Pricks to the price of loyalty

"He was a man of small stature, with hair blanched rather by suffering and sorrow than by age." -- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, digital location 2116

A short message thread with John Murphy posed an interrogative "Have you heard of Tony Stiles?" The apparently attractive young man is looking for acolytes to join in Tony's campaign against human trafficking, a rather noble, if daunting sentiment. Mr. Murphy benefits from the price of loyalty, and indicated Mr. Stiles had the humane decency most of us profess to have, as altruism is deemed beneficial. Murphy followed me a short time, then ceased, my failure to hold his interest a metric of some sort, perhaps that I alternately flirt with libertarian ideas, then turn and critique them, or maybe I'm just a downer, and he is a more upbeat promoter for his employer, one who hasn't eviscerated him. 

Such evisceration, a knife to the heart carried as an entrapment, taken to its logical conclusion, often leads to the emotional implosion of Kenneth Halliwell, the prototype of homosexual rage against itself. Prick Up Your Ears was about abandonment against the growth of a dead playwright's horizon. Fusing that with an agenda to send a message to reform a paradigm leads to the same interior crawlspace. If the inability to let go, and the blunt force trauma of destitution moves in the direction of vengeance, the trigger for it eliminated, there is an emotional recoil against the punishment inflicted, and escaping Halliwell's fate becomes an odds game: accepting a bad act that removes you from your innocence, however inflicted with injustice, and then beating the law, which is achievable, but rarely successful.

The emotional investment of a good lieutenant is not the same as a homoerotic set of coordinates exposed and deemed unacceptable, although emotional fraying can conflate the two, but I was John Murphy 23 years ago, motivated by a leadership I wanted to promote, to elevate, to see it as a public conduit, and misjudged that of which it was capable. Not that the scar remains fresh, nor even palpable, as the 23 years have beaten against the brute strength, now swimming with oblivion, waiting to see if there is enough left for the veracity of vindication, or if I fade past midnight like so many quadriplegics looking at a sixtieth decade like a death warrant, or a veritable concentration camp.

Come spring I need to give my notice, another daunting endeavor, but a necessary therapeutic tool; I'll need to trust someone's transitory generosity on the heels of this event. We'll see, but I couldn't give Mr. Styles the personal loyalty which she once had at her disposal. The price of grief, and blow after blow after blow. Impotent even to support my immediate family.

Tossed in Through A Stretcher?

For by the 1970's, opposition to the allegedly uniformitarian strictures of the Enlightenment was rampant throughout universities in Europe and America," Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment, Vol 93--Joseph Mali, Robert Wokler,eds.

Though it surpasses anything on American public broadcast, Anno 1790 is a disgraced handmaiden in  comparison to Nicolas le Floch, so blatantly as it follows the French model. Jerome Robart may play his titled detective as sympathetic to the hysterical masses in France who would behead poor Louie 16 and his hated queen, but Jerome's Nicolas understands the aristocracy in its concourse with mercantilism, and his role as a chameleon between the court, his boss, and the bug-eyed piss pot Parisian barker, serves as the sinews trying to hold things together. Anno 1790 is somewhat more strident, messier, a bit gruesome, less playful, and no audience truly cares about corruption in Sweden's historical court. Without so much as a breath on Google, name a Swedish monarch.

Exactly. Where Floch is more piercing about sexual duplicity, Anno is more intense about the consequences of forbidden sexual liaisons, offers up incest, anarchy, serial child murder, the torture of the police state and the guerrilla strikes against it, abortion, the struggle for woman's suffrage, all in one breath, and Protestants could have hardly been so progressive in the fin de siecle close on Immanuel Kant as the greatest moral philosopher of the era, if in the 21st century, the doxology serves as a shield for corruption, negligence, in the essential incompatibility between individual choice and social conformity . This blogger's hostility toward homosexuality and its mimical evasions runs counter to personhood and choice, and counter to the necessity for a falling birth rate, the culling of the elderly, and the advocacy to terminate known disabled fetuses, and yes, I believe it would have been more merciful to let the majority of spastic quads die in birth.

For my regular viewers, seriously, what's my future, even supposing I pick up limited employment, pop a few tranquilizers? It is difficult to provide you with a description of how I might have defined success before biological entropy, but Presby's agents constantly browbeating me over cleanliness wasn't it. Like Steve Jobs, I stick my imaginary feet in the toilet. He died a cult icon over fetish for touch interface. I'll be lucky to leave Race Street in one piece, not pining for fame, but a sense of accomplishment, that is another matter.