I think it's because I was raised on irony, satire and subversion that, in my youth, I harboured so firm a conviction that the rules of the game could be changed. At least, that may be why *I* felt this so certainly, even if others weaned on the same fare didn't. Everything around me in that time, everything that looked as though it was telling me how the world was, seemed to promise a coming revolution. I saw a hundred syphilitic, dipsomaniac spoofs of James Bond held up for our ridicule before it truly registered with me that the original existed. I saw no casually charming ladies' man before I'd seen a thousand desperate losers try and fail to be one for our amusement, and I assumed the lesson, as I saw it, was as clear to everyone as it was to me: The days of the fortunate ones were numbered.
The world, as shown to me by this parodic milieu, was divided into the ambitious and the humble. The humble were - well, simply that. The ambitious were those who sought power, glory, esteem. Whether they obtained it or not mattered only insofar as it informed the nature of their ridicule. The Ladies' Man - he might be poor and simply ridiculous. He might be rich and obscenely disgusting. In any case, he was loathsome to women, never knew it until it was too late, and always forgot straight after. The Snob - he, or often as not, she, would be the product of the finest education and yet thick as your boot. The Popular Guys and Girls were always monstrously cruel and, even if their ultimate fate happened not to befall them before the credits, there could be no doubt they had it coming. The dictatorship of the humble ones would soon be upon us - weren't we all watching this? All laughing, booing, hissing, cheering at the *same thing*?
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