Fifty Shades of Patricide

This is, actually, the worst (probably teenage) daughter I have read about in my whole entire life. Words fail me. I just can't imagine being in the shoes of anyone who could do that. The only guess I can come up with is that she has been thoroughly coarsened by the pop culture of which FSG is the nadir.

Strict father, my eye. My parents would have had my guts for garters had they caught me reading the 1980s equivalent of FSG, let alone overheard me saying it was my favourite book.

Update: Words have come back. "Honour your father and mother" is the fourth commandment, and it is not conditional. If you have terrible parents, you get to a safe distance as soon as you can, work to forgive them so that your horrible childhood has less of a hold on your soul, and you save them--even if at arm's length--from dying in a bus shelter in their old age, if you can.

Fortunately, most people do not have terrible parents. Most of us have flawed parents, and those flaws are most noticeable when we are shifting from a childhood perception of our parents as all-wise and invincible--that is, when we are teenagers. In theology school, we called such a time "critical distance." In short, we move from a false image of someone to an unhappy new realization and, hopefully, we get through it and come to accept the person for who she or he really is.

Sadly, various forces--most clearly advertisers--take advantage of the teenager's period of "critical distance" to direct a child's natural (and divinely commanded) loyalty to his or her parents to some other authority, like an artist with music to sell. Advertisers preach a gospel of teenage rebellion against parents as if it were a fact, not a construct made up by Hollywood. (When I was a teenager, I was not particularly interested in rebelling against my parents but in the stultifying hypocrisy that seemed to flourish  in the Metropolitan Toronto Separate [i.e. Catholic] School Board. Oh, and also various prevailing ideologies, like multiculuralism vs the centuries-old process of fashioning a uniquely Canadian identity, similar to the process that had developed in Australia. But I digress.) This normalization of "teenage rebellion" makes things all that much easier for people who would seduce children away from their parents--for example, older, wilier, would-be boyfriends. It's almost amusing how teenage girls are so ready to disobey their parents to obey some new near-stranger, thinking that this is all very brave and grown-up and Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet, by the way, is the most misunderstood, and probably the most disastrous, of our culture treasures. To repeat yet again, the point about Romeo and Juliet is that their parents had everything in common and therefore the two principals were perfectly--from a social point of view-- matched, and the tragedy was caused solely because their fathers had a long-standing neighbours row. It is as if, in suburban Cardiff, Mr Jones and Mr Davies couldn't agree who owned the tree along the dividing line between their back gardens, and as a result, young Rhys Jones was not invited to the Davies' snazzy 18th birthday bash for their Carys. The quarrel between Capulet and Montague had absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnic group, social background, religion or even what age it was appropriate for girls to accept suitors. The Capulets were perfectly happy to marry Juliet off before she was 14.

Anyway, I am shivering in horror that things in the West have come to such a pretty pass, and that the attack on the family--which is what the celebration and promotion of "teenage rebellion" comes down to--has been so successful, that a girl in Britain would be psychologically capable of wrongly accusing her father of eight counts of incestuous rape, making up her testimony from a dirty bestseller.