Speaking With a Forked Tongue

In the old Westerns the Injuns would, with expressions of anger, disgust and sadness at the obvious stupidity of the whites and their continuous double dealing, say, “He speaks with a forked tongue.” Now, while making no comparisons between sitting presidents and squatting demons the term “a forked tongue”, and its close cousin “speaking from both sides of his mouth, does conjure  unwelcome notions and sad memories, paint an ugly pictures of avoidable tragedies. What must one do to be rid of such unwholesome thoughts?

You are probably wondering why the little musing above.  From among the very many stories which one may choose I offer this one.

This latest example speaks of  one who sneaks away in the middle of the night to fly across the globe and creep before the sun rises into the besieged city, sign something that pledges to leave and to stay at the same time, promises…like someone we once one heard promise?…this war is over and then fly home to fanfares and trumpets, proclaiming…like someone we have heard before?…the equivalent of peace in our time.

Oh, the cynic will say, “All of them do that.”  Let them say it.  They are probably right.  The squatting demon says it, too.  And, he knows, that as long as enough fools listen and “Hope” where hope is vain, and trust where trust is poison, he will have so much fun.

Bring Out Your Dead!

“Good Lord, Agonia, will you take a look at this!”  One wonders if anything will shock over in Blighty any more.  Or, have they finally exhausted decency.

The blog...and the comments…show, to me anyway, the insidious nature of the creepy materialism that has gotten into our minds and souls, like the cold and damp of a British winter infects the very bones. It is an ache.

Wars and crises over the years (broadcast in real time and live on TV) have hardened us to those horrors we were once blissfully unaware of, and in that ignorance thought ourselves incapable of descending to.  Too late we learned, shuddered and were sickened.  Now?  Time has removed all sense of horror at the millions lost last century; the hundreds of millions shot, bombed, burned, starved and neglected to death.  Some, many, even doubt it happened.

And so this begins to occur, slowly first, and spread, a plague of materialism, a coarsening of intellect, a hardening of heart, a selfish willingness to think anything, to consider any option for comfort and ease in the name of self.  In the names of one extreme sort of materialism or other they participate willingly in worse horrors and propose little domestic horrors-a- day to cure a headache, improve a soft drink or cookie, to warm a swimming pool.

The “wonderful” promises of advances in medicine and science if we just ignore our common humanity allow us to forget that in many ways those advances come at the expense of life, and what was thought, once, our special place in the order of the world, and the dignity that place gave us…creatures of matter and spirit joined.    This latest is thought so little of other than a means of recycling something which would be left to rot.  Imagine how many profitable acres could be reclaimed for malls and sub-divisions from cemeteries?  Imagine Arlington as a Hyatt resort, a Four Seasons, a Ritz-Carlton?  Why not?  What is the corpse of s soldier but dead flesh and good fuel.  Did he not serve his country in life?  Why not serve as well dead?

Now as this article accompanying the blog post tells us we can and should entertain thoughts about good and practical things to do with our leftovers and if we can think of doing it, why, then we should do it. I do hope, at least, that they will make sure to save the hair, the fillings, the eyeglasses and the dentures before they fire up the furnace.

Oh, yes, and the fat, too, wonderful as an engine lube, don’t you know.

“Darling, since you put Grandpa’s Own in the car, we’ve lost that nasty ping and knocking and gotten another 10mpg. out if it.” “Yes we have, Agonia.  Best move I ever made, my pet.”

As you’ll see from the comments to the good priest’s blog post, at least one of his interlocutors finds little if anything wrong with the idea.  Good St. Johnathan Swift, Pray for us!

A Letter to a Friend

Someone recently communicated with me urging on me their understanding of this pas de deux between Holy Mother Church and Uncle Sugar’s current mob in DC over whether or not it would be right and just, proper and helpful toward salvation for the latter organization to insist that the former one knuckle under and forget all this drama about rights of conscience and freedom of religion, and concentrate simply of ponying up the money simple folks need for recently defined simple medical procedures, medications and/or apparatuses.  He took the road more traveled.  Below I try to tell him why I will not.

Have I made it simple enough for him?

Dear “N”,

It is simple, actually.  Pay attention, here.

Let us say that you  have a little business, and the business has three employees.  Let us say further that the government has recently passed a law that anyone who is an employer (you) has to buy health insurance for their employee(s).  That would be the fellow working for you, Billy Bucketbellie.  Still further, let us say that the law requiring you to buy that insurance also states that cosmetic plastic surgery (Nips and Tucks, botox in the butt, nose jobs, etc., even such things as multiple piercings and outlandish tattoos in strange places) are legitimate treatments for legitimate medical problems for the purposes of this new law (We will call the whole thing Reconstructive Health, which term was born as the twin of the Supreme Court decision granting to everyone everywhere their Reconstructive Rights), such that if someone has a skinny butt or a droopy neck and they don’t want it, they have every right to get it taken care of.  And let us say that such Reconstructive Health procedures will be provided absolutely cost free  under the new government ordered and employer paid for health plans that you, thee employer now must get for your employee(s).  There will be no charge to anyone at any time if they want to avail themselves of Reconstructive Health treatments or devices (push up bras are covered…even for men) including no co-pay at the providers office.

It is odd this, is it not?  I mean heart disease, cancer, diabetes and bee sting allergies will all require at least co-payments, but  Reconstructive Health  is provided absolutely cost free.  But, the  Reconstructive Health industry, by the way, is known to have a very strong lobby, and Congress, all of Washington DC is filled with a lot of pierced and tattooed people and people who know them.  Anyway, I continue.

