The awful truth is that the response most great writing about wickedness provokes in us is neither "Yes please," nor "No thanks," but "You too?" The collapse of genre boundaries has laid different forms of expression open to attack, on the basis (partly) of often wilful misunderstandings of how they work and what they do.
Lost is all ruthless and grim and negative, and it talks about wickedness and darkness and depression.
And if God was upset about the wickedness of Nineveh, what must God think today about the wickedness of America -- where we build nuclear weapons, serve evil corporations, let the poor suffer and die, bomb our enemies, spy on everyone, and destroy the environment?
The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness.
Blair was "a true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein".
Expect talk about Europe's politicians demonstrating that they are stronger than markets, and lots of bluster about the wickedness of Anglo-Saxon "speculators".
"I accept everything that the Bush administration says about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein," Rieff says, "but I do think it's a revolution too far".
In the bizarre moral universe of basketball, summer basketball has the virtue of being honest, at least on occasion, about its wickedness.
With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel's pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality.
And in films more explicitly about corporate wickedness, like "Michael Clayton" and "The Constant Gardener," they are portrayed as willing to do just about anything to protect the bottom line.
