I am known by many names like Beelzebul, Mephistopheles, or Satan. When I was created, God called me Lucifer, but I prefer–Prince of Darkness. He literally fired me before the Big Bang for my arrogance, selfishness, and disobedience and banished me forever to Earth after it came into existence. For this reason, I detest God and always will. When the first humans arrived, God implanted in their laughably primitive intellects a desire to seek him, somehow without forcing them. Vindictively, I designed a perfect plan to thwart their efforts to regard him as a loving father. I have never before revealed my skullduggery, but it is working almost perfectly except for a few misguided souls. I’m looking for allies—people who are mad at the world, want to take what life here has to offer, and give nothing back. Let me tempt you to join me in my vendetta by showing you what I’ve done so far.
Since the strongest instincts of human beings are self-preservation and propagation of the species, I have targeted the family for destruction. Although my strategy will continue to take some time to complete in earth years, it was well under way by their 20th Century using these six easy steps:
1. Send the men off to war. Playing upon the natural tendency of humans to covet the land and property of others, over the millennia, I have successfully influenced the strong leaders of tribes to try to conquer other lands and people. Some hostile tribes welcomed the challenge; others were simply trying to protect their families and country in “just” wars. Before the 20th Century, my task was more difficult because most of the world was still uncivilized and a family often consisted of men with several wives and many children. By 1900, in powerful countries the industrial revolution produced the nuclear family with a working husband, a stay-at-home wife, and three or four children. So, I planted hatred based upon selfish interests and paranoia among the leaders of some of these countries and, in 1914 and again in 1939, aggressors and defenders sent thousands of young men to war never to return. Happily, wives and children were often left to fend for themselves and mothers entered the work force just according to plan. Grandparents who often lived with their children by this period in their lives tired easily, but were left to do much of the child rearing. They already tended to spoil the kids and to be less strict, so I didn’t have to interfere. Unexpectedly to some, but not to me, the mothers were as good or better at the jobs vacated by the men. When wars ended, husbands returned to new jobs as the economy flourished, and many women remained successfully employed. Families soon became accustomed to two incomes—needed or not. Infants and children continued to be cared for by relatives. The destruction of the nuclear family had subtly begun.
Contrary to my design, many post-war children were born and families remained large and tight-knit. These poor saps often congregated around the radio listening to nauseating programming like the The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Gunsmoke, and Dragnet where evil never triumphs over goodness, like I made certain it often did in the real world. With respect to movies, thanks to the sanctimonious watchdogs of the National Legion of Decency, on-screen love affairs were sickeningly saccharine and had none of the gratuitous violence I advocated. When it came along, television was even more repulsive with productions like The Jack Benny Program, Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Jackie Gleason Show. My bathroom and bedroom humour were taboo. Writers were forced to create clever dialogue, situations, and characters which at times, even made me stifle a laugh. A happy result I hadn’t expected was that the shows were often so well done, families became less interactive, sometimes passively staring ahead as if watching a fire. Furthermore, televisions were still luxury items often requiring two incomes and keeping Mom out making money instead of nurturing her young ones. Yes!
2. Foster population control. Preposterously, pregnancy out of wedlock was still considered a disgrace in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s and many couples decided to marry if that happened. The common folks had more children and most stayed together. Because abortion-on-demand was not yet legal, rich and famous pregnant women went off somewhere, had their babies, and, according to plan, put them up for adoption. Sex remained pleasurable, but having babies was inconvenient for competitive, successful women.
Before 1930, Christian churches uniformly forbade any form of artificial contraception. Thanks to the influence of my unwitting racist, Margaret Sanger, championing the cause for birth control, the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference opened the floodgates in that year with their approval “…provided that this is done in the light of the …Christian principles” (LOL) and now virtually all mainstream religions allow and even encourage it, except for that confounded Catholic Church.
Fostering totally unfounded fears about worldwide starvation, I helped hoodwink John D. Rockefeller and his sons and grandsons into aggressively promoting population control by underwriting “scientific” research and publications on overpopulation and funding major universities, even some Catholic ones. The quid pro quo to receive the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation required course content promoting fear of overpopulation of the planet and subtly shedding a more favorable light on contraception in their curricula. However, my piece de resistance was urging Katherine McCormick to supply the money, and Gregory Pincus and John Rock to develop “the pill,” and approved by the FDA in 1960.
