"I did the right thing."

Dear George,

Divine Providence is your administration what a chef’s knife was to Jack the Ripper, an instrument of policy. The beauty of providence is its long-term vision. No matter how disastrous the consequences of a given decision, providence promises that all will be well in the end as long as we put events in the context of a geological timeline.

Providence allows the leader who is up to his neck in shit to declare, “I did the right thing.” Alan Hart says of that statement, “In discourse analysis it’s known as the false dilemma. You can’t argue with somebody, particularly a leader who insists that he was doing what was right because, implicitly you invite yourself to be seen as arguing for what is morally wrong.”

The leader who makes a fetish of Divine Providence lobotomizes the brain’s feel for decency. As soon as he is convinced that God is behind him, the leader will not shrink from wading through a waist-high lake of blood and viscera because the slaughter his decision causes is justified by the noble end his policy is pursuing.

From whence does this divine providence come? It is really quite simple: The ego farts and the soul is convinced the breath of the Spirit is upon it.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones