Well, look at that, Alphonse (and other attempts at getting at the infinite mystery and fragile pricelessness of personhood through fiction) isn’t kid’s stuff, after all… At least, not if we’re to believe what the esteemed and delightfully grumpy Thomas Fleming has to say about Philip K. Dick…
There is now a theory, certainly credible if unproven, that the Soviets issued a warrant for the assasination of the French Writer, which led to his fatal car accident in 1960. This description makes the operation seem like something worked up for a Bond film.
The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, and published as a book entitled Celý život, was missing from the Italian translation. In the missing paragraph, Zábrana writes: “I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.
There’s a feast of other literary notes throughout the piece. I especially liked this one:
Czeslaw Milosz, for example, praised Camus as the only man in postwar Paris who remained friendly to him after the Polish poet’s 1951 defection. The entire French intellectual class, which was entirely left-wing, turned against him for abandoning the communist dream.
This, unfortunately, seems to have been the more typical response:
Pablo Neruda denounced him in an essay as “The Man Who Ran Away.”
And not every French intellectual dismissed him, at least not one in Indiana at the time:
René Girard, who praised La Chute as an “admirable and liberating book” in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.
Dr. Tom makes a trip ‘up Nort’ ?
(Warning: Slightly Fleshy!)
Over at Heather King’s Shirt of Flame! (Of course, you’re supposed to click for the original essay, not the comment.)
At first flush, the article is surprising for a Mother Jones entry – until the reader realizes it was all a set up to set the prolife dogs eating one another at the end.
All in all, I would rather have heard the lawyer defend himself against pro-aborts than fellow pro-lifers.
But then that would have been my story, not Blustain’s.
The first impulse is to say, “Why can’t prolife journalists get access to and present abortionists in such a sympathetic way while at the same time maintaining the prolife case?” But when the passions cool, one realizes this has less to do with the journalist’s will and more to do with the abortionist’s.
Would YOU want to go on record for anything remotely akin to what abortionists do?
Best part, this – showing the subject’s conversion. It’s quite salient – and as I’ve said before it is perhaps a fruitful place to have the discussion – how abortion has adversely affected adoption in the US.
That began to change in 1990, when a couple came to him after their child was born with Down syndrome. The doctor had not done an amniocentesis, which might have diagnosed the condition, and they wanted to sue for “wrongful birth”—claiming they would have aborted had they known. Cassidy declined the case. “In this particular instance I was thinking, ‘What would it be like for me and for this little girl if I stood in the well of a courtroom and argued to a jury that they had to give lots of money to her mom and dad because they didn’t get a chance to kill her?’” he says. “That case forced me to ask the question, how did the law get this cruel?…It all led back to Roe v. Wade.”
He also started paying attention to the legal discrepancies between adoption and abortion. What impressed him, he told me, was that a woman thinking about giving away her baby can only terminate the mother-child relationship after the state helps ensure she’s making the right decision: In many states, she must wait until after birth to relinquish the child and must be offered counseling. “Those [maternal] rights are treated with the most profound respect,” Cassidy says, but “in the context of abortion, there is no respect…. My first question that I had for everybody—I’m talking about the courts, about people going into the courts claiming they represent the rights of women, about the pro-life community, the churches who like to talk about this issue—where is their discussion and defense of the mother, the real rights of the mother?”
H/T Margaret Cabaniss, IC
Or should we infer otherwise from the silence in the news accounts?
But it’s always good for the kids to see the prolife Church and pro-abortion politicians in warm embraces.
It shows we’re not as stodgy an institution as all that after all!
Well, at least not since Pius XXIII said it was OK to be Catholic and pro-abortion.
And if worse comes to worst, these two bishops might be able to employ the jurisprudential wisdom of Marquette University’s newest Law School star!
After all, who can argue with the incisively catholic argumentation from the recently retired senator’s Howitzer-like mind? Indeed, nowhere was the good senator’s bristling cerebellum more actively engaged in progressing the world beyond its current medieval scope than it was on the Senate floor, Sept. 26, 1996:
Sen. Santorum: Will the Senator from Wisconsin yield for a question?
Sen. Feingold: I will.
Sen. Santorum: The Senator from Wisconsin says that this decision [abortion] should be left up to the mother and the doctor, as if there is absolutely no limit that could be placed on what decision that they make with respect to that. And the Senator from California [Sen. Barbara Boxer] is going up to advise you of what my question is going to be, and I will ask it anyway. And my question is this: that if that baby were delivered breech style and everything was delivered except for the head, and for some reason that that babys head would slip out that the baby was completely delivered would it then still be up to the doctor and the mother to decide whether to kill that baby?
Sen. Feingold: I would simply answer your question by saying under the Boxer amendment, the standard of saying it has to be a determination, by a doctor, of health of the mother, is a sufficient standard that would apply to that situation. And that would be an adequate standard.
Sen. Santorum: That doesnt answer the question. Lets assume that this procedure is being performed for the reason that youve stated, and the head is accidentally delivered.Would you allow the doctor to kill the baby?
Sen. Feingold: I am not the person to be answering that question. That is a question that should be answered by a doctor, and by the woman who receives advice from the doctor. And neither I, nor is the Senator from Pennsylvania, truly competent to answer those questions. That is why we should not be making those decisions here on the floor of the Senate.
Well, maybe the next generation can make sense of it all…
DEATH
The wage of sin, the price of Adam’s fall–
All right, I’ve sinned, you reading this have sinned,
We’ll pay our debt, blood, suffering, and all:
Our souls to God, our bodies to the wind.
Death follows life, so be it, life will end,
But Christ, dear Christ, the doctors kill our young,
The doctors, doctors, murder, cut, and rend,
Before our children ever see the sun.
They move, they feed, they kick, they sleep and dream,
They live, they live, they live within the womb–
They cannot beg for life, they cannot scream,
And so we leave them to their birthless doom;
But how unfair and sorrowful it seems
To lay the sinless in a sinful tomb.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Conflicted in early life between his desire to be a weatherman for local community access cable stations and a man who wears pants in July, JOB took the middle road and now writes poems between every waking moment. [Read More …]
All you need to know is that I'm a lady, understand?
Behave yourselves accordingly. [Read More …]
And yet, not a tear does the Gray Lady shed for China…
”About one hour later, the van stopped in the hospital. As soon as I was drug out of the van, I saw hundreds of pregnant moms there — all of them just like pigs in the slaughterhouse. Immediately I was drug into a special room, and without any preliminary medical examination, one nurse did an oxytocin injection intravenously. Then I was put into a room with several other moms.
“The room was full of moms who had just gone through a forced abortion. Some moms were crying, some moms were mourning, some moms were screaming, and one mom was rolling on the floor with unbearable pain. …”
p.s. Joe Biden, call your conscience.