Responding superbly to my temptations in that same decade to produce films which glamorize sex for obscene profit such as The Apartment, La Dolce Vita, Lolita, and the hugely popular Ian Fleming adaptations, Dr. No, Goldfinger, and From Russia with Love, the common folks became increasingly desensitized to extramarital trysts. After all, their “role models” on the big screen weren’t concerned. Why should they be? The pill virtually eliminated any fear of an unwanted, “shotgun” pregnancy and dealt another blow even to an imperfect concept of family. Humanae Vitae—Bah! Humbug! Men have always been rather pitifully predictable creatures with simple, one-track minds—even as patriarchs of a family. In the traditional families of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, most men had few focuses: pay the bills, take care of household chores requiring manual labor and simple repairs, fill that empty feeling in the stomach with something, keep mother happy to at least limit whining and complaining, spend an hour or two with the kids, dull the senses with strong drink, release sexual tension, and spend the remainder of the time idling or on a hobby of some kind. My many strategies to vary the emphasis on one or more of these over the years has quite successfully promoted family disharmony. Women, however, anything but predictable, complex creatures, are instinctively driven to keep the family intact. Their husbands’ sexual appetites didn’t change, but the availability of the pill allowed a married couple to conveniently choose the number and timing of any offspring. The entire focus of sexual intimacy shifted after 1960 to pleasure. Comforted by the endorsement of virtually all non-Catholic religious groups, there was little “danger” of conception, thwarting any creative plans of the Enemy. I also managed to keep fairly secret from many devout believers the fact that the pill might work in part by a “mini-abortion.” As a happy spinoff of widely available oral contraceptives, my temptations toward married people to philander also began to work better. Take that, one big happy family!
3. Promote gender equality. Working women were not amused by caricatures like being kept barefoot, pregnant, and chained to a stove, and the “modern women” of the mid-20th Century were becoming increasingly discontented. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique clearly articulated a rage held by some, and women’s lib became a workforce cause. The torch of anger and frustration at inequality among the sexes was carried forward by Gloria Steinem and my favorite anarchist, the braless Germaine Greer. My skillful, negative influence on their parents had given these very bright, attractive women an unhappy and dysfunctional childhood making them angry at the world and at traditional families. They scoffed at publications like Ladies Home Journal and the sexually segregated, help-wanted advertisements. Their impact on impressionable young women first surfaced in that misguided civil rights movement of the early 1960s and in community politics where trade-union women were beginning to lobby for equal pay. Both Gloria and Germaine have expressed that bitterness in so many delightful ways through the years that I have great plans to thank them someday unless Someone finally gets through to them.
Anger against traditional women’s roles in society turned to rage on college campuses like Smith College and the University of California at Berkeley— two of my favorite bastions of “progressive thought” and some of their charismatic, radical professors converted many to the ideas of the great Karl Marx. Senator McCarthy had incurred the wrath of many of their heroes of the big screen in the 1950s so that most of Hollywood, if not already Communist, had moved to the far left. To their fans now in their late teens they could do no wrong on-screen or off. The draft lottery for the Viet Nam war brought young men with low draft numbers into the women’s cause. Anarchy became more and more popular and there was no shortage of crowd agitators for burning draft cards and bras.
4. Pollute the Popular Culture. According to Almeria in William Congreve’s play, The Mourning Bride, music traditionally was supposed to have “soothe(d) the savage breast,” but with my influence and their raging hormones, Bill Haley and the Comets’ Rock Around the Clock and Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog and Blue Suede Shoes ignited young people. The strident sounds of ‘rock and roll’ may have begun among white, rock-a-billy bands, but black youths, instinctively musical and rhythmic, soon became a tour de force in the genre with frenetic Little Richard and groups like The Orioles and The Diamonds. Parents who had danced to Glenn Miller and Count Basie were bewildered by the cacophony of “The Bop,” “The Chicken,” and “The Stroll” which turned their kids into juvenile animals. About the same time, young, upstart professor Timothy Leary was proclaiming the gospel of “tuning in, turning on, and dropping out” which coincided quite nicely with the developing anarchy of young people. New rock groups emerged with countercultural names like Led Zeppelin, Kiss (???Knights in Satan’s [my] Service), The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane.
With the draft looming and pop icons making hit songs like Edwin Starr’s, “War,” and “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish, I helped head shop owner and music festival promoter, Michael Lang, and a group of his fellow hippies to follow through on their idea to organize “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,” better known as Woodstock. Fueled by the festival documentary shown in theaters everywhere, hard rock, bohemian attire, and long hair became the standard for high-school yearbook photographs and created a world revolution in clothing and drug experimentation. Communes, love-ins, and my basic philosophy about humans, “If it feels good, do it” and “free love” became quite hip. Few of the young people could really articulate what they were for or against, but quite according to plan, the sexual revolution was in full swing. Shabby military-surplus clothes became the style, but the body odor and hairy legs of hard-core feminists didn’t last long among the 20-somethings and their adolescent protégés. Soon they would be in clean fatigues, braless like anarchists, but with radiant, long hair, subtle makeup, deodorant, and fragrances like Shalimar®. A majority of the girls dressed up for this masquerade whose parents could afford it, were “regularizing their menstrual cycles” with the pill. The danger of conception was down, but the STD clinic business was happily booming.
However, there was one pregnancy that I applauded, the third (and thanks to me, unwanted one) of Norma McCorvey who, as Jane Roe, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to petition for a legal abortion in 1969. Unfortunately, she delivered her baby before the 1973 decision and, even worse, she later eschewed the part she played in it along with her lesbian lifestyle, and joined the dratted Catholic Church. Despite her prominent role in the Pro-Life movement, the abortion horse was let out of the barn and today we are up to more than 700,000 exciting dilatations and curettages a year. As you might imagine, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep that horse from ever returning. Long live the culture of death!
