The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana   ::   Эко Умберто

So, then, when is screwing allowed? I mean really, you’re trying to make a law that works for the whole world- when the Romans, who weren’t God, made laws it was stuff that still makes sense today-and God tosses down a Decalogue that doesn’t tell you the most important things? You’ll probably say: Sure, but the prohibition against impure acts forbids screwing outside of marriage. Are you sure that was really the case? What were impure acts for the Hebrews? They had very strict rules, for example they couldn’t eat pork, nor cows that had been killed in certain ways, and from what I’m told not even whitebait. So the impure acts are all the things that the people in power have prohibited. Which are? All the things that the people in power have defined as impure acts. Just look around, Fat Head claimed it was impure to speak ill of Fascism, and he’d send you off to confinement if you did. It was impure to be a bachelor, so you paid the bachelor tax. It was impure to fly a red flag. And so on and so on and so on. And now we come to the last commandment: Don’t covet other people’s stuff. But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got Don’t steal? If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin? No, not if you don’t steal it from him. Don Cognasso will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing. But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round. And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason why a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger. And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed. But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing: Don’t covet more than you have, respect the rule of property. In this world there are those who own two fields of grain just because they inherited them, and there are those who toil in those fields for a crust of bread, and the ones toiling must not covet the owner’s fields, otherwise the state will be ruined and we’ll have a revolution. The tenth commandment prohibits revolution. Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you.