The Pietist. His virtues are many, to be sure. He is earnest, sincere, serious, forthright. He practices constant introspection—his spiritualized self-flagellation—in order to learn his vices, because to be aware of virtue is sure sign of vice. His regimented morality leads to his “principled stands” in public life, where he can showcase his honor, his integrity, which he pretends to himself is not for the benefit of putting on a show. The horror the Pietist inflicts is not his self-absorbed masochism, but his insistence that we all become Pietists, or rather, his naive assumption that we are all already Pietists—or else that we impose guilty feelings on ourselves for not being so, which is only to say the same thing. But hisgreat terror is the former Pietist, the post-Pietist, the Trickster, for she refuses to cooperate with his party’s ideology, an act the Pietist can counter only by creating his own imaginative ironies, self-contradictions, cultural incoherences, and purposeful nonchalance. But to commit such acts he must no longer be a Pietist! For what can the Pietist create except more sins to mark upon his flesh? Or should Thor become Loki in a day?

(Another one from the not too distant past.)