Friday, July 20, 2007

SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP'S "COMFORTING NARRATIVE"

As with most folk tales and urban legends, the anecdotes of The New Republic's latest fabulist, "Scott Thomas Beauchamp", inform us little of real people or actual events; rather, they serve to amplify the "comforting narrative" -- a heavily fictionalized, distorted view of reality which, to a certain mindset, provides an explanation for the incomprehensible, an overlay of moral certainty over the unpredictable, unfair, and unpleasant truths of real life.

But even the most fabulous myths and legends are derived, at least in part, from mixed-up bits and pieces of personal experience and collective memory. Perhaps that is why the tall tales of "Scott Thomas" seemed ... vaguely ... familiar.

Well, now it can be told! The true author of these sociopathic dispatches must have been drawing upon memories of a beloved animated television series he'd seen as a child in April 1995, which presented a fearful depiction of humanity's vilest, darkest of hearts as both animal abuser and corpse desecrator -- simultaneously!