Second opinion
IS man a product more of his genes than of his environment? Oceans of ink, and even some blood, have been spilt over this question. I have thought of a new solution to this age-old puzzle: it doesn't matter in the least, at any rate with regard to man's bad habits. They get passed on one way or another.
The new solution occurred to me as I looked at the man in the first bed in our ward last week. He was deeply unconscious after taking drugs that some call 'recreational', coma being a popular form of entertainment round here (I must admit that it often immeasurably improves a patient's character). The comatose man had a tattoo of a spider's web radiating from the tip of his nose.
As he was unable to answer any questions about himself, I called his doctor.
`I can't put a face to his name,' he said.
The man's girlfriend turned up later. She looked about as pure as the beaten slut: peroxided hair, a metal spike through her eyebrow, apple-green, genital-hugging Lycra shorts. She was indeed beaten regularly by the arachnophile, and often called the police, later dropping the charges in the name of love. She brought — or perhaps dragged would be a better way of putting it — her two young bastards with her, the malignity of whose facial expressions were fearful to behold, considering they were but two and three years old. One wouldn't have had to be a witch in Macbeth to predict their future: abandonment by their father, followed by tattoos as multiple as their father's, and a life of crime. Genes or environment? It amounts to the same thing.
The man in the next bed, tattooed only with a cannabis leaf on his forearm, had tried to end it all with six painkillers. I asked him why.
He told me it was because his ex (the prefix long became a substantive) wouldn't let him see his bastard, and the fact is that round here every man demands his human right to abandon his bastards in his own time, at the moment of his own choosing. Until then, he exercises his natural right to visit them when
ever he wants, killing two birds with one stone by giving his baby-mother (to use another colloquialism) a good slap.
He told me that his ex had two other children, apart from his own, by different men. 'But,' he added, 'I've brought them up as their standing dad.'
Their standing dad? As opposed to what? Their sitting dad? Their lying dad?
Unfortunately, he said, his ex insisted that one of the others was his, even though he knew it wasn't. She had 'caught pregnant' by another man during what he called his relationship with her; and now she demanded that, if he wanted to see his own child, he should see the other one too. And to this he would not agree: it was a matter of principle.
I suggested that he consult a lawyer. 'There's only one problem,' he said. 'What's that?' I asked.
'He's got my name on the certificate, and the court will ask who owns him.' 'Owns him?' I asked.
'Yes,' he said. 'But how can I own him when I've never paid no maintenance?' 'Oh, easily,' I said.
Theodore Dalrymple
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