Let us say that you and your family are  True Believers , and what you are true believers of is the  Church of the Original Form .  You believe that the body you were born into the world with is the one God wanted you to have; that since God is all knowing and all good, in His Divine Wisdom he gave you the one body in all eternity that most perfectly fits His image in you and for you, and is a reflection of His Mighty Power and Love to all the world.  Let us say that.  Finally let us say that one of the most sacred doctrines and dogmas of the COF and its believers is that because of this belief in the originality and uniqueness of one’s body it is a grievous sin and an offense against one’s deeply held beliefs actually to alter it in any way through surgical or other means, unless in the course of treatment for a disease or a serious accident.  Furthermore, it is also a serious sin to participate knowingly in someone else’s willing resort to any  Reconstructive Health Procedure.  Your conscience tells you that you cannot participate in this government mandated insurance program as it it presently constructed.  To do so would involve you directly in grave sin.

While you would feel sorry that your employee Mr. Bucketbellie had an operation to remove his wattle, and you would pray for his soul, you cannot in however small a way, join him in that decision, and you consider it a violation of your Constitutional right freely to practice your religion without the interference of government now to be required to provide the insurance which will allow him so to do.

No one anywhere is saying that the Bucketbellie’s of the nation may not pierce, cut,and color themselves as they wish.  They are simply saying that the government should not force them to provide insurance for those poor fools to do so.

I’ll make it more simple, if I can.  Perhaps you don’t smoke, you never smoked and you don’t like to breath second hand smoke. Let us put you back in that business again, and suppose that you have hired Bob Rawthroat, a chain smoker who goes through six packs a day (God help him).  Now comes the government with another plan to save the tobacco growers of the country from ruin and poverty.  You must contribute half the cost of Bob’s half carton of coffin nails each day.

Wanna do that?  I don’t.  While I have no employees yet, I do own a small business and I will not participate in any plan that requires me to pay for something I consider it would be a violation of my conscience so to do.  The bargain I had with this Republic guarantees me the right to do that.  It has broken faith with me, and that is not only wrong, it’s downright despicably wrong, and the people responsible for it are as a former teacher of mine was wont to say, cruds and worms, cruddy worms, for so doing.  I do not like them and applaud the decision of anyone not to obey the law.  It is a treacherous thing to do to a citizen, and makes me wonder if a government can commit the crime of treason against its own citizens.

Yours In Patriotic Duty,

Peter

An Humble Suggestion

Acting on reliable information that a group of atheists have petitioned the SOG (Seat of Government) to create a position within the Chaplains Corps of the Armed Forces of these Untied Sates for an Atheist Chaplain I first went to my dictionary, then Wikipedia for some guidance as to what, exactly, an Atheist Chaplain would be.  I found none.  But, there must be some mold into which such a thing may be poured, and that being done, there must be something it, well he or she, could do once so conformed to type.  If precedent is followed, it means there will be created, at least in the Armed Services, regular Chaplain led Atheist, umm worship?, services on a day regularly set aside for such things.  Muslims already have Friday.  Jews have Saturday.  Christians, I hope, still have Sunday, but nothing’s guaranteed.  I’m not sure but I think Wiccans and Pagans and New Agers have whatever day looks good.

Perhaps Atheists will take Monday, for Moon-day.

Anyway, in the spirit of welcome from the already worshiping multitudes I have been thinking this morning of offering atheists a framework for a regular , umm, well sort of worship service, and struggling all the while with coming up with a name to call it.  It can’t be anything like Mass because of course that word means meal and what is eaten is the Bread of Life which brings salvation and Everlasting Life; two things in which no self-respecting non-believing atheist could possibly believe.   How odd that sounds now that I read it, but how true.  Any atheist worth his/her salt believes, actually, in nothing.  Creation?  No!  From what, how, why, they would ask.  And, don’t dare mention the word Who.  Good?  Evil?  Heaven?  Hell? Truth?  Beauty? Love?  Hate?  Virtue?  Vice?  At the best, a smart atheist would probably finesse each question by saying, “It all depends.”  This was, essentially, the answer Sartre gave to everything; I meant to write existentially, of course.  “It all depends”, and “Lemme get back to you”, atheists and siding salesmen, separated at birth?

Anyway this morning the thought occurred to my mind as I said to offer them something to do during the time set aside for them to gather as a group of non-believers and witness to the absence among them.  Well, that’s an odd sounding construction, too; on a par with that bit about non-believing believers above.  The possibilities are positively Hellerish, as a professor friend has already noticed.

Perhaps it’s better put in this way: witness to the non-presence of…  No, that doesn’t work any better, and Festivus is taken.  Anyway, I’m sure they’ll come up with something to call it.  Atheists, I have heard, are smart folks; which says a thing or two about mere human intelligence left on its own.

Having put aside the problem of a title for what atheists will do on their day, I’d like to offer them my thoughts on exactly what they may do.  Since I am a Catholic the form of, err, worship for want of another word, I’m suggesting is based on the one I am most familiar with, the Holy Mass in the Latin Rite.  I don’t wish to suggest they actually use Latin which may upset the traditionalist Atheists out there…  Funny, the concept of a traditional atheist yearning for a return to a Latin atheist , umm worship, service had me laughing out loud just now.  But, atheists are big fans of what is pleasantly called Sacred Music if you must know the truth, most of which is sung in Latin.  Attend a concert of such music and half the wet eyes in the audience, I guarantee you, will be atheist eyes.

Anyway, feel free to tweak the following if you think of something which will help these folks get their act up and going.  Make any suggestion that comes to mind as you read by which they may be helped to meet and give thanks for and praise to…to…err, each other?…for…for…well, umm…stuff…and, and…each other?…to, umm…well, whatever… for the greater good of…ahhhh…you know?

