First, it is impossible for all of the attitudes of one's rational nature to be "thoroughly false and perverse and grounded on a thoroughly false and perverse object".
Most memorably, he talks about how pointless the war in Iraq often seems to men on the ground — a perverse Groundhog Day loop (so unlike his grandfather's war) in which there is no destination, no progress: "We'd go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of season.
Either that, or you'd have to face the truth that the man calling the shots for your team is a right-wing Republican, who, on strictly ideological grounds, likes doing perverse and irrational things and then pretending that they make sense.
It was a time of powerful global backlash against feminism – documented in Susan Faludi's book, Backlash – but in Scotland, Patrick recalls, there was a "perverse flowering", with Edinburgh's ground-breaking Zero Tolerance anti-violence campaign, Glasgow's library and Scotland's first feminist magazine Harpies and Quines.
The very fact that the archbishop gave any credence at all to "theocon" views on welfare the idea that dependency culture, and perverse incentives, pose a real problem breaks newish ground on the British religious scene.
"I think that would be more politically viable because many folks on the ground have said that the perverse incentives are the root of the problem, not privatization itself".
"Capturing the Friedmans" reaffirms the family as the inescapable cauldron of great drama — as the birthplace and feeding ground of the most powerful emotions, including perverse sexual desire, and as the site of reconciliation and solace, too.
"Some are saints and some are jerks," Young sings, cataloguing his subjects more specifically as he goes — "alcoholic people," "patch-of-ground people," and even, in a wonderfully perverse refusal to update lyrics, "Lee Iacocca people".
His work is said to be grounded in history, in the violent and perverse world of the Plantagenet and Tudor courts, in the intricate struggles for authority, land and sex that shaped medieval life.
Indeed, the "loser" label would readily fit many of ISIS's soldiers on the ground who have migrated to Iraq and Syria in a perverse pilgrimage to reverse a lifetime of a petty life.
