The other day some Republican commentator described President Obama as the Antichrist.
In the Amanda Knox case in Perugia, the prosecuting counsel described her thus: 'She was a diabolical, satanic, demonic she-devil. She was muddy on the outside and dirty on the inside. She has two souls, the one you see before you and the other.'
Does this medieval language stem from the fact that we see so much detail these days that we have to distil everything into a concentrated form? Is this a new Manichaeism deriving from a surfeit of internet facts and TV soap-operas, so that everything has to be unbelievably good or unbelievably bad, God or the Devil, for us to understand it?
Are we losing our ability to be shocked, so like a drug addict we need an ever stronger dose?
Obama is not the Antichrist, Amanda Knox is not a she-devil. That doesn't make them necessarily good people, just people like us.
PS translation by The Guardian, spelling by me, character size by Google
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