We start with a song.  We’ll not call it a hymn, and you know why; too many negative associations.  So, let’s call it The First Song.  I’m thinking something along the lines of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel would be great here for it’s denial of responsibility and simultaneous celebration of random and chaotic successions of events, perfect atheist non-theology.  It establishes a theme based on the “It all depends.” fall back position, a sort of “Quien sabe?” kind of thing, a kind of devil may care insouciance that epitomizes the best atheist response to existence.

After this warm up, this loosening up, there ought to be something similar to an opening prayer, which is just plain silly for a group of atheists.  No one prays to themselves.  But, I think we could do something along those very lines.  Here the Chaplain would say: “Let’s stand tall and think how nice we just sounded, and how nice it is to be here in this, umm, big room right now.”  Then he or she could read something from Garrison Keillor’s Poem for the Day thing on NPR.

Getting right into it, two or three people then would come up to the front of the , umm, congregation in the , uhh, big room and read selections from….  Well from anything, really, anything that would help them, or make everyone feel good about, oh, stuff; a New York Times editorial, a Maureen Dowd op-ed on Catholicism, anything from a Dan Brown, Ayn Rand, Ann Rice or Jacqueline Susann novel, Time, America, Commonweal or the National Catholic Reporter.  Whatever.

When they sit down, the Chaplain gives a little talk about anything he thinks is nice to talk to a bunch of folks about.  I don’t think this should be called a sermon.  Lecture is a better word; the kind of thing any college professor, many of who are atheists, do all the time.  In fact any college professor would be happy to stop by and give a lecture to such a group, I’m sure, and consider it a civic duty so to do; especially if they were social scientists.

After the lecture is done, the Chaplain then invites everyone to stand while he leads them in the Statement of Non-belief.  I am working on one, soon to be posted on this blog as a, err, worship aid.  I thought of a very simple, “NOPE!”, but discarded that idea as not being properly liturgical.

After the recital of the S o N B there will come a period when all gather around a common table to share in a communal feast of Dry Sack, water crackers and two year old  aged cheddar; a brief refreshment and opportunity to experience the closeness of people who don’t have anything in common with one another except their non-belief.  One or two people, not a choir since that would over power the conversation, could sing something like “Bring in the Clouds” softly in the background.  Either that or a similar song would be wonderful for the ambiance, so necessary in gatherings of this type.

As this winds down, the Chaplain draws everything to a close with a simple, “Well, I guess that’s about it.  Don’t forget to think about yourself this week.”  All respond, “Yeah.  You bet.”

On major, I can’t call them feasts or holy day, how about “Big Deals”, “Special Days”, or something like that, the form of dismissal could be along these lines:

CHAPLAIN:  “Go forth and be the best you can be; whatever best means to you at this time and place, however you conceive being to be for yourself alone, careful not to impose on however anyone else, if they exist, is in being with you.”

ATHEISTS: ” You bet!  You really bet!”

The last song?  “My Way” of course.

The Kill Team

Yesterday I learned that some of the youngsters we have over in Afghanistan “defending our freedom” have been enjoying themselves after school, so to speak, playing outside with their friends.  The game?  Well, they have been hunting you might say.  And what they have been hunting, specifically is the folks who live in Afghanistan.  They even took trophy pictures of their kills. And, they took some actual trophies, at least once cutting off the finger of one of their murder victims.

Why?  That was my first reaction.  It was probably similar to the cry of someone informed that a beloved family member had committed a terrible crime, “Why?”  One searches for a reason, some way to make sense of something like this which shatters one’s soul.  I need look no further than our own daily headlines for the evidence that supports my  choice for a reason.   There’s a murder trial going on in my town right now.  Three kids broke into a home a year or so ago and hacked a woman to death, and almost killed her young daughter.  They did it because they wanted to kill someone.  On the way out of the wreckage they took a few small items as mementos of the experience; tokens, trophies, totems.

We’ve killed about 40 million people that way, hacked ‘em to death while they thought they were safe in their “home”, since 1973; killed ‘em because we wanted to.  Most recently we read about a “doctor” , an abortionist, in Philadelphia who kept the dismembered bodies of the children he killed in jars and plastic bags strewn around his office.  Trophies?

Our “boys” over there did the same.

There ain’t a bit of difference that I can see among the three kinds of murderers, kids, soldiers and pregnant women.  It doesn’t end there.  We have judges who allow doctors to kill old folks or sick ones because they have become burdens on their family or on the resources of the facilities where they are supposed to being treated.

And there are politicians, and pundits and professors who will say that there’s nothing wrong at all with killing old and sick folks, and folks who can’t walk, or who will be “burdens” if we allow them to be born, or who are just in the way.

Someone mentioned they thought it was ironic that the pictures appeared in a German newspaper.  Why should it be ironic that the Germans have pictures of some of the citizens of this place of death smiling beside their kills?  I don’t think the truth is ironic at all.

We have the choice to kill, so why not?  They certainly had the means and exercised their right to choose.  The photos are proof of that.  Who needs a motive when murder has become a right?  What I find truly ironic is that some forms of murder are still considered crimes.  Call me a reactionary; the kind of fellow who only makes right turns, whose gear shift only reads “R” for reverse because there are a few things I would reverse around here if I could, and most of them have occurred in the fifty years since I came into my own.

