I Swear

There's no stigma attached to bastards any more. Even the word "bastard" has lost all of its sting. Think hard about the last time you called someone a bastard. Did you really mean to imply that his/her parents were unmarried when s/he was conceived and/or born? Or were you just attempting to express your displeasure in a very generalized way in response to an anonymous someone's inability to artfully merge into the flow of vehicle traffic? See, you lack precision. This is why you are not a surgeon.*

The idea of social ostracization based on parental marital status may seem backward, elitist, obsolete with modern inheritance law, morally repugnant and medieval, but are those all bad things? Not all medieval ideas are bad ones. Usury as a mortal sin was a medieval idea that just got pitched away one day, nobody knows why. On Monday, lending money at interest would destroy your immortal soul and had to be farmed out to the token pockets of Jews clustered in most of the largest and yuckiest of European cities, then on Tuesday, poof! You get your cash from God-fearing, land-holding Medicis who spin the combination of wealth and property into unassailable financial leverage to run most of Europe. Plus the one thing Jews are allowed to do is now taken over by Christians, costing them an important, protective social niche, leaving them with only the ambient glow of endemic, murderous anti-Semitism to illuminate their relations with their neighbors.

Did I just sort of imply that modern banking caused the Holocaust? Probably. That's irresponsible, hyperbolic and factually insupportable, but I'm not going to take it down because I'm pretty sure it could get me a guest spot on CNN. They like to hear all sides of an issue, you know. Even when one side is stupid.

Bastards can't be bastards anymore, at least in any legal sense, and I guess that's fine, but it still kind of bums me out. Things used to be a lot more clear. You married someone, you cranked out legitimate only kids until you had a boy one, probably more than just one boy one because several were probably going to die of scarlet fever or giardiasis from drinking from the local well or something, you fretted about what to do with the legally and economically invisible girl ones, but as you got old** you didn't have to worry about estate planning or living trusts or college funds. Everything just went to the oldest son and it was that sorry fucker's problem now because you were comfortably Late and Lamented, beyond the reach of all the mewling and sniping and everyone else can go pound sand.***

I'm also a little bummed out about it because, as an Oldest Son myself, I'm missing out on an unadulterated inheritance from my own father. When he goes, it will be a frenzy between me and my full, half and step siblings, wrasslin' to get our hands on his trove of a lift-assist armchair with cigarette holes, an IRS tax burden and alcoholism. I think dad's going to be around for a while, but it's not too morbid for me to already start thinking "Jesus, I hope I only get the chair."



Next week: an intimate look at the evolution of the word "motherfucker."


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*Unless, of course, you are a surgeon. Then please substitute another job that is roughly as important and requires the same sort of steady, dependable accuracy. Like the engraver-machine operator at a Things Remembered.

**Like 35, but it was 35 years of hard road, most of it paved with excrement.

***I don't know a lot about medieval career options for second or third sons beyond the clergy or the army, so I'm not 100% sure if "pound sand" was just an expression or an actual employment option.