Holier Than Thou

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If you don't know what a Prole is, you're probably one.

I am talking to you, Jim Clyburn.



What?

You didn't really think you ever were one of them, did you?

One of the elite, I mean.

The reason people like me get into my line of business is mostly because they don't want to have anything to do with people like you. It comes down to a matter of principles—not that the concept means anything to you.

It is a funny thing, principles.

Think about it.

There is no middle road, there. No phony centrism.

You either have some, or you don't.

It's not to say that one is born with them. Nor are they some kind of an acquired taste, either. Truth be told, I don't really know how one comes by them.

There are those, of course—people like you, Jim—who see them as a flaw, a fairy tale, taught to little children, that any rational adult soon learns to discard, along with such fantasy figures as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, in favor of pragmatism, as they grow up. The kind of pragmatism people like you exalt in the name of the higher good. As if people like you knew what the higher good is, or cared about it, or really gave a damn about the voiceless multitude whose higher good they claim to speak for.

Oh, I know, you'll say you do. Care, that is. You might even believe it, at times.

I am not judging you, Jim. A path is only a path. You've chosen yours, and I have chosen mine. I could have become an honest businessman. Or an exalted politician, like you. Or, I don't know, some petty civil officer, like, say, that "off with his head" Vanessa Baraitster magistrate, in the UK, whose lack of impartiality, anyone with any sense of empathy has been dismayed at.



I could have become anyone of those people, even you, Jim, if only I believed in such concepts as honesty and justice in business or government.

You see, to me, such affectations are as far removed from what is commonly referred to as daily reality as the notion of principles, or the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, are to self-proclaimed pragmatists like you.

Am I a cynic?

No more than you are, Jim.

But I am more of a realist than you will ever be.

I do not claim to be a pragmatist.

I do not hide behind the higher good.

And I do not lie, Jim—least of all to my own self.

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This is were the customary disclaimer usually go,
I am borrowing this one from Jeremiah: