I've had a few curious messages sent to me since my last column. To be clear, I will not be throwing anyone from my past under the bus in a kamikaze like "tell-all memoir" and I'm not going to be using this space in place of the confessional.
So be not afraid - your secrets and mine are safe with me. But perhaps your nervousness is a sign in and of itself of past deeds to ponder.
One of my single greatest faults is by this time quite obvious - I can be a rather cheeky and presumptuous fellow. If you're wondering what that might look like, just imagine any fiction where one character says to another "you forget yourself, sir," and conclude that I am indeed the one who forgets himself, quite often flagrantly.
From acquaintances old and new to their area of expertise, I have a penchant for telling them how it is or being all too familiar.
This has lead to many situations that when retold sound like something that should have been in a sitcom. In the not too distant past, I simply asserted to a Benedictine monk that their order would obviously be required to save civilization again from the coming dark age as if I was talking about the weather. In my brief brush with the military, I constantly stated that if I was ever in charge we'd be raising the Red Ensign again and I often asked why we didn't sing when we marched, sometimes humming a tune myself for good measure.
Not very helpful, I'm sure.
And at a friend's party where I'd perhaps imbibed too freely in spirits, I responded to the question "what's wrong with the world," with "well, we're all fascists you see," going on to explain how we are taught by every aspect of our secular, capitalist, "liberal" mass society to view our fellow man as nothing more than soulless creatures of lesser or greater economic worth.
I don't think that person is going to ask me that question ever again.
I might have lost that soul.
Put another way, I probably ought to have been born for a more gregarious age or where being eccentric wasn't relegated to the fringes of society, whether they be the heights of Beverly Hills, or the all-too-exposed streets of East Hastings.
I might venture so far as to state that the stress of trying to be normal sometimes leads me to be even cheekier and arrogant: for example, I certainly gave my opponents an excessive amount of grief four years ago.
I've since apologized.
By far, my favorite punching bag is the political class and its dithering adherents, who I like to accuse of all engaging in rent-seeking calumny from their ill-informed consumers. But in my tussles with the underclass, both labourers and socialists, I often point out that anti-establishment fervor can only carry you so far; every activist with an iMac and every underpaid worker with a vehicle payment can't really argue against the system, as they've lost the virtue of poverty.
And so, with nowhere else to go, I presume to be the maligned prophet, and I pedal myself to whatever reactionary position will indeed best show the egg on my opponent's face, engaging them with Clausewitzian ferocity, sometimes for fun, at other times with righteous indignation.
Epistles exhort we who believe to be all things to all people in order to win them to Christ, and this perhaps is where my folly finds a smidgen of justification. I presume that I can indeed assume any position or status given my heritage, raising, background, economic success (or lack thereof) and education.
I grab any and all cards to simply trump my opponent - at the worst of times because I need to feel good, and at the best of times to show the absurdity of it all.
This then better explains my first admission - that I have indeed acted beneath the dignity of my station as a conservative commentator. Notwithstanding the fact that we are truly in a political no-man's land of epic oligarchic proportions, I do not need to add to the noise by simply being snide.
True correction must be done with good intentions.
I've failed at this and I am sorry.
