What if the serpent had not tricked Adam and Eve? Would they have still eaten of the tree of knowledge?
Did the snake really know what he was doing? Did he know what he was? Why did he do it?
Could he have been honest with them?
Epiphanies are a pain in the neck.
A few months ago, the blatantly obvious dawned on me: You know, this American political culture is pretty disgusting and degrading. Is this what you really want in your life? You're going to live in a cesspool, throwing and dodging balls of crap.
Sorry, but that's life in the Divided States of America.
A confession: Too often - almost daily - I wish I'd never taken a bite of the political apple, but once you've left the garden, you can never return.
You can't unlearn the political truths. You cannot forget that, as Aristotle taught, politics is the master art - it controls all other arts.
And then there's the reality that this is the true deadliest game - the one where the points are tallied in human lives.
It's a horrid, pathetic addiction, an epic love-hate relationship.
The title of Hunter S. Thompson's account of the '92 presidential election is too painfully dead on: "Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie."
In a Rolling Stone article, Thompson wrote, "Politics is like the Guinea Worm. It sneaks into your body and grows like a cyst from within until finally it gets so big and strong that it bursts straight through the skin, a horrible red worm with a head like a tiny cobra, snapping around in the air as it struggles to breathe."
The notion that "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" is only half the story.
Even if you're strong enough for the kitchen, stay too long, and it will cook you like a piece of meat until you feel nothing at all.
One need only look at the numbers to see evidence of these harsh realizations. Last year, 60 percent of my columns were tough, kick-you-in-the-teeth political pieces.
Of this semester's columns, only 25 percent would fit into that category. That's only three columns.
So many people lament political apathy. They work hard to get more people voting and involved in the process, but rarely does one get a warning as to the reality of the hideous depravity of the political process and its addictive nature.
It's time to stop lying about the political apple. It's especially hard because there are plusses and minuses as to whether one chooses to bite it.
Ignore it and stay in the garden, and you're not free: You're stuck in the garden under God's rule.
You're in a world you had no hand in creating and certainly have no say in controlling.
Bite it and learn the painful truths and secrets of the world - then suffer in the cesspool and die over and over again.
Whether it's simply watching one American abuse another on MSNBC or seeing the opposition triumph, you are going to die.
And so the snake sits on the branch, surrounded by golden apples, his forked tongue flapping in the air.
This is the apple, this is the choice. The price of freedom is what it's been since the beginning of time: You have to die.
And it's up to each of us to decide if that cost is too much to bear.
I don't have the answer.
Write to David at Swimminginbrokenglass@gmailcom
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