Lucifer Walks Among Us

A few months ago, this remarkable exchange was published in the pages of New York Magazine:

Can we talk about your drafting process—
[Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.
You do?
Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.
Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.
Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.
No.
It’s because he’s smart.
So what’s he doing now?
What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

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 The person answering the questions is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, noted roadblock to American cultural progress.  Antonin is an unusual name in American society; it seems like an extension of "Anton," as in, for example, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who died, or at any rate dematerialized, in 1997 in San Francisco.

I wasn't particularly surprised by the Scalia interview. I've always thought this black-robed clown was a nut case and probably the most overrated intellect in the history of American jurisprudence.  The passage quoted above is not the stupidest part of the interview, just the most relevant for present purposes.

Scalia is without doubt the single person in the United States most responsible for the eight-year Bumbleocracy of George W. Bush.  While the legal fight was still on in Florida at the end of 2000, while the Bush and Gore camps were clogging the courts of Florida with lawsuit after lawsuit, Scalia signalled to the Bush camp that things would work out for him in the Supreme Court, a prejudicial statement without precedent or equal in my own legal experience.  The conservative judges, led by Scalia, managed to halt the recount in Florida on the theory that counting all the votes in the Sunshine State would cause irreparable harm to Bush's chances of winning.  So, enough was enough.  Bush's final margin of victory of 371 votes in Florida was sufficient for Scalia, and that was that.

George W. Bush, as we know, was not a scientist.  Unlike his opponent, he was not deeply versed in the technical details of global warming, or environmental issues generally.  He was aware that all this talk about curtailing the use of fossil fuels was not a good development for his fellow oil men, so Bush took the position that decisions on global warming should be based on "science," by which he meant different science, and by that he meant pseudo-science.  Thus, the United States, which tends to set the lifestyle pace for the world generally, did nothing and we added at least another eight years to the long run-up to the irrevocable tipping point where a runaway greenhouse effect and abrupt climate change (which may in fact be underway now) become inevitable.

Thus, whether one believes in the "Great Man" theory of history or not, it does not seem too much to say that Antonin Scalia is responsible for the coming extinction of the human and all other higher animal species.

Taking us back to the interview above.  How does Antonin Scalia know so much about the Devil?  It makes me suspicious, frankly.  Scalia knows that Old Scratch no longer makes pigs run over cliffs, that he's "smarter" now, and that the Prince of Darkness has settled on a strategy of sowing unbelief among people.  That's a lot of inside information for one tubby Supreme Court judge, if you ask me.

Might the Devil want to speed up the process of human extinction?  This seems less mysterious. In the fateful, apocalyptic battle between the forces of Light & Dark, Lucifer would want to do anything he can to mess God up, and what better way to screw up the Grand Finale of Revelations than to finish off all the people before Jesus has a chance to return?  Don't think for a minute that Satan has gotten over that drubbing he took when he was tempting Christ with no payoff. Two thousand years is not too long to nurse a grudge when you're the Devil.

So maybe the case that Antonin Scalia is Satan is not ironclad (not that half-baked theories ever got in the way of Scalia himself reaching binding conclusions; see, e.g., Bush vs. Gore).  But Scalia as the Devil's agent-in-place, his right-hand man?  Look, the guy's idea of "bird hunting" is to blast waterfowl at point-blank range as they emerge from a cage, sitting alongside his porcine buddy Dick Cheney in a "duck blind," as they listen to the hum of Cheney's battery-powered circulatory system. It's probably true that Scalia is not smart enough to be the Devil himself, but maybe he makes the grade as Satan's useful idiot.