THERE'S NOTHING LIKE THE DELIGHT of sons turning against their fathers, except of course for when dad gets bothered enough to deliver his first good swak! Ah! I like to hear that crack! over and over again on my magnetic tape machine . . . it rings sweetest, the first cut that's the deepest. . . . And then there's the bruise that rises to flesh surface the coolest blue. Better still: pappy turning maniacal and getting systematic, compulsive about the abuse. He takes off his belt and folds it in half, locks the kid in a closet and genuinely (so pervasive is his hatred) forgets, puts out cigars before he's done smoking--on buttocks, back, back of thigh flesh. Then lights up again and finishes the smoke. That's a classic dad! Without, where would I be with each new generation of sissies and scouts? With, I'm guaranteed not only a herd of maladjusted youth--sadists and sulkers, meritless and delinquent--but (ah! the perfect, exothermic perpetuity of evil's entropy) the next generation of filial beater-uppers as well!
Conformity was the norm during the last decade, when, after squandering all that cruelty and invective in World War II, I could fund only a few causeless rebels in the ranks of the wretched teens--no more than the bad apples adults anticipate in any bunch--and a low-budget if extraordinarily resonant publicity blitz for mistrust and divisiveness managed from one of my first forays in electoral politics, the US congress.