I’ll not give you chapter and verse, but you must know, as well as I do, the role played in the huge culture shift since mid-century by media, scholarship, science and politics, so that now we talk openly about such rights as the right to kill.  Well, we don’t call it that, but it is the functional equivalent.  The infection has spread so far that we find young boys thinking there is nothing wrong with invading a home in the dead of night for the sole purpose of brutally killing the people who live there and then bragging to their friends about the act, soldiers “defending” freedom committing murder and taking photos to prove it and women killing their children a million times a year while the courts and legislatures tell them it is their right.

I’ll grant you there may still be a few hardy souls  who have raised their voices or will raise them against this outrage.  They are drowned in the din coming from so many more on the side of choices.

The late Pope John Paul II said that evil spreads with amazing speed, and I think a direct line can be drawn from the cheapening, the loss of a sense of value and dignity in human life, that is produced by the evil of abortion to these other acts we witness.  Yes, it’s true that we’ve failed miserably in the past all over the world in protecting and caring for human life, but for 2k years we’ve seen slow advances on that kind of failure…a lot of setbacks, but slow advances.  But, within the last 60 years, at my counting, after the defeat of Nazism and the fall of Communism, and contemporaneous with them both, there has arisen a greater enemy.  That enemy has persuaded us that killing is as normal and necessary as breathing, laudatory in many cases and a right.

“From an attitude of skepticism in relation to the foundations of knowledge and culture,” again as JPII says, has come a rejection of it all in favor of a kind of Promethean attitude of reliance on ourselves alone. That way produces the inevitable outcome of death, a death with no resurrection on the last day, and a death to which a great many people march in ignorance and with great pride in their “accomplishment”.  You are right if you say we need to pray for them.  We need also to pray that some of the voices raised in defense of the indefensible will fall into silence.

I’d begin on campuses and in school rooms across the country to reverse that trend that has led us to descend from the City on a Hill into its sewer.  Over the years in those places we have exchanged an education in Virtue for values, Truth for tolerance and Reality for relativism.  The curriculum being thus emptied we have grown up generations of students, the first of whom now wander aimlessly in the desert of self indulgence and rights without responsibilities; rights with terrible consequences, though, for the weak and voiceless.

We have become Nineveh with no prophet to cry out the truth about us, with no ruler to accept it and declare a time of mourning, pour ashes on his head, wear sackcloth and order everyone else in this mad house to do the same; fasting from food and drink until God, who by rights should wipe us out because we deserve it, lifts His hand.

At no time since they were uttered, it seems to me, have Moses words been more worth hearing and heeding:

Moses said to the people: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. 

If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.

For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Cain asked the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  We’ve given the answer, “Not only no, but hell no!” Or, as John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable.” We now have “kill teams” in our Armed Forces.  To my mind it is the direct result of a culture which condones, celebrates as a right, murder, such that “conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life.”

A friend of mine saw the photos and was appalled by them, as was I.  He was the one who thought it curious and ironic that they appeared first in the German paper Der Speigel.  That paper also has 4,000 more photos and videos of similar atrocities committed by the group, a “kill team” as it called itself.  Well might one ask where is the irony in a German paper publishing photos of American atrocities?  We now join them in shame.  Will you say, “But wait, the Germans killed millions, these are only a few.”  Will voices claim that this was merely the fog of war and the pictures merely bad manners?  Will the trophies cut from the dead bodies amount to more of the same slight failures in decorum; the mess of the battlefield?  Why not Germany, or Russia, China, Uganda, Cambodia or Bosnia?  We used to think we were different.  We have no right to think so anymore.

Sleep well, and make sure your doors are locked.

UPDATE: Another friend quoted a dead Roman: “Homo homini lupus”, meaning to say that man is a predator of man.  I have no evidence to point to that wolves kill wolves because the think they have a right to.  Even when wolves fight each other,  such struggles rarely lead to death or serious injury.  We alone love to kill.



Half Orphans, Drive By Dads and Less

The ‘Hood’s full of babies, live ones and dead ones.  I’m on Facebook.  I finally succumbed to the temptation a couple of months ago after our daughter had been after us to do so for almost a year, and the grand children were mentioning all the fun they had.  Who could resist?

After I joined I was surprised to find the number of folks my age, and a generation younger who flood my FB page with pictures and tales of newborns, toddlers and about to be babies. (Like a shark’s rows of teeth, I’m of the generation that is ready to fall off and float to the sea bottom.)  I read delightful tales of christenings and first steps, bits and pieces of the young ones antics and parents’ weary responses, and look at tons and tons of cute fat cheeked baby pictures, smiling mothers and gooey eyed fathers.  I am particularly fond of experiencing the Auld Folks melting softness, glowing love and warm joy coming through their announcements and updates.  Mine are all too old for diapers and bottles, but the stories invoke the memories, and breed hopes that I may yet see and hold one of my own great-grandchildren before I drop off the Shark’s Lip of Life.

Well, isn’t that nice, you may say.  But, it isn’t everything.  Read on.

I am even connected through Facebook to a few folks who are a couple of rows of teeth behind me, behind even the Moms and Dads who tell the bright laughing stories.  They have their own stories and pictures, too; not a few of them, oddly enough, about the births of their own babies, and they show the pictures, and bring on the cooing and congratulatory comments.  The difference here is that there are only Moms, no Dads, in the pictures or behind the cameras.  No Dads are in the picture that is, if you get my drift.

Believe what you see, and you could conclude we are becoming a place of fatherless children being raised by mothers young enough to go clothes shopping with their daughters or dancing with their sons.  The kids’ll never hear, “Wait till your father comes home!”  Dad, like the salmon, is downstream, somewhere.  Who will take his place?  If no one does, what will life be like for men and women raised by other  women barely more than older sisters, and tired grand parents when Mom needs to go to work waitressing or cleaning out some mall somewhere?  Will the the nearest thing to a father be Mom’s date?  What fathers have become in this arrangement is the functional equivalent drive by dads.

