Peering Beyond the Rift

And when He uttered to them, "Being your leader is not enough, I need more in order to remain with you", it was an electrically epiphanous moment, analogous to when Toto drew back the curtain and the Great Oz stood naked and exposed to the assembly which had previously revered him. Both Pathos and Comedy now sat squirming beform them, compounded in sermonizing, adolescent contradiction. Approximating the performance of a juvenile Machiavelli, He had failed to grasp that power is not an entitlement for which one petitions; that it can be conferred merely for the asking. Power is an endowment, a gift of nature, an attribute of the individual's will, that one develops, hones, and tunes to a finely fevered pitch. Hence, it is innately and authentically recognized by others, and subsequently, when authority is bequeathed.

Her irreverence was unsettling to Him, and threatened to cast Him in the role of pretentious buffoon. The assembly's focus must be denied this diversion from His objective: the meticulously thought out, fastidiously constructed seizure of their control. "This is of very major importance!", He chided her, as though she were a giddy child in need of a stinging whack to the bottom. Her derisive laughter was a spiked barb that engendered puncturing the solemnity of his egostistically pompous bubble. He beseeched the tiny god of his own creation to mask his anxiety from her formidable distraction, and for Christ's sake, if not his own, silence the haughty bitch.

His psyche grappled with the multitude of roles He had assumed as der Akteur, lusting beyond aching frenzy that one would swiftly leap forward and deliver ample oratory to bury the burgeoning dissent. Although consummately skillful, His performance, as such, failed to escape unobserved; a critic was born.