While I'm on a few days' sabbatical from Skins's island, busy doing income taxes, I've been thinking a great deal about how my own attitude towards the primitives of Skins's island has evolved--since I first discovered Skins's island several years ago, during the 2002 and 2004 political campaigns, during Doug's ex-wife's Great Mischief and the Bostonian Drunkard's Fitzmas, and during the 2006 and 2008 political campaigns.
I've concluded that, yeah, my own attitude about the primitives has been slowly evolving, gradually taking a turn for the worse.....and it bothers me not at all.
The evolution was that, initially, I was puzzled by the primitives, and took all of their negativity and self-pity as a temporary aberration that would straighten itself out over time. Then puzzlement gave away to anger that such ungrateful jerks and rectal apertures existed in America, among my own people.
And then during Doug's ex-wife's Great Mischief and the Bostonian Drunkard's premature ejaculation over the nonIndictment of Karl Rove, I spun around to the perception--a correct perception, by the way--that "Man, these primitives are really stupid, just really stupid; how do they manage to breathe without an instruction book?"
During the past two elections, the evolution has been towards the attitude that the primitives need to be slapped around, and vigorously so. Applying the lash might civilize six or half a dozen primitives, might half-civilize a few more primitives so that they stay in line, and as for the rest, well, they need the lash simply because they're such ugly, nasty, brutish, bestial, bloodthirsty, savage primitives.
It won't do any good, but the last-mentioned primitives need the lash anyway, and more so than the first two groups of primitives.
I'm a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can hope to meet, in real life, renown far and wide for my courtesy and graciousness, my indulgence and tolerance, my live-and-let-live, my kind and forgiving nature.
In fact, there are some in real life who insist such traits in me are not a virtue, but actually a character flaw, due to the excess of it--but as I haven't yet been damaged or bankrupted, I let it go, deaf to such allegations.
So this is why I've been thinking about it, how I feel about the primitives. Usually in real life, my perception of other people goes upward as time passes--familiarity breeds respect, in this case--and so in theory this should be a bad thing, thinking worse and worse and worse of the primitives.
But on the other hand, this doesn't bother me.