I am happy, I suppose, for the fact that these youngsters gave birth, but I have a heaviness of heart about their reasons for doing so, their own futures and their children’s.  All the more reason for praying, then.  While I have no way of knowing if these children were conceived as part of  the growing trend of “intentional” pregnancies among young women, many still in high school,  I do know of one person who said she has no thought of marrying.  “Marriage isn’t done these days.”  Lord, help us all if children are becoming simply a notion, an accessory.

One wonders, at least I do, what may have been the case if during the now almost mandatory pre-natal testing indications of some serious deformity or genetic disease had been detected.  A child is not a wardrobe item to be returned.  Not quite yet I pray, though the link does highlight our increasingly hard-hearted and eugenically oriented culture.

Such cruelties as are discussed in the article above are ancient cruelties one may hope.  It may be a vain hope when one considers what horrors went known and unchecked in Philadelphia for years until Dr. Kermit Gosnell was indicted.  God alone knows how many murders were committed there in conditions which rivaled a slaughter house.  You may, if you have a strong stomach, read the actual indictment.  Having read a few indictments in my time I was struck by many things, the anger of the Grand Jurors, their scorn for the “politics” of abortion which influenced the treatment of Dr. Gosnell and his “clinic” and the damning criticism that Gosnell was allowed to operate as he did because his clients were all poor minorities.

Anger, scorn and criticism are more than justified.  The people who believe that abortion is a matter for a pregnant woman to decide do not try to tell us that a Dr. Gosnell is anything but an aberration in that trade.  They daren’t.  Rather, they want us to know, and feel good about, the fact that safe and responsible, clean and pleasant abortions are what the industry provides.  We have come a long way from leaving unwanted infants on the town dump for passing gulls and crows.  It is possible, now, to remark without seeming outrageously cynical and two-faced if one is a NARAL or NOW member, that abortion would be unnecessary if we just had better sex education and more efficient and available contraception.  The real truth is far more scary, especially when one begins to think seriously about that nasty word eugenics and its many shades of meaning and many ways of application.

Perhaps, some day, we will go so far as to awaken from this nightmare, this craziness affecting us all, wherein on the one hand we don’t blink an eye at children giving birth while fatherhood disappears down a dusty trail and on the other hand headlines in major newspapers spin a story about a 40 percent abortion rate in New York City being due to restrictive laws on abortion elsewhere, or opine that there’s no big deal, anyway since we’ve always had abortion.  Are they asking us to relax and learn to enjoy it?  At least it’s legal, now, and would go away altogether if everyone could avoid conceiving in the first place.

Except, of course, if you’re fifteen and need to have your own baby to dress and take pictures of.

UPDATE: Perhaps we may finally be able to accept as true, and live up to the truth, that, as Walker Percy pointed out in 1981 , we are human from our conception, and each of us unique.  Of course it implodes the myth that we have all of these rights and choices which has led to the mayhem we have been inflicting on ourselves lately.  We will have to understand that rights, so called, do not trump responsibilities, and choices which we think we have a right to make in many cases should be avoided for the harm they do to others.  Perhaps salmon will some day speak, too.  The Bradan Feasa, did he say a word to us then, would probably begin by telling us how wrong we have been.

 

 

The Saugus Review of Literature and High Art

The Saugus Review of Literature is a little known, but precedent setting and prize winning scholarly journal making something of a name for itself publishing reviews of and the actual works of writers and poets on the very edge of their genres.  Its scholarship and style is at once challenging and of impeccable quality.  I have been a subscriber to SRL since I discovered a copy on the seat next to me one night on the Red Line coming home from a Celtics game at the old Boston Garden.  I recommend SRL to any one of you interested in reading good works and expanding your knowledge of the many exciting things taking place these days in the arts and scholarship.

I know the Editor-in-Chief, Salome O’Hara, and it is from her that I received permission to publish here on this blog a review of two short poems by the  Alsatian poet Jean Flhond.  The author of the review, Prof. Seamus Moulinis is Emeritus Professor of Recent English Literature at The Catholic University of Highbridge, Sacred Heart College in Pinewood, NY.  The article follows:

“Jean Fhlond appeared in print for the first time several years ago in a little magazine published by the Brothers of Eternal Depression, a group of men devoted to doing what they could to help those who have discovered, as Peggy Lee sings in her famous song, that there is no real answer to the question “Is That All There Is“, but to keep dancing.  Fhlond’s work is a courageous and ground breaking exploration of man’s confronting that truth in all its many dimensions, with all its many challenges. 

He is a little known pre-post modernist, a student one might say of Rimbaud; a man claimed by the Germans because he spent much of his writing life in a particular beer hall in Munich, Das Grosse Beir.  There he carried on an unrequited relationship with one of the waitresses Dollie Braunwurst.   She was totally German, but with a truly Gallic heart; enjoying his attentions, but enjoying more spurning them.

My aim here is to show how Flhond is in the tradition of the better known French modernist poets, and not only that influences a large number of recent European poets.  I will limit myself to analysis of two of his most recent published works: “struggle” and  “end”. 

