Diogenes’s Invectives

The Extermination of Daddies

Atlas – Air France n°85 – July 1973

They’re absolute nonsense, those rumors that no one learns anything at the Sorbonne. You shouldn’t believe a word of it.

Why just the other day, as I entered the door from the Rue des Ecoles, I saw an example of Sorbonnian wisdom proclaimed in chalk on the right-hand wall: “Daddy, you gotta die!”

As you must surely know if you studied at the Sorbonne, I am not a daddy. Nor have I ever been one. I can therefore consider the teachings of the Sorbonne with the serenity of an uninvolved observer. My line of reasoning is thus:

What are daddies useful for? They procreate you, clothe you, nourish you. Well and good. The only condition they impose is that you accept their society, on the pretext that the said society assures them the work which nourishes you, clothes you, et caetera.

But in reality (I pursue my train of thought), it is clear — is it not? — that daddies have only one end in mind, that of bothering you. For their society is castrating and repressive; that’s official, since Freud proved it seventy years ago.

Where was I? Oh yes: so the story dished out to us by daddies doesn’t really hold water. I mean, even granting that their society gives them the means to… et caetera, the fact remains that the problem would be resolved if they were to die: on the one hand, their rotten society would no longer exist, and secondly, it would give the money we need directly to us. So you see that daddies must die so that society can cease to castrate us and so that we can have everything at once.

I think this is all quite clear. We must exterminate daddies, and the sooner the better. I would even venture to suggest that it is never too early to eradicate a source of evil. Why wait for the damage to be done? We must eliminate daddies before they have had the chance to procreate — let us say, for example, at the age of eighteen at the latest. In this manner, evil will be nipped in the bud.

If need be, if they asked me politely, crossing their hearts not to impose their rotten society on me, I would agree — yes, I’d even go so far — to merely castrate them.

But watch out! Keep your eyes glued to them. The liberated society of daddies would have to be protected by special guards, courteous but firm and well-armed, always ready to check any insubordination.

For you see, with daddies, you can never take enough precautions.■

Diogènes