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Every ex-Catholic (or “lapsed” Catholic, since the Church likes to think of itself as a sort of Holy Mafia that you can only leave in one very specific way) should probably see “Agnes of God.” (That’s the one about the nun and the dead baby. And this is not a spoiler.) Mom and I saw the excellent Summer Repertory Theatre production tonight at Santa Rosa JC.
You know, I really wanted to write about Judith Miller and Matt Cooper and Karl Rove and Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. I was sort of hoping I’d find something in the play to tie in with that political melodrama, but it was way too metaphysical for the Bush White House. They would have been scandalized by the story of a young woman who seems to be pulling the wool over her own eyes. (They wouldn’t have been embarrassed, though, because they’re incapable of it.)
Only three characters appear on stage in this play (two nuns and a psychiatrist). But for some reason it sometimes seems that the stage is crowded with hazy figures from these women’s past. The nuns think they’ve escaped from the harshness of the world by insulating and isolating themselves and being dedicated to a higher principle, something they can’t see but believe in anyway. They need it to help them deal with how brutal life can be.
In a way, that’s what Rove does for the president. He’s the Mother Superior who thinks, so that his disciple doesn’t have to. Sometimes it gets in the way of good judgment, but that layer of deniability allows them to do the see-no-evil thing with the press and public. What do you want to do tonight, Karl? I don’t know, George, what do you want to do?
Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.
The play explores the question of whether some secrets are too painful or too personal to be revealed. It even goes to the matter of whether it’s the world’s business what happens behind closed doors. In the end, the answer is that it does matter, to the degree that the world is affected. If a baby dies, the world has the right to know the reason.
And if a thousand soldiers and thousands of civilians die, the world has a right to know the reason for that, too. That’s what Joe Wilson believes, and it’s why he exposed the fact that the administration based its contention that Saddam was purchasing nuclear material in Niger on documents known to have been forged. Rove didn’t want that to get out, or at least he didn’t want us to believe it, so he called Cooper and outed Wilson’s wife as a CIA agent.
It’s as simple as that. They were willing to expose an undercover intelligence agent (Plame) and undermine the credibility of the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq who actually stood up to Saddam (Wilson), just to keep the public from learning the truth about their trumped up reasons for going to war. Rove did it, and he has now spent the last two years lying about it. Indictable? Probably not. Ethical? Definitely not. | 