A word, before we examine the text of each poem, about the titles themselves   One observes first the absence of any upper case type in the titles.  Though Fhlond was a master typist, it is known that he was quite aware of the tides of style.  The lower case titles are an homage to a.a.commungs, the American poet of the early to mid-twentieth century whose whimsicality and originality in structure and word formation did much to free others from the strait jacket of classical form, grammar and  sense.  Commungs was a poet for the people and about the people in every time and place, especially the American West, as can be seen in his most popular poem, “anynight down inna little kowtown”, at once a satire on life in a frontier town and a homage to the Asian-Americans who worked on the Trans-Continental Railroad.  Now, to the works themselves…

The titles of Fhlond’s two poems contain much more than two words; already we are brought into the poems’ themes and the poet’s ideas about life.  These words themselves tell a story, and demand of the reader his whole attention.  As Fhlond’s work matured, his sense of brevity and compression,; his desire to do more with less became his driving inspiration.  Indeed it could be said that he was the first “compressed poet”, spawning a generation of followers.  His final book,  “Z” consists of one page, with the letter in lower case at the upper right corner of the page.  During an interview with Myles Pynchetown for The Poet Speaks on the CBC program Literate Lives, Fhlond explained his purpose in writing, his poetics, “I am looking for the soul of an idea, an essential telling of experience in which I come at once from the beginning of all concepts to the end.  I believe I have found it in this, my final poem, “Z”, at once the title of a work and the work itself.  The poem was set at the very top of the right hand edge of the page to convey to the reader that it and all it means stand on a precipice and gaze into an abyss.  It is a metaphor of consciousness, and the meaning of existence.”

But that is tomorrow, in a matter of speaking.  The two poems I consider are from yesterday, still valuable as pointers toward the culmination, the completion of Fhlond’s art.

In the first: “struggle”, the poet approaches the universal condition of existence with compassion and deep understanding:

How often do we get up each morning
To find our slippers beyond reach?

In these two lines Fhlond establishes the primordial question Man asks of the universe, and thereby illustrates his confrontation with the limits of his creatureliness which he carries further into a bold statement that things are as they are because that is simply the way of it.  It is at once a summary of theological struggles and a bold recapitulation of Western philosophy:

We often from the table rise with flecks of food
Between our teeth..

He continues, courageously emphasizing the imperfectability of our situation, our radical limitations with the half rhymes of reach and teeth, the repetitiveness of often in lines one and three.  Taken together, the first four lines are a neat recapitulation our condition.  In every circumstance we will find ourselves overpowered by existence.  This is the opening statement of the poem.

In a series of shorter lines which bring the poem to its dramatic and hopeful conclusion Fhlond discovers for the reader the way to defeat life’s war against the living:

These burdens are not our own
Nor should they be.

The lines can be seen as an affirmation of community and an indictment of existence which demands too much of the individual.

We carry weight beyond
Our rated capacity.
All of this the universe knows
And appreciates.

Fhlond acknowledges our contribution to history, and argues for the proper understanding we must have of our place in it.  These lines are at once determined, courageous and hopeful.  Only human beings can know their limits and strike against them a blow which, even to an insensate universe, is worthy of recognition and appreciation.  Before and within a blind universe we are by chance consigned to act.  We must act with determination and grim purpose.  Our only satisfaction, and our fundamental meaning is found in struggle, even when it is a struggle against stiffness upon arising or little bits of poppy seeds in one’s dentures.  In that is found, Fhlond asserts, Man’s meaning and joy.

The second poem “end” is nothing less than Fhlond’s eschatology:

The garbage truck is as regular as the seasons used to be;
The reason I set out once a week for the curb
Dragging the big can along behind me down the drive
To set it there opposite my neighbor’s, near the mailbox
The night before the pickup is scheduled.
We’ve had no snow and it’s mid-December already,
Christmas a week or two away, one pink rose
On a little bush in the back yard, and the daisies look
Almost as good as they did two months ago.
Who knows what time of year it is, but I do know
The garbage needs to be put out every week
On Thursday, unless there’s a holiday.

Fhlond’s contribution here is to put into terms we all understand the laws of thermodynamics operating on separate systems, macro systems like the changing of seasons and micro systems like household waste; each of them related to the other. He has unified, if you will, the physical sciences with there immersion in the material with the Spirit of Man, joined them both and affirmed man’s nature as spirit and matter lifting the latter from mere temporality to eternity.  He has given us a reason to live, to continue, to overcome.

It is also an indictment of man’s impact on the environment and a poet’s prediction of the end, even with the periodic interruption of a “holiday”, a temporary reprieve from utter destruction and loss.  Nothing will prevent the end.  This is, finally, Fhlond’s triumph as an artist, joining hope and despair into one unitive whole.

Mad Dogs and Californians

I just got off the phone from a conversation with my brother, Tom.  He lives out  in a little California town called Healdsburg.  I am not a fan of California.  As a matter of fact I think that there is a problem with that whole place, California, Arizona, Nevada, et al.  I think the sun out there is too strong for human beings, and that it works strange things on their brains after a while.  That’s why I worry about my brother, and caution him when we speak to get plenty of shade.  I’d prefer it if he never went outside until after sunset.  It causes problems, not the least of which is melanoma.

Tom...Before Community Service

They have a lot of problems in California, and if someone wanted to do the work, I’d bet that they’d find out they were all caused by too much sun on people’s domes, caused by that and too many people in one place, too.   I was out there not too long ago and saw some of the problems, all caused by too many people, too much sun.  You think China has  traffic jams?

Anyway, that’s what my brother is talking about in our conversation, driving and what can happen when you do.  He tells me the story of his Day in Traffic Court.  It all starts with him coming off the 101, that’s one of the fabled California Freeways (not so free after all) running nearby where he lives, and making a turn off the ramp.  While he does that he has his picture taken running a light which had been yellow when he started to turn but wasn’t while he was turning.   So, he gets this letter with a very nice picture of himself attached and an invitation to join some other folks for Story Time With the Judge…200 other folks it turns out.

