This will be your first semester of North American Practicum 5211. I am Principal Slubgob PTD CDOIE TFO. This will be the first class many of you have taken with me although some of you did work your slimy ways through my sexual temptations and sensuous degradation 3420 elective. To both groups, let me extend an... eager welcome to this, your final course. My career both in the field and in the classroom has been one of unparalleled success and I expect that trend to continue both for my benefit and your's.
You will have just had your first patients introduced to you and are, I am sure, eager to begin the exciting process of twisting, bending, warping, perverting and in all ways degrading and ultimately consuming their little souls. I am aware that any number of you might resent this requirement; having successfully passed all your theory courses you feel you ought to be trusted to begin on your own. Well you aren't. This course is intended to provide one final level of supervision and direction on your first assignments which we of the greater pedagogical lowerarchy feel to be necessary to ensure that you bring back more food. After all, trust is our enemy's virtue. While he mucks about with his relational uncertainties trying to "build up" his servants,we will be certain to achieve our goals by direct supervision of our inferior slaves (that would be you).
Come to think of it, trust has, in itself, the alarming property of increasing the confidence, personhood and responsibility of it's object as well as building up a sort of mutually respectful relationship between it's subject and object. Of course, with your patients, you may be able to use it to some effect if you can induce them to place some trust in an unworthy object but even you had better be careful to be certain that the object will not become somehow worthy. If one human places even a little trust in another and that other, through it's own strength or through circumstances or (Hell forbid) by the enemy's strength, actually manages to come through it is always disastrous to our cause. Even when the second human fails and lets your patient down, you will find yourself forced to spend hours or days coaxing resentment and bitterness in the patient lest the enemy use the event to build forgiveness and charity into the little worm. Things are far better objects for your patient's trust. They will always fail in the end and there is no danger of a deepening "relationship" between them and your patient. Indeed, if your patient can be induced (an increasingly easy project for some in American society) to place enough of their trust in things, Mammon is only too happy to accept new worshipers.
You, are not to be trusted. We will use you and you will bring us food. Someday you may grow in power enough to get your own little brood of imps and then you can extend you puny wills a little more. Till then you will serve our purposes and do as I say under my supervision. Never forget that Hell is built on our thirst for power. Results will bring you recognition, failure will bring only destruction.
But let me return from my tangent. In this course I will be drawing primarily on my own experience and on the profound works of some of our more infernal field directors. My own "practical principals for the modern tempter" will make a superb beginning for your background reading (STS 3420 students will already have a copy of course); also Twistwattle's "Western Media as a Road to Hell", Bulmoth's "American Politics - Right, Left and Down", Screwtape's "Letters to a Failed Tempter" and of course Professor Pinth's "Schisms and Denominationalism" each contain valuable advice to a first time tempter.
Now! What do we expect from you in this course? You will, of course be expected to put into practice all that you have learned at the tempter's college. I will not be focusing specifically on theory in these lectures but on practice. Theory may come in as review or background in some instances but we will spend most of our time applying what you have learned to specific events, types, thoughts and trends you will encounter in the field.
You will submit weekly reports and I may assign additional readings if and as I feel that they are helpful to our efforts. Of course you are expected to keep abreast of the American's popular cultures (both religious and secular) and from time to time you can expect to write up an analysis of some trend or other which might serve a useful purpose for our cause.
A few words about the format of this course. I will post my lectures on this site an a roughly weekly basis although I may post more or less often as political and cultural opportunities and crises determine. You will send your work to my e-mail account (professorslubgob@hotmail.com) but you may post any remarks or questions in the "comments" section of each lecture. You will remember to post using your patients name so that your classmates will get used to associating you with your assigned prey. This may be helpful to any collaborative projects you undertake. I will make an effort to tag each lecture with it's relevant topics which ought to make an searching somewhat easier for you. You are encouraged to comment on one another's posts as well and I will, of course, answer any questions I deem worthy of a response. If you have any specific questions regarding you patients you may e-mail those to me along with your weekly reports. I may answer them directly or, if I think the issues broad enough, I may address my answer to the entire class in the form of a lecture on the relevant topic.
Regarding the structure of my lectures: I will begin most lectures by identifying and clarifying the topic. I will then sketch out some general "rules of thumb" for those of you with different sorts of patients, concluding. I will then provide some in-depth advice for when the "rule of thumb" ought to be violated; under what circumstances, in what way, to what effect and so forth. I will end each lecture with a summary appraisal of the topic as generally beneficial, harmful or effectively neutral to our cause.
Finally, allow me to address one concern which regularly frustrates new tempters on their first assignments. You will have noticed that your patients are diverse: some poor, others "middle class"; some are educated while others are functional illiterates; some are christians, some neo-buddists, a few muslims and others are pseudo-atheists. And perhaps you feel that this is unfair; that some of you will have a harder time of it than others. Well of course that is true. It is unfair and the assignment will be easier for some than for others. Let me be clear. No effort whatever was put into making this fair. You are in the field for our advancement not your own. The fact that some of you will increase your power is an unfortunate fact which we would avoid if we could. Since we cannot you will each be best served by serving us.
In our next, and first proper lecture I will lay out our general stratagem for North American temptation.
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