One recent morning, Rob asked if I had read Maureen Dawd’s column abut Dick Cheney’s new book. When I said I hadn’t, he said, “Read it. The only believable part is at the end.”
I hadn’t had my coffee yet or even a bite of breakfast and frankly didn’t know if I could muster the courage to wade through any column about Cheney and his new memoir, In My Times.
In my mind, Cheney remains a Darth Vader, a man who actually ran the country for eight years and nearly drove the U.S. into oblivion. He was the guy who backed torture (enhanced interrogation, Cheney called it) the invasion of Iraq, and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. And that’s just for starters. For all we know, he may have written George Bush’s speeches, in particular the ones about mushroom clouds and Armageddon and be afraid, be very afraid. About midway through the Bush years, I couldn’t even look at Cheney without feeling the urge to vomit.
Darth Vader, if you recall, wore that weird black helmet so that he could breathe. When stripped of that helmet, he looked like the pathetic, dying man he was, who could merely gasp for breath. Cheney, it turns out, is a man without a pulse.
In July of this year, he had heart surgery to implant a mechanical pump known as a ventricular assist device. It’s used in a small, but growing number of people whose heart failure is so severe that they would die in a few months without it. In other words, Cheney was at the heart failure stage where he was severely short of breath, could only walk a few steps, or was confined to a chair or bed for most of a given day. The pump doesn’t mimic the heart’s beat. There’s no beat at all.
I found a curious synchronicity in Cheney’s end of life surgery. A man who claims he would order torture again, who takes no responsibility for anything he did during his eight years as VP, who is responsible for the destruction of thousands of lives in Iraq, who lied to Colin Powell about WMDs in Iraq, who outed a CIA agent, has no pulse. No heart. Interesting symbolism, right?
The second synchro is this: during the weeks that Cheney, apparently in a coma, recuperated from his heart pump surgery, he claims he had a “prolonged dream” that he was in a villa in Italy. “It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there,” he wrote. “I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of papers.”
That was the part Rob found believable. Me, too. His description has all the hallmarks of a near-death experience.
“So it must mean the universe forgave Cheney,” Rob remarked after I had read Dawd’s column and burst out laughing. “The guy was in an Italian villa, sipping cappuccinos every day.”
“Either it’s forgiveness or it’s all bullshit,” I replied.
“You think Cheney’s lying about that villa stuff?”
“No. I mean, maybe what we believe is all wrong, that it’s all BS, there’s no afterlife, no karma, no accountability, that Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz and all the rest of them will be joining Cheney in the afterlife, in his Italian villa to drink cappuccinos and plan their next assault on freedom and truth.”
I run into this wall from time to time and promptly call Carol Bowman, for a reality check. Carol is the author of two books on reincarnation and a past-life therapist who has regressed thousands of people. She’s convinced we live many lives, that we bring issues for one life into another, that we’re here to resolve and move forward.
But really, the bottom line is that we don’t know. Yes, there are signs, and it may be that synchronicity is the language of this particular terrain. It may be the best language we have at this time and place, at this juncture between what is and what is to come. But is it incontrovertible scientific proof? Well, maybe.
In the meantime, as Maureen Dawd says, think about “Caesar and his cappuccino.”
Or, as Carol Bowman says, Believe.