The judge starts out by telling every one how tough it is for him; he has no discretion about the fines he’ll assess since the legislature in its wisdom, unable to raise taxes, has raised fees and fines to finance the State Givernment (I’ll let the typo stand) and keep themselves employed manufacturing hot air in Sacramento.  Then the bailiff begins to call folks up to for what I have named the  Rite of Plead or Pay.  Tom is not paying too much attention to this.  He’s there to get in and get out, just like everyone else; to get back in the sun and have it work its old devil magic on his brain.

But then, he says, he begins to notice a trend developing.  He notices the judge as he questions the miscreants before him in orderly ranks assembled offering something Tom has not known is available during the Rite, a change in the rubric.  The judge would ask the citizen, “How do you plead to (name a traffic offense)?”  The citizen would answer guilty in the vast majority of cases.  (Tom says there are only twenty people who pleaded innocent of the complaint and choose to go to trial at a later date.)

Now things get very interesting because the judge asks, after a whopping fine has been assessed, if the defendant has the money (check, cash or credit card) to pay the fine.  One fellow, whom he remembers is there for three separate offenses in one incident, and gets a $2400.00 fine, replies that he does not.  So the judge offers him a payment plan.  Neither can the citizen do this; $100.00 a month, he says, is beyond his means.  The proof of that is the fact that the fee for a driver’s license is also beyond the fellow’s means.  Well, you might think, the judge is stymied, and the only thing he can do is order the man to the calaboose.  I know I think so when I hear this story.

Not so, not so, Pilgrim.  This is California, and they are ahead of the curve, or the eight-ball; you choose.  As your man says, he places himself at the mercy of the court, and the court, merciful as all get out, offers, suggests, pleads(?) with the fellow to take the option of …TA DA!…Community Service.  With a speed approaching light the offer is accepted and the fellow walks away…into the sun light.

My brother listens as one person after another is unable to pay the whopping fine set by the solons for traffic offenses of all kinds, pleading everything under the sun as a reason.  This does not fail to have an effect on my brother who tells me that when his turn before His Honor comes that he is prepared to go as high as $150.00.  But, when he hears the number, five-hundred and eighty dollars, American, he is suddenly aware that he would like nothing better to do than accept the offer of Community Service to the State of California and all its people.  Offer made and accepted, Tom steps aside and joins the growing line of service oriented, and poor, citizens.

Shortly after he has made a public confession of his penury, he tells me, a nice, very well dressed lady from a very well-t0-do suburb in the County appears, receives her own back-breaking fine and is, as are most of the people, quite incapable of paying it.  Community Service is recommended.  Guess what?  She takes it, too.  I have a picture of the judge, near despair, his head in his hands  simply repeating those two words over and over and over until the courtroom empties and all is quiet.

In answer to my question, Tom tells me he hasn’t any idea about community service, what it is, or where and when it will have to be performed.  He does say that the state has the cleanest roadsides he’s ever seen.  The thought occurs to my mind that he will have more work in the sun than is good for his mental health.  I worry about him.  I worry about them all.  Pray for them.

Here’s a PS: Tom says that only three people pleaded guilty, and did not take the Community Service option.  They are sent to jail.  One of them is a Mexican fellow who can not speak English, has no job, no money and no drivers license.  He and the other two are probably the smartest ones in this whole mess.  They get three hots and a cot, and they stay out of the sun.

More Child Abuse

What I write today may upset some of you who will read it; not because of the subject matter.  Most everyone who reads this, if they persevere, will be very familiar with that.  No, I think you will be upset with the conclusions I reach about the things I mention, the connections I make between them and all of us, myself included.  So, my apologies to you beforehand for stepping into your space and upsetting you with what you may not think is child abuse on a very large scale.  I do think so, and think you should, too.  That’s why I wrote it.

A couple of days ago, moved by some things happening at a junior high school (oops, Middle School) just down the block from me I wrote a little something about what I thought was a big problem; the abuse of children that everyone sort of thinks is no abuse at all.  By that I mean that there are no knickers twisted among the great number of us over such things as (a) pornography on the internet readily available to children as young as ten, (b) the medical experimentation that has lead to such modern frankensteinian practices as donor dads and designer kids and (c) master classes in the kama-sutran arts for eleven and twelve year old children.  If you are interested simply read the piece before this one.

It seems to me that there is little or no concern to call these things what they are, the abuse of children.    Of course, they are a lot of other things, too, most of them downright evil.  But, one does not like to call things which most people enjoy or make use of evil, especially if it turns a handsome profit, or is, as the saying goes, a “victimless” crime.  While I am at it I might as well add abortion on demand to the list, particularly abortions performed on young children without parental knowledge or consent.  If ever the specious concept of victimless crime could be applied to an act it is well done here.

If you remain un-persuaded that I haven’t made the connection in your mind between my list above and  child abuse there is probably little I can do that will turn on the light for you.  Still, I have the horse, the lance is in my hand and there is a windmill on that hill.

There is ample and growing evidence that women suffer from a form of PTSD called “Post-Abortion Syndrome”.  Further evidence points to the large number of coerced abortions performed on women who would not have had the procedure if they had been free to decide for themselves.  Both of these conditions are more common among teen-aged girls who find themselves pregnant.  The sad fact is that in each such case two children suffer abuse; the young mother to be and the soon not to be child she carries.

We are horrified from time to time to read stories such as appeared in the papers a few days ago about a man who bled to death on the street while passers by ignored his dying self.  Neighbors commented that such a cold and callous thing is un-acceptable and borders on the criminal.  Of course we all should remember the Kitty Genovese case long ago in New York City.

