MORFORD: A troubling lack of pure evil / Where to find a refreshing dose of vileness in the Age of Obama? 

it turns out classic, black-hearted evil still abounds in our culture. It's just a little less easy to spot.

Witness, say, the long-forgotten R.J. Reynolds tobacco company ("Passionately dedicated to evil since 1890"), currently struggling, like many supervillains of the past, to maintain its diabolical cred in this new era, especially given the drop-off in smoking rates and the company's diminishing capacity to bring death and disease to millions.

R.J. Reynolds has apparently been test-marketing a new tobacco product, some sort of melt-in-your-mouth pellet candy thing, called Orbs, tasty little lumps of toxic tobacco packaged in nifty metal tins, just like breath mints. No smoke, no inhaling, no spitting. Just pop one in your mouth and let the fresh, lethal goodness leech straight into your bloodstream. Cancer never tasted so good!

Pretty evil, yes? It gets better. How about the fact that the U.S. Senate is about to block the damnable product because it's so clearly, albeit subversively, aimed at attracting children? "Tobacco candy," they call it. "We're just giving undereducated, cancer-ready adults what we tell them they want," the evil corporation says. They're both right.

So there you have it. All told, I'm not that worried. This is America, after all. I know we can do it. We have the ingenuity, the imagination. Our megacorporatons and our neoconservative politicians and our gun-wielding sociopaths are famous the world over for innovating new and exciting ways to reek of pure evil.

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