I confess to the horrible crime of betrayal, and divided loyalties; I am the spawn of one father and the spiritual son of two others, both as horribly flawed as the natural one, and I am beginning to fear that I am channeling all three of them. Sybil herself (or at least the opportunism of her psychologists/biographers) couldn't have put up with the energetic belligerence of three such overwhelming personalities. I've got a grip on the edges of reality, but then I spent a lot lot of years clinging to things by sheer stupidity and gall. Let's just hope the synapses and the integrity of the flesh last a few more years....
BETRAYAL. Dante (a brilliant student of a very particular school) understood the very essence of aboriginal humanity: the blackest and most viscerally heinous sin is betrayal. Rhesus monkeys understand the essence of this, and a slightly more sophisticated cousin named Dante buried his favorite enemies in the ice for it. If you read the Inferno or any modern renditions of it, ALL sins the flesh is born to ultimately boil down to betrayal.
Now, I can hear you fucking cynics whining already.....SIN, you say, what the fuck, were you born in the 16th goddamn century or something? I DO have to admit that sin sounds a bit antiquated and overly specific, and certainly a violation of general spirit of ironic whimsical optimism we 'enjoy' presently...however the pinko tree-hugging beardy weirdies have ignored the stark fact that the universe really doesn't GIVE a flying <explitive deleted> about their commitment to a sustainable way of life.
SIN admittedly is a terrible word, and one that has recently acquired a bit of <butt-fucking predetory hypocritical pious jackass unpresidential m****f*** but I digress> disregard and ambiguity in recent years; but Jesus, the crazy Esseneite terrorist Maccabeetista/hippy that he actually appears to have been, would have been the first to admit that a bit of moral compass is easy to discover and impossible to lose, if you really have decided to be an honest person rather than a cabbage or something. Jon Stewart, may we draw bated breath at his name, realized that we cannot pretend to believe that our ambitions really constitute the essence of a meaningful life if we forget, even for an instant, who truly suffers in this life, and who lives off the blood of those who suffer. 'Vuestra Merced', my hairy pink ass....
Which, apparently, (or so my conscience, or at least the demon of consistency, tells me), leads back to betrayal.
Whew. It is a kind of mental hari-kiri one must commit, to admit that one just cannot stand the pretensions of one's mentors; the terrible flaws that they threw up (smirk) as virtues and principles; the beliefs that they swore they were too wise to own. It is not maturity that I recognize, but birth. Fuck manhood, that was a shill and a load of horseshit from start to finish. Give me the pain and shock and blood of birth any day. SHOCK puts the fear of death in you, and someday we'll know enough to make that a right of passage. Millions of aboriginal traditions can't be TOO far wrong....
It comes to this; I have developed a terrible guilty pride in the metephorical body slams and face plants I've delivered to my septa/octogenarian political adversaries in recent years. Their dearest favorite sons have disillusioned them vastly, and it enrages and horrifies them to have to face up to the fact that, after all these years, they are going to have to THINK again. They are going to have to actually use those hard-fought skills of critical thinking to deploy and defend their own innate sense of honesty.
Heinlein, Solzhenitsyn, Howard and Vance had their particular blind spots, but the very essence of shock is the realization that the universe is NOT going to slide a comfy sling under your ass if you feel a bit lazy....fanatics, beware, for there be Tygers here. Yea, oh brothers, you must become more than your teachers, you must transcend and defeat their flaws in order to discover new and more fantastic flaws that neither you nor Dunning-Kruger can comprehend.
