Cockadoodle Doo

Denial of St. Peter (1660) - Rembrandt

So it turns out that Gonzales Aides Broke Laws in Hiring, an internal Justice Department Report Concludes. This sort of behavior is what every upstanding Republican fears that the Democrats will do if they happen to capture the White House this fall, and simultaneously it is what every upstanding Democrat knew would be uncovered about the current Republican administration.

And both would be correct. This is the doubling rivalry of René Girard's mimetic theory in a nutshell. For those who take the time to be impacted by these anthropological insights, it leads to the conclusion (a) that all of us fall into such "funny business," as Gil Bailie would call it, but (b) we rarely see it when it happens to occur in our own psyche.

It takes a converted self to be able to own up to this reality about ourselves as mimetic beings, a contrition born of remorse, akin if not identical to Saint Peter's hearing the rooster crow after he denied Our Lord (Mtt 26, 69-75). And even then, it takes a rootedness in our vast human neediness nearly every single moment in order not to fall back into a smug, self-satisfied pleasure in one's own insightfulness.

Anything else is sheer illusion and denial.