So, Pinocchio goes off to meet the coachman,
and the coachman's already said he's collecting bad little boys,
and he's got them all on the coach, they're all delinquent-types here,
and the ticket on the coach was the Ace of Spades,
which is what Pinocchio is holding,
and he's with this character here called Lampwick.
That's an interesting name.
So he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light, Lampwick, and that's interesting
because it's a play on "Lucifer", because Lucifer means "bringer of light",
and so Lampwick is a play on that. Lampwick is really a nasty piece of work,
he's got this false arrogance about him, he's got this cynical voice,
this really deeply cynical voice, and he's only... I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this,
maybe twelve or thirteen,
and so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical.
I'll tell you a story about that: so I used to live in Montréal,
I lived in a poor neighbourhood, and one day I was in the back alley building a fence,
because I was putting a little fence around my little tiny backyard,
and there was a house, across the alley, down the street a-ways
where there was a lot of not-good partying, a lot of bikers were hanging around there,
I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well.
And anyways, I was out there in the back alley, pounding away on my fence,
and these little kids came up. And they were little,
they were like, three and four years old, and they spoke Joual,
a really heavily-accented Québécois French, and so, my French isn't good,
so I could hardly understand them, but they were watching me hammer,
and they got a little closer, and they had one kid, who was clearly the leader,
had a real scowl on his face, hey,
and so they were watching, and I kind of motioned to one of them
that they could use the hammer, and that kid said,
and I'm going to mangle this, but he said: "je volais", or something like that,
and what it meant was "I'll steal that",
and so I thought, and then he came over and tugged on it,
and he wanted me to take it, and he was quite angry.
Well, I wasn't going to let him take it, and then, so I couldn't engage him,
I couldn't get him to play, you know, his buddies were sort of hanging around behind him.
They wouldn't come and play because he wouldn't,
so he was hostile right away to me.
And then,
so the fence piece was laying out in the alley, and these little monsters started running across it!
Which I thought was really remarkable, you know, but it was terrible at the same time,
because they were really little kids, that shouldn't be happening when you're three or four.
If that's happening at that age, things are not good.
And so that kid was already seriously not happy with the world.
And, you know, I'd been studying anti-social behaviour for a long time by that point,
and I knew that the kids who are destined to jail later in their lives
are kids who are rough and tough when they're two years old,
but then don't get socialised, or maybe worse, they get anti-socialised,
which is exactly what happened to this kid, he'd obviously been ignored and abused,
certainly no one had ever played with him in any real way
because he wouldn't play, and it's not good if a kid is that little
and you can't get them to play, something's gone seriously wrong.
Because they're so playful at that age, it's like 90% of them.
Anyways, so they were running back and forth on this fence,
and stomping on it, you know, and I was right there!
I thought, well, first of all, I thought that was remarkable,
but I also thought it was absolutely horrifying,
because in some sense I could see where this kid was headed and why,
at that early stage in his life, it's really...
...it's not a pleasant thing to behold, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
And that's kind of what this Lampwick is like, he's prematurely cynical.
This kid was already cynical when he was, like, four years old.
You know, most kids don't get cynical until they're teenagers.
And then often they don't get completely cynical, and usually they more or less grow out of it.
But it had happened to him much earlier.
So this Lampwick character, he's already decided that he knows everything,
that everyone else's opinion is worth nothing, and that there's nothing in culture or society
that holds any utility whatsoever for someone like him.
Now, you can imagine developing that way,
if you were raised in a family where people were generally lying to you,
and that they randomly treated you, or neglected you,
and that you couldn't discern anything about them that was admirable or positive.
Of course you'd assume that the whole structure is corrupt,
and that you had to take care of yourself, and no one else.
Well, not "of course", not everyone assumes that under those situations,
I shouldn't say "of course".
But it's a logical set of conclusions.
And of course, it's proportionate to some degree to how much abuse you take.
Although there are lots of stories of people being terribly abused as children,
who grew up to be kind, remarkable, responsible, thoughtful people,
who absolutely opposed to abuse instead of propogating it.
There's no direct causal pathway.