As we gratefully watch  comet Perry fizzle into the dirty icebag we know it to be, let us pause in panic to contemplate the future of a country in which this abused child grows into a brain and soul damaged man, who then snares (forbid it Jesus) the nomination of a major party likely to win the coming election.

With a nod towards the modern usage, which would have it that one is not a "victim" but a "survivor" of child abuse, I distinguish the two categories thusly:

A survivor has faced the awful truth that one of the two people delegated by providence to comfort, love, and defend him was instead a monstrous caldron of hate and inflictor of gratuitous pain.  The survivor has come to understand that his abuse was not some justified recompense for his evil ways, but the manifestation of his parents' disease.

The victim, on the other hand, like Perry, has dealt with the cognitive dissonance of his childhood trauma by erecting a wall of denial, on which he scrawls the graffiti image of an imagined good parent who beat him only to improve his wild ways.

"If I misbehaved in class, Mom would find out about it before I got home,” Mr. Perry wrote, and his father would get the news on returning from the fields. “Dad believed in the pain principle. His leather belt was usually the delivery method of choice.”

Examples of the latter are to be found in the comment section of the LA Times article which brought to public view the important study done at the University of New Hampshire by Prof. Murray Strauss.

Shorter message-beat you child and you lower his IQ (boy does Perry demonstrate the truth of that, or what?) and raise the probability of PTSD and other psychic derangements.

Republicans, think twice, and then twice again...