Coincidance - Principia Discordia

HOW TO READ / HOW TO THINK
(Afterwords)
This rather acerbic essay was originally written for Bob Shea's little
magazine, No Governor. It is so short because No Governor is a very tiny
magazine and cannot print long pieces; it is so mordant because I wrote it at
a time when I was beginning to suspect that the younger generation of
Americans are so ill-educated that one virtually has to write in baby-talk
before they can understand anything one is saying. Despite the brevity and
acidity (or perhaps because of them?) I rather like this piece. It seems to say
exactly what I wanted to say in a marvelously terse manner. Perhaps I
would write better if I was always compelled to be brief and always mildly
annoyed and distracted by the suspicion that a large percentage of potential
readers badly need a basic literacy course.
One of the irritations that provoked this piece in the first place was
certain neo-pagans in California who regularly speak about Christians in
the way that Hitler used to speak about Jews. When I tried to explain to
some of them that hating Christians as an undifferentiated mass was as
illogical as hating Jews as an undifferentiated mass, they couldn't understand
me. They knew that anti-semitism was unfashionable, but anti-Christianity
is not unfashionable yet (being comparatively rare) and that is about as deep
as their understanding goes. They never harbor unfashionable prejudices,
but they also never suspect that prejudices per se might be rather stupid.
Of course, this essay produced no "miracle cures." It was reprinted in
another little magazine called Golden APA and my polemic against the
Aristotelian "is" of identity went entirely over the head of one contributor to
that journal, who wrote a few issues later that the Irish "are" a disgusting
People. That seemed amusing to me, in a way; or, at least, I preferred to be
amused rather than becoming irritated again. As John Adams said
somewhere, in considering the extent of human stupidity, one must either
laugh or cry, and it is more salubrious to laugh.
73