"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

remotely cognisant with the facts that your roles in certain notorious
events have been grossly exaggerated by
both posterity - which is often inexplicably kind to the
self-aggrandising - and by your own indulgently biased
accounts. No doubt you like to depict yourself as a thorn
in the flesh of the establishment, but closer to the truth
would be to say that you are merely an irritant, and that the
subsequent rashes are far more the result of your unwanted
presence than of any defect on the part of those you choose
to infect.

'In the case of someone so self-absorbed, it is perhaps

plausible that certain developments in the wider world may
have escaped your notice; to wit, the inexorable passing of
the years and the irrefutable testimony of the calendar,
which states, if you would take note, that this is not the
1990s any more. Once upon a time, you found and to your
credit exposed corruption and conspiracy among those of
whom we expected better. Your problem, it strikes me,
was that you did not know what to be about next. You
have continued to seek out such nefariousness, but where
you have not found it you have instead imagined it - and
more insidiously, implied it. If I were you, I might wish to
consider whether a man who finds corruption in every place
he looks might perhaps be seeing the reflection of what lies
within himself.

'In the instance that has brought you before me, you

arrogantly pitted yourself against an organisation far more

august and enduring than the windmills at which you had

tilted before; and though you were but a mosquito attacking

an elephant, it cannot be ignored that this mosquito wished
the elephant harm, and its bite may have done so had it not
been swatted.

'In short, Mr Parlabane, there is no place for you here

in the future. This is a new Scotland, a new country, with

new standards and a new morality. I must not allow it or its
institutions - nascent and ancient alike - to be disparaged
and prejudiced by the diseased mind of a wee shite like
you. For this reason, I order that you be taken from this
court, henceforth to a place of confinement, there to dwell