No, it was the old toad that lived in fear of his father’s leather belt. Back in the outback in the good old days; a regular, good strapping from the Dad to sharpen up the lad and no mistake. Or so the story goes.
Rather than the young boy. No smackings for him. Nobody ever laid a hand on him, or took the belt to him. No. And so he isn’t afraid of anything, that James, as you would expect. Not afraid of his Dad or anyone, because he is a true post-modern boy, that one… meaning he has entirely lost sight of history.
Surely there are no bad consequences to anything that we do, the boy says. We keep within the letter of the law. Indeed we do better than that, we keep within its spirit. It is quite insulting to accuse us of criminal behaviour, we break no laws, and of course we continue to make profits.
But not enough perhaps, never enough, simultaneous violence ensuing:
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
(Walter Benjamin; Theses on the Philosophy of History)