Every morning, we awaken to a new moral outrage from our president. It is hard to keep our equilibrium. Today, after his oil blockade of Cuba has caused a complete breakdown of the energy grid of the whole island, he speaks of “the honor of taking Cuba.”
Since the morning after the election of Donald Trump to his first term as president, the world, at least as I had understood it, has appeared to have moved off its axis. With every year since it seems to have tilted askew more and more. The disorientation has been dizzying. A heart of darkness seems to have overtaken our nation.
In 1979, the acclaimed director of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, took Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, reimagined it, and set it in 1968 during our war in Vietnam. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is an ivory trader gone rogue and insane as he murdered Africans in the Congo. His last words were, “ The horror, the horror,” a “cry that was no more than a breath,” as he looked at the horror of his own atrocities and those he witnessed in the colonial imperialism in Africa.
Stephen Shoemaker
Those same words were the last uttered by Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. Kurtz had gone insane and murderous and was being worshipped as a god in Cambodia. A military mission was begun to go there and assassinate him. Again, as in Heart of Darkness, the enigmatic words of Colonel Kurtz may have conveyed his final recognition of the evil of his actions and the emptiness of his own soul.
Coppola said later about the war:“We were in the jungle. There were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”
The movie eerily and tragically reflects the time we are living in. The ancient Hebrews when confronted by sacrilege and evil action would tear their garments and put on sack cloth and ashes. What would we wear today? Ashes on our foreheads? Cry “horror”? That would speak truth.
Perhaps the most famous line in the movie is uttered by Col. Billy Kilgore as he watches our helicopters spraying fire on the fields, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Donald Trump loved the line. In 2017 he, now president, botched the line while speaking to some veterans’ groups: “I love the smell of Agent Orange in the morning.”
As ICE invaded Chicago last year in its rampage against immigrants, Trump, again enamored with Kilgore’s character, created an AI image of himself in Kilgore’s uniform, with helicopters over the Chicago skyline, saying, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
“We are witnessing the ‘heart of darkness’ at the heart of our nation’s leaders.”
We are witnessing the “heart of darkness” at the heart of our nation’s leaders, in particular our president and our Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (he prefers “Secretary of War”). As Hegseth has executed the illegal war in Iran, “Operation Epic Fury,” he has spoken the most blood-curdling words with a gleam in his eye.
“America … is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. … No stupid rules of engagement, … no politically correct wars. May we prosecute the remainder of this operation in a manner that honors them (the fallen soldiers). No apologies, no hesitation, epic fury. … Peace thorough strength, the warrior ethos, lethality, unity of purpose, those are not slogans. They are the beating heart of what it means to wear the uniform, that uniform.”
Terms like “maximum lethality” have rolled off his tongue. “No quarter, no mercy,” he exclaimed. The term “no quarter” means killing, not capturing prisoners, so none survive. The phrase and the actions it describes have been identified as a war crime since the Hague Convention of 1899.
Trump talked with glee about our bombing of Karg Island, a key oil export hub in Iran. He said the bombing accomplished its mission but added he might bomb it again “just for fun.”
“The horror, the horror.”
In 1952, Reinhold Niebuhr warned of the “inordinate” and unparalleled power of America and the temptations of our strength. Our trail of wars since that time have proven the dangers of such power.
He wrote: “The evil in human history is regarded as man’s wrong use of his unique capacities. The wrong use is always due to some failure to recognize the limits of his capacities of power, wisdom and virtue.”
And as for Hegseth, our Christian Crusader who has invoked divine warrant for our war in Iran, Niebuhr wrote: “We are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire.”
Of the heart of darkness that grips our land and our leaders, we need the words of Jeremiah and Jesus.
Jeremiah, who said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?”
And from Jesus: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intensions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander.”
So we refuse to call evil good, and we repudiate the heart of darkness in our midst. As the prophet Isaiah said: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”
Ecclesiastes warns: “Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the human heart is fully set to do evil.” And with sackcloth and ashes we say, “horror” and, because our own hearts are never pure, we pray with King David, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”
Stephen Shoemaker most recently served as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He previously served as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.