In Bush's speeches this resolve culminates in a vision of himself and America as instruments of the will of God. "Evil" could inhabit the 2002 State of the Union address not simply because of Bush's fluency in the language of faith but because of the coincidence of conviction and the broader culture of relativism in which the term evil floats so freely. "Evil" is powerful, eficacious, because its very lack of meaning (or the excesses of meaning overdetermining it, which is the same thing) enables the term to produce a conviction efect: no matter what "evil" means, people can be confident in Bush's conviction-he knows.3 Hearing the 2002 State of the Union address, we believed that he was convinced there was an axis of evil.4
Many Evils
More obvious explanations for the presence of ''evil" in the 2002 State of the Union address are, one, the ready availability of a discourse of fear and terror folowing the events of September u, and, two, the prominence of religion in American life. Evil clearly flourishes ih these discursive environments. 5 But these quick explanations distract us from the pervasiveness of evil and the multiplicity of its modes of appearance. Hence they fail to account for the evil in Bush's speech.
The first explanation regarding the discourse of fear and terror repeats the familiar (but nonetheless wrong) mantra that Sept<sub>�</sub>mber u changed everything.6 It is said 9 I n exposed the pernicious danger of postmodern relativism and the soul-destroying impact of irony. It demonstrated the persistence of evil in the world. And it reconfigured reality by chalenging us, the ci ilized (according to Bush and Samuel Huntington), to confront; wage war on, evil.
Accounting for "evil" in the president's speech by appealing to this changed environment, however, fails to acknowledge the setting of these claims-a discursive habitat nourished through the culture wars long preceding 9 I n-and grows out of the assumption that over the past forty years Americans have lost their moral sense, their capacity to speak seriously about evil. This loss is said to be significant, a truncating of the moral world insofar as the category "evil" is necessary for evaluating experiences, harms, suferings, and dangers. Concern with the amputation of Americans' moral sense, moreover, shares its discursive habitat with critical claims regarding the culture of irony, a fecund environment already in the post-World War II era as the presumption of the general secularization of American society took hold?
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