Revisiting “Axis of Evil”: Liberal Ironist and Shepard s God of Hell

United States adopted the nineteenth century British model of colonialism for the twentieth century, specially in the exercise of controlling people s perspectives within the country while undertaking the adventure of directly interfering in other countries’ affairs. When President Bush addressed three countries around the world as Axis of Evil on January 29, 2002, he was following the same route. Nevertheless, coining the phrase was not enough, and making people believe it required the main task that became possible through creating an intellectual atmosphere in which the focus was to promote the picture of good and evil embedded in the addressing of Axis of Evil. Consequently, any voice out of tune was hushed instantly, even if it meant Sam Shepard who had previously won great fame on the American stage by his family plays. Shepard never stopped on the notion of revealing the multiplicity of self, interacting with different geopolitical situations. As such, it is no wonder that his God of Hell is pursuing the same aim, a play totally neglected by the critics and reviewers for being too political and incoherent. Nevertheless, the research at hand is to demonstrate that Shepard is a true intellectual or, in Rorty s term, a liberal Ironist, able to entangle himself from the tissues of the aforementioned cultural war by considering people s susceptibility to humiliation.