Brief Summary.
It has been suggested that the charm I lay claim to is in short supply. As evidence I have the lowest readership online, this does not disturb me, zero is a nice number. I reword the claim here, when I repeat that the Devil is charming, to realists, cynics, sycophants and those with a twisted sense of humour.
This rewording comes after unsuccessful attempts to produce the flattery and self-abasement that might charm you.
I don’t care if I am read or not, how could I expect to be? I’m harshly critical of you, taunting you with your obvious lack of development, like any mortal parent of an underachieving genius. Can you spur the brilliant to action? Can you shake loose the collective conscience? Peta says no. You are infuriatingly apathetic, am I then to praise you for it?
By your own claim you have brought yourself to the brink of extinction, and the rest of the species before you like a helpless herd. Your carbon taxes and recycling efforts are so laughable they scarcely bear mention, you will want to save the earth only when she has her hand around your throat.
I should ignore this, perhaps?
For all the evil I bring, I never sin against the planet. She is the most sacred thing, no proper god insults her.
You know I have a long list of things to deplore in you, and why. Change it please.
Accountability. Have some.
Feel free to hate me, nobody likes the messenger. Let me make it easy and show you my underbelly.
Taunt me for my obsession with you. With every century of your existence, since you clubbed your first woman and dragged her away, I have grown more attached to you. What a joy to drop hints of better and brighter things, how enchanting you were in your simplicity. If you read my book, you remember Wehha, all through your centuries there are creatures like him, who are born to dazzle simple men, to live quite beyond them.
I love your music, so much it rules me. I love your words, they show me what you can be. I love your devotion to dogs, this is finally as it should be. Those of you who fall for cats have no need of my love. How many altars can you serve?
I love how you cling so passionately to your own past, it’s fascinating to see how many ways you can have it. The collective memory is very easy to tamper with, it can be made to swing a full 180 degrees in half a lifetime. Your own media speeds this up, it’s like watching a movie over and over and it’s never the same. I like to think it shows some of you don’t take yourselves so seriously.
That’s what you have to remember about me, that I don’t take myself seriously. (Did I not blog about laying eggs? See “I.Satan.”) I am always aware of my limitations in an increasingly illiterate world.
Who wants to take the trouble to imagine that a Devil might have empathy? That he might love as hard as you, hate as easily, fear for his loved ones, despair for the earth that he doesn’t want to live without. Immortality is hard enough to endure, can you imagine it on a different planet or plane? One without trees, and really, how can a god be expected to live without real trees?
Who wants to hear themselves criticized? Are you all perfect now?
You want something that suggests hope, how can you long for it, envision it so clearly, and still live without it? I don’t have anything to do with hope, my evils have lived alongside yours all these centuries, it’s you who has changed.
Hope is a name for your daughter, a non-taxable charity, a word for having your head in the sand.
What did you do today? How much of your time did you devote to making things better? How much to hoping someone else will? How much to hoping, period?
No, days are black with sales around this time, lines are forming for what really matters to you, your home and family if you have them, your inner impulses if you don’t. Eat, drink, shop, find reasons to get offended as a matter of course, abandon your life for the ones on the screen.
Juvenal- ‘tell me how you amuse yourself and I’ll tell you who you are.’
Talking to and about Romans, who watched blood sports and poisoned people that got in their way. What would he say about you?
The same violent circuses, virtual now. Why do you still want them?
“Microscopic” by Gas