Part 1.5 = SPITE
A man adopts a crocodile and it injures him and eats his child. What was the man thinking? Sometimes, in the human animal kingdom, it is also not always good to put blind faith in reptilian fundamentalists, either. Because they might punch you in the nose, steal your alligator-skin wallet, and abduct your child, all the while thinking they are doing you a necessary favour, since the only way to learn about REAL LIFE, according to them, is to experience a mugging up-close and personal, and thereby also be converted into the same fear-driven cult of fundamentalism, left or right. You can't trust anti-abortion activists, or, you can't trust blacks, or "abortionists," according to them. Choose your anecdote, and together, in fear, we shall generalise and project...
A woman adopts a chimp and it mauls her companion, out of jealousy. What was she thinking? Didn't she know that chimps are not people, and are many times stronger, and perhaps many more times more ruthless. They are deficient in empathy... Or... and/or... Maybe it was a fault of the human, not understanding the needs of the chimp, to be left alone in a natural environment in the first place. To not have its forest cleared and polluted. To be allowed to be the king, of sorts, that it feels meant to be, it its millions-years niche... Maybe not so smart to adopt a crocodile in the first place. Maybe not so smart to treat a fundamentalist with sensibility, or a GOPper with trust, or a fanatical pro-lifer with respect, or an, "abortionist," (whatever that may be), with too much leeway. Maybe not so smart, either, to trust your kids to a pedophile or a serial killer. Because, I'm sorry idealists and religionists, man is sometimes also animal - and, sometimes, in places where he is not, his opportunism will imagine he is...
For just as the chicken crossed the road, so too did the scorpion wish to cross a river. (A little athropomorphising here, for what scorpion thinks to cross a river in the first place? And what's a river doing in the desert, ha ha...). So, the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river on his back, (and promises him, I dunno, a bundle of mortgage derivatives)...
So the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, "But don't, you know," says the frog, "don't sting me, OK?" Really, that's basically all the frog is interested in. Not being stung.
And the scorpion says, "Ha! Why on earth would I sting you? You're my ride across the river. It would make no sense for me to sting you!"
The frog, a naive progressive, (i.e., a, "frickin retard"), takes the scorpion at his word, which sounds perfectly rational. (Similarly, many people assume Republicans won't tamper with voting machines, and continue to vote, election after election)..
In the middle of the river, everything is going swimmingly, when the scorpion twists a bit and, there you go, out comes the stinger and it strikes the frog. The frog is alarmed and in pain, and shouts out, "Why did you sting me?! You said you would not sting me!"
And the scorpion says, "Ha, ha, ha... Look. Who are we kidding? I am supposed to sting you. I'm a frickin scorpian! It's IN MY NATURE!" And down the both of them went, bubble bubble...
Spite. That is the stuff of our anthropomorphised scorpion, who would smite the sun if the time were right. The sting of the scorpion is like the spit of spite - the petty attack with great moral affront, which could sink armies if the game were right. Unfortunately, spite often does not think or plan rationally or progressively or tactically. It just spits. And, often, the result is that it brings down the spitter along with the smitten. The spiteful person, often a blind fundamentalist, referring to abstractions, feels it is IN HIS NATURE to attack, let the spit fall where it may, even if it blows back and brings him/her down as well. Lost in a game, mistaken for a contest of LIFE OR DEATH, he spits on words - he spits with words or symbols - and so is felled by realities greater than words or symbols. And, like the dutiful suicide bommer, this is often thought to be a noble mission. Attempting to impress some proxy parent, gleaming down on him and his eternal narcissism.
The world of spite is a lost world. But it turns in many many people, mostly in shy closet-NAZIs or bully-wannabes, who are the first to back a bully who would sink their entire empire. A kind of death wish. Horses rushing back in to their burning barn.
There is a dark veil of spite descended on our land, which we must all negotiate, like gossamer gauze or a deadly spider's web. As if walking on eggshells, no longer knowing whom to trust anymore - who shall next try to stab us in the back, for no predictable reason, because that resentful person feels to do so is entirely, "within their nature." Oh, jolly well for this person, fancying him/her-self of such supermanly powers as to wield great powers of spite which, like voodoo, should thunder about planets like bowling balls, but really only falls like a droplet to hell, sizzling. These great towering Easter Island egos topple so readilly like iron filings once the magnet is withdrawn. And it is a damn shame. For all of us.
One point of society, or civilisation, is to allow us to choose to rise out of our animal nature, and so to, together, defend the interest of our commons, of our children. This transcendental will is the only hope we have. If we, on the other hand, allow our failed expectations to pervert into a never-ending faucet of resentment, which only perpetuates our primate, animal strifes to such extent that they are not even useful for the survival of our children, or of ourselves, much less of evolution, then spite is nothing but a mass suicide. A mass leap of lemmings towards genocide but off a cliff instead. It is not that German soldiers and citizens were obedient to orders. It was that they were convinced that their part in the conspiracy of sadism was somehow THE "RIGHT" THING TO DO.
And to such abstractions - become addictions - we are all vulnerable. So, watch out now...
Beware of mire.
Spite seems to be a central theme in the heart of many a fundamentalist.
The spigot can be turned off only by love. If one manages not to perish in the process.
Although, something may also said for complete sensory deprivation...
Whatever you do, don't enable a scorpion.