Michael Malone - Weebly

did to humanity, people like Hayes fled immediately to
the sanctuary of conspiracy. The editor of the Day
admits they only changed the words, but would argue
that language is everything.
Hayes clings to meaning, and words have
definitions. Better, he says, to believe in conspiracy than
in nothing; better to believe that the big spiders of the
world secrete from their corrupt entrails a complex web
whose interconnections can be traced and plotted, than
to accept that all of us, flies and spiders both, dangle in
a webless void.
A.A. Hayes thinks a great deal about evil, for which
—as humanists do—he blames God. His faith in evil is
ecumenical; he sees its causes everywhere: our homes,
our hearts, our heads, our hormones; in short, our Fall.
We are all guilty of merciless possibilities. But Hayes
worries less about the evil of the individual heart, which
is, after all, so garishly dressed and loudly spoken that it
is not very hard to spot it in the crowd, and is almost
comforting, it's so old-fashioned: like evil in a
melodrama, a villain with a waxy moustache. Like
Hitler, against whom personally and with such a clear