The care and feeding of an ogre


This post of mine has been removed by D&C editors, apparently. A little too mean, perhaps? No meaner than anything this man has said, repeatedly, from the moment the new pages opened for comment.

"But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

…. Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!" -- from A Christmas Carol.

Hmmm. Remind you of anyone? I can't help but wonder what dreadful things happened to "creativeogre" (who posts on the D&C reader interactive pages) that made him so foul-tempered, so ready to recommend death as punishment for every infraction, so convinced that any kindness shown to anyone anywhere is not only wasted effort but counter-productive.

If we lived in his preferred world, we'd have to build slaughterhouses to kill all the people he thinks should die for their infractions.





Posted: Fri - March 28, 2008 at 05:15 PM          

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