum

Revelations about the inner workings of the Bush Administration are coming fast and furious as the Bush-Cheney Administration comes to an ignominious end. The truism, ‘nature abhors a vacuum,’ goes a long way toward explaining Cheney’s power. But who and what will step into the vacuum now?

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that Cheney “became vice president well before George Bush picked him." Cheney “was going to be able to convince this guy [Bush] to pick him,” Wilkerson said.

Then, for all students of American and world history, he added words that should echo down through the ages: Cheney knew he would “be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."

The reason these vacuums existed, according to Wilkerson, is that “let’s face it… George Bush was a Sarah Palin-like president,” utterly lacking in foreign policy experience. The idea in 2000 was that Bush “was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," beginning with Cheney.

There is another vacuum however, which Wilkerson does not mention, a vacuum that Cheney didn’t even try to fill, or have his willful puppet George fill. That’s the moral and leadership vacuum left when America, the ‘leader of the free world,’ was clearly seen to be vacuous and leaderless.

The question to my mind is this: Can and will Barack Obama and his administration fill this vacuum? The answer, for a variety of reasons, is no.

For one thing, Obama is already using the same intellectual tricks to avoid responsibility that the Bush Administration perfected. As the world awaits some sign that conscience has returned to America with regard to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Obama recites his mantra that “we only have one president at a time.” At the same time, in his radio addresses, Obama speaks and acts very presidential, repeating, “We must come together as Americans to meet America’s economic problems.”

Obama knows full well that America effectively has no president as the country and world wait for Bush and Cheney to get out of Washington. He doesn’t even need to step into the vacuum now however, simply give some expression of concern, some indication that the kind of repression and violence the world protests in Gaza (repression and violence spawned and supported from the bowels of the ‘sole remaining superpower’) will not long endure.

The peril is penultimate. The post World War II political and economic world order lay in ruins. Multilateralism was dead on delivery in the early ‘90’s. America has been running on moral and spiritual empty since the end of the Cold War.

Though glaciers, indeed the polar ice caps, melt at an increasing rate, the most influential voices in America talk about “the glacial accretion of trust” that Obama will need to rebuild.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The vacuum that Cheney filled with the malevolence of secret power still exists. In fact, it grows wider and deeper. As Harold Pinter said, “there is a great abyss between what politicians say and the reality.” If America under Obama cannot fill it, and they cannot, then what will?

Never have individual citizens, thinking and acting without regard to borders and boundaries of all kinds, had so much potential to influence policies, and indeed, the course of human events. Yet at the same time never have so many people felt so defeated and dispirited, so overwhelmed by a world they do not understand and feel powerless to affect.

Is it any wonder that everywhere people draw back upon their families and friends, and back even further, upon solipsistic concern? Nonetheless, the vacuum exists and persists, and begs to be filled. Nonetheless, the field is open, and beckons to action.

Right action begins with solitary reflection, and coalesces into thinking together with those who are also doing the spadework within. We’ve had enough of leaders promising hope and delivering more of the same.

Obama may be a decent man, and may even turn out to be a good president. But he is a prisoner of the paradigm and policies that put him into power.

As the singer Annie Lennox said in her cry from the heart over Gaza: “For me it is a question of human rights, human values. It goes beyond Jewish, Muslim—nothing to do with any of that. There has to be a place ultimately where people come to the table. How many more people will be slaughtered before we get there?”

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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