Tales More Sinister

(Dedicated to Bob Kincaid, my political mentor)


The Inquisition was more than a hearing on the hill, more than an evening beating pollsters stupid with fuel bills and credit card receipts. No, it was the preset for the rule of law we now enjoy and watch its prejudicial heresay construct a means of governing that could have leveled the Vatican back when the rape of young boys was seen as a means to an end.
Brutality then and now is where we are, the glory of terrorizing civilians on a par with the cardinals undressing in pools of smoldering steel to garner the praise of attrition. Property or the names of those willing to engage in the vilest of activities as to shame the Marquis De Sade himself into retiring to Venice and taking up yachting. Heretics they called those who sought the truth whether it be religion or political truth. These days however we have the Patriot Act and we have that gnarled up bunny rabbit of the Down Syndrome George W. Bush. A man who would have donned a robe before the Yale society even existed. He would have marched around more than the figure of an owl set aflame among the likes of Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite.
These days the Inquisition is carried out on the Internet where a priest in Wisconsin can email a pedophile in the roofing business about a certain public toilet on a local highway. The internet provider complicit but not served papers under the right orderly law of freewill and crude public scrutiny, the same kind of thinking that allows the profit motive of corporations to disallow knowledge of information in their own quarterly stock report if they have taken the time to lobby and grovel in an office twice the size of your living room.
The Patriot Act owes as much to brief orders of martial law as it does the Thousand Year Reich and its view of emblems in storefront windows. It’s a cruel and dumb world we live in they would have you to believe but the same ignorance that will drive dedicated television viewers to the polls will also draw and tenderize their hindquarters to the fire and lose the ability to criticize the coals.


- Chris Mansel