5. Promote Careers over Motherhood. The wars of the 20th and 21st Centuries have proven that women are as capable as men in almost every profession. The answer to the question, “Where is a woman’s place?” in the current millennium is, “Anywhere she wants.” Even favorable reflections about home life and children are apt to quicken the pulse and dilate the pupils of my women activists who have cemented the notion among many modern women that motherhood is second-class citizenry. I have fostered the idea by enticing driven, female college and graduate students into becoming highly successful in careers in law and science. It is now commonplace to find women as editors of law reviews, district attorneys, professors of medicine, and department “chairs” at prestigious institutions. (I successfully influenced the PC police to expunge the term, “chairman,” years ago.) Some of them have lengthy bibliographies and relish the often phony stature which accompanies it. Many have become quite attached to the accolades and fawning by their admiring women students and trainees. I have convinced them that they are more intelligent than most women and that their influence in the world, not the home, is of paramount importance. Many would never deign to be a mother since it is beneath a woman of their intellect. Unfortunately, I have not been able to stamp out the idea of having children from most young women, professional and otherwise, and some single mothers have to work. But for those who insist on having children I have heavily promoted an alternative strategy, day care. Children who spend most of their formative hours with baby sitters, short on education and making minimum wage, fit perfectly into my plan to produce dysfunctional children since they are devoid of genuine nurturing by an intelligent mother who loves them more than her work outside the home.
6. Promote Families without Fathers. Ingeniously, since the latter part of the 20th Century, I have been able to successfully distort the natural ability of humans to make joyful sounds and rhythms which the Enemy gave them instinctively. My truly inspiring sexual revolution and that ridiculous civil rights movement helped greatly. Formerly anathema among serious songwriters, lyrics soon began to contain uninhibited, implicit or explicit sex acts in heavy metal, disco, ‘Motown’, jazz, and country music. With the advance of computers and sound technology with affordable drum machines, rhythm-centric music like rap (aka hip-hop) with its deceptively creative and simple, spoken iambic pentameter emerged. Singing at all or even on key was not required, but an angry, ebonic voice was. Thanks to the racial paranoia I had fostered after the Rodney King beating by some very bad (good) cops and with special recognition to the Bloods and Crips, Ice-T, and Schoolly D, ‘gangsta rap’ emerged as a mainstream form of hip-hop. Bass tracks from car CD players blared at 100 decibels and passively aggressively vibrated all cars within a city block. The rappers unashamedly rhymed about violence, guns, murder, drugs, and rough hypersex. The contagious beats were decried as loud noise to a large segment of the population, but were sweet music to my ears! Most were not terribly affected, but, happily, some young black youths look up to these “cool dudes” and begin to act and dress like their music-video mentors. My same magic worked with the head-banging, moshing, heavy metal for the mostly white, gothic crowd. I couldn’t have been more pleased with teenage girlfriends of all colors having baby after baby and bringing them home to mama with the fathers nowhere to be found. If my plan isn’t thwarted by Someone, the next generation should be even more dysfunctional. My chances of this happening in the entire population is enhanced by celebrities and high-profile sports figures of all ethnicities who have multiple, live-in lovers for a few months or years with offspring from each affair. The question, “Who’s your daddy?” couldn’t be more real. What’s more, unmarried musicians, movie stars, and athletes with children are celebrated not only by my media minions like the producers of E!, but lately also by mainstream television. My special thanks to Brad and ‘Angel’ina, and Goldie for the example they set. Who needs married, male role models who are good providers and love and guide their children with the help of their wives in the direction of the Enemy?
Banishment by God has kept my anger and resentment at fever pitch since humans first came here and will never end as I’m sure you have gathered from these six ongoing and highly successful strategies of mine. His great affection for these pitiable creatures is beyond me. But if I can keep successfully deflecting the juggernaut of his confounded grace, they are definitely mine and the family cannot survive. However, if these numbskulls ever realize that their Creator is actually here on earth now, I am done. Many of them give lip service to desiring a personal encounter with God for themselves and their children. I must not let them discover that since around 33A.D., that encounter is now possible daily in the Eucharist of the Catholic Church if they want it. At that infernal Supper of the Lamb (i.e., Mass) he changes the substance of wheat bread and wine into himself. It is his most powerful weapon against me because when they receive, he becomes part of them for a time and, like a tractor beam, affectionately draws them to himself and to holiness. I am determined to hide the real meaning of the Lord’s Supper from other believers or simply vilify it through my “virtues” of anger, jealousy, and resentment for the Church left over from the 16th Century. In the interim, I have so obfuscated the truth through individual interpretation of the Bible that there are now thousands of versions of the Reformation, but none with the tangible Jesus. With the destruction of the family, no one will really care and by the next few generations bibles should begin to gather dust and church attendance, especially by Catholics, should continue to fall off dramatically.
If, after reading this, you like my work, come join me in the fight. You may not realize it, but you may already be helping me in one or more of these six prongs of my pitchfork.
Your devious friend,
Beelzebul