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.