Such a thing could never happen in a hospital, now, could it?  But it does. If you follow the link pay attention to the statement of the mother whose child was left to die, and what she says about coercion.  By the way, don’t let the fact that the story comes from England lull you into thinking it can’t happen here.  It has!  It happens everywhere.  Google will happily and quickly supply you with more than twenty thousand links to stories about this particular form of child abuse

Here is another story; this one from Italy.  It is interesting to note that it was a priest who was going to pray for the child who discovered it alive two days after the abortion!  He was not a victim of “diffused responsibility syndrome”.  That’s what they call it now.  It used to be called callousness, disinterest and downright cruelty.  Before this one would be correct to think that only a Nazi beast would let someone die of hunger and thirst, naked and alone, slowly, over days.

And, remember, this is not abuse.  This is simply a choice and it is a right.  I suppose that all of the medical professionals will plead that they were merely following orders to let the child die since, after all, it was its mother’s choice to do so.  Alas, it’s a kind of willful blindness, a morally bankrupt failure to involve oneself in another’s pain, to pretend that what is there isn’t.

I don’t find that attitude too much different from the attitude most of us take to what happens on the Internet, in our mad-scientist laboratories and, lamentably, in our schools.  If we do not participate we approve.  If we do not approve we pretend it isn’t our part to do or say anything is wrong.  After all these people are not or relatives, these children are not our children.  They are not our friends or neighbors.  There is too much on our plates to concern ourselves with mere opinion, and the list of palliative excuses goes on.  Where are the parents, the authorities, one asks?  And, if the government approves and the parents of the child…?

In my previous effort on this subject I provided links to articles which dealt with facts and figures.  They exist.  The consequences of sexual experimentation to the young who are exposed to such things as I described in my other posting are well known.  They lead to a sort of murder of the spirit regarding the proper place of sex in one’s life and a failure to be able to form lasting loving relationships; this leading, eventually I suppose, to the death of the family.

More immediately, though, the rate of STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) infections is skyrocketing among sexually active young people who are being told that it is normal and healthy to engage in any form of such activity one wishes.  Normal and healthy.

As if that were not enough recent reports point to an increased risk among young people of developing cancers of the mouth because of some of the things they are learning are normal and healthy things to do.

What are we, all of us, doing to ourselves?  More importantly, more malignantly, what are we doing to our children by allowing, encouraging and promoting their promiscuity?

I can only call it what it is, a murder in which we all participate by our varying degrees of disinterested silence or outright approval and participation.

If we leave any after us, they will call it a great pity.

Child Abuse

Soon the dawn will break.  Light will appear, faint and hesitant at first, and then burst open the day with brightness.  This dark night will be swept away.  It has already come!  In Great Britain it has been day for several hours as I write this.  Rush hour is well underway and offices, factories and schools are busy people going about with their assigned tasks.

The children, particularly the youngest, will be excited to discover what the day will bring; awaiting the guidance of their teachers dedicated to molding them, building their minds and bodies.  So will some scientists who in their way are interested in molding be excited.  I speak of the ones who are keen to explore new ways of manufacturing the perfect human being.

A recent headline in  British paper spoke about the exciting possibility of eradicating congenital defects in us by combining the genetic material from a number of donors.  Three was the number in the story…but why stop there?

The result of all of this mixing would be what has come to be called a “designer child”; someone with absolutely no connection to anyone.  Anyone, that is, beyond the two people who have paid an awful lot of money to purchase this little bit of breeding; like a dog from a high end kennel.  It gives “snaps and snails and puppy dogs tails” a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

But the result.  Oh, the result, the beautiful, perfect ten fingered and toed happy little disease and deformity free result.  How pretty it will look in its carriage and in the pictures.  It is surely worth the destruction of as many little piles of un-distinguishable and invisible clumps of experimental humanity as might be necessary to provide the world with one perfect child?  And the good which will have been done for the child is not even calculable?  Is it not so?

Well, maybe.

It is getting a little closer to dawn, now, and soon the first birds will wake filling the air with their morning songs.

In another three hours they’ll be doing the same things out in California where in the San Fernando Valley something more than a lot of fruits and vegetables is produced; about 20, 000 pornographic films a year.  Did you hear 20k a year?  Yes, you did.  And it is a multi-billion dollar business, 13.6 multis to be exact.  The saddest part about this, and it is very difficult to quantify the immense sadness all of it signifies, is the figure which knocked me over when I read it.

Here is the figure.  Among the top five search items on the internet for children 18 and under are “sex” and “porn”.  The Pollyannas of the world might want to spin that little factoid by saying that forty percent of the “research’ little Johnny is doing is in the field of human biology, or current film theory, or some such silliness.

But, they do not really need to log on to the internet.  Pornography will come to them as they sit in the classroom these days.  It is practically a required subject.  Here in my little American town, at the Junior High School just down the street something called PACTT (Parents and Teachers Together With Children) held an all day seminar with the 7th and 8th grade kids, some of whom undoubtedly make up that number of eager internet researchers.  You will read the story that appeared in the local fish wrapper the other day and note that one of the seminar subjects was ‘teen sexuality”  I am reliably informed that the seminar was a closed door session where children and presenter only talked about what and how to do what comes naturally as the saying goes.  And, anyone who wanted one was given a special gift of a condom.

This happened, I guess, while Mom and Dad and their presenters were talking about how to pick a college for little Johnny and Janie.

Of course, when the school administrators were told about this they were horrified, horrified in probably the same way that Claude Rains was during the film Casablanca when he discovered gambling was taking place at the Cafe Americain.

The sun should be up.  Light should be flooding through the window soon since it is nearly 5:00AM.

It isn’t.  It is blackest night.