Joe Biden…Slouching Towards Murder

In 1919, in the confused and disillusioned world immediately following the First World War, the poet W. B. Yeats wrote a poem (“The Second Coming”), in which he offered a vision of that world. It was a vision that foresaw the chaos that would envelop Europe, indeed, the entire world, with the rise of anarchy and the worst kind of "passionate intensity" that would soon manifest itself in national and international socialism; i.e., in fascism and communism. He saw a world awaiting the Second Coming…a few verses:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The poem ends with these two lines…

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In 1996, borrowing and modifying this thought from Yeats, Judge Robert H. Bork wrote a book entitled, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, in which he addressed the appearance of a new kind of leftism in the 1960s, a leftism he believed would wreak havoc on our nation and on civil society throughout the world. He accurately predicted it would plague us with several generations of leftist intellectuals who would do all in their power to destroy Western Civilization. His prediction has, of course, been fulfilled. One need only look at the entirety of our educational establishment, from kindergarten through graduate school, and the products of their indoctrination, men and women who now populate all levels of government as well as our corporate board rooms.

Because these new leftists are strident to the point of violence, and viciously attack anyone who disagrees with their evolving, amoral, and totalitarian ideas, politicians too fall under their evil spell. One of these ideas, a cultural, moral, and religious issue with which the left maintains near unanimous agreement, is abortion. And among the many politicians who have succumbed to their attacks is our current president. Joe Biden, from the time he first entered the senate — coincidentally, he was seated in January 1973, the same month the U.S. Supreme Court issued it’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion — until 1987, could boast a largely pro-life voting record. The first sign of real change occurred when he became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and, along with Ted Kennedy, led the attack on Supreme Court nominee Judge Bork. Senator Biden later said:

“That’s why I led the fight against Judge Bork. Had he been on the court, I suspect there would be lots of changes that I don’t like and the American people wouldn’t like, including everything from Roe v. Wade to issues relating to civil rights and civil liberties.”

During the 90s and the early years of this century, his positions began to waffle. Although he voted several times against partial birth abortion, his views had apparently softened. And in 2007, a new Joe Biden openly appeared, when he chastised the Supreme Court for its “paternalistic” attitude exemplified when it upheld the ban on partial birth abortion. From that moment to the present, he has been among the most avid pro-abortion politicians at the national level. From openly pro-life to a view that supports abortion “under any circumstance,” Joe Biden has displayed his disregard for human life, all for the sake of political gain. Joe, too, has slouched along on a death march, leaving behind him a long trail of bodies, more than 66,000,000 innocent little ones.

Pray for our president, and for our nation.

P.S. - To see a list of Joe Biden’s changing political stance on abortion, go to this Catholic League page:  Biden’s Evolving Views on Abortion.

The Descent

I've been reading some poetry lately, more than usual. It seems to fulfill a need. While there are certainly exceptions, poets seem to be saner than most of us, certainly saner than most modern philosophers, and the best of them have been given a gift of prophecy. Today, given all that's happening in our world, I need a regular dose of sanity, and have therefore turned to a few of my favorite poets.

Poets, of course, are often pessimistic when it comes to the human condition. (This is a gross generality, but it's my blog so I can write such things if I like.) Anyway, two of the poets who have lately grabbed my attention are W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.

Turning the pages of my copy of The Poems of W. B. Yeats, I'd occasionally stop and read a poem that caught my eye. Among these was The Second Coming. Written in 1920, after the wholesale death and destruction of World War One, it foresaw, with prophetic accuracy, what the world would face in the years that followed. Crushed by four years of nightmarish violence, the enlightened pre-war optimism disappeared along with the promising lives of a continent's youth. Expedience trumped morality as human lives became expendable, the means to political ends. The war promised only a bleak future, one that Yeats described in his poem:

______________________________

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

 gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

________________________

W. B. Yeats

Writing almost a century ago, Yeats seemed to recognize that the 20th century would be one of chaos and upheaval such as the world had never seen. Rapid and remarkable scientific and technological progress would hide from many the continuing moral decline and the gradual replacement of religion by scientism in the minds of the elites. God is replaced by man, who finds himself caught between a failed rationality of the Enlightenment and the despair of the postmodernists. 

Closing my book of Yeats' collected poems, I turned to Eliot and amazingly opened right to page 96, the beginning of his long poem, Choruses from "The Rock" (See T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays), written not long after Yeats' poem. I've included those opening verses below:

____________________

Choruses from "The Rock"

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

О perpetual revolution of configured stars,

О perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

О world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to God.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

_______________________

T. S. Eliot

Eliot, like Yeats and Chesterton and many others, was a modern prophet who saw clearly what would result from the moral distortions of his time. Read his thoughts on Christian society and culture in Christianity and Culture to get a better understanding of what we face today.  

Yes, as the poets remind us, we are surrounded by the signs of decline. Distracted by the wonders of technology that tell us how very smart we are, we forget that wisdom does not emerge from an integrated circuit. No, wisdom is passed down from one generation to the next through the traditions that today are forgotten, ignored, ridiculed, and suppressed.

We develop cures and preventatives, extending lives by years, even decades, but then slaughter the inconvenient infants in the womb by the tens of millions. Not content with denying life's beginnings, with god-like audacity we kill those approaching its end, the sick and the elderly, and label it "compassion."

We praise humanity's "progress" despite the evidence of a century of totalitarian despotism that destroyed more lives than in all previous human history. And yet, driven by extraordinary hubris, politicians scramble to acquire more power, actually believing they can control the uncontrollable and plan the unplannable.

It's all very disconcerting for those who lack faith. Most just move along in life hoping, at least, to find some ephemeral happiness. But some, far too many today, are driven to the brink of despair and self-destruction. Others find meaning in the extremes of human behavior and cling to ideologies that promise a distorted form of salvation. Satan is very busy in our world today.

Pope Benedict XVI

As I pondered the prophetic words of these poets, I couldn't help but think of the tragic events in Las Vegas. So many in the media and politics scream about controlling guns, the tools used by the man responsible for the carnage. But no one says a word about moral culpability because this would lead to an uncomfortable discussion of morality and truth, two words that have been excised from the popular language. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, today our culture is plagued by "a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

No one dares examine the root cause of the Las Vegas tragedy and others like it: the fact that in our society human life has little value. If an unborn child, a human being with a beating heart who can experience pain, is considered disposable because he or she doesn't suit the parents' lifestyle or plans, then why not use violence to promote one's ideology or to satisfy  personal psychological desires? Without God, His commandments, and His gift of faith, there is no morality, there are no limits.

I thank God for my faith, and I do so every day, many times each day. For we were created by a loving God who has given us the freedom and the grace to accept His revealed Truth. But acceptance or rejection is up to us.

We must remember, too, that our loving God -- Father, Son and Spirit -- is the Lord of History and acts in our world through us or in spite of us. His will be done because His will cannot be denied. I encounter too many Christians who fear the future because of what they see in today's world. Such fears must never enter the Christian's heart, for our loving, merciful God has promised salvation to those who love Him. "Be not afraid" is God's constant command to His People, His reminder that He walks with us always. 

God's peace...

One Thing After Another

Today, for the first time in a several weeks, I stepped away from all the things that seem to monopolize my time, and just sat down to read and relax. I thought about turning on the television to catch up on the world news, but then decided against it. Indeed, reading has always relaxed me, while watching television seems to have the opposite effect. For example, early each day, after my morning walk around our neighborhood, I sit down with the newspaper and my first cup of coffee. Interestingly, reading the paper, even on those days when it's filled with bad news, rarely upsets me. Oh, I'll occasionally shake my head at the general stupidity of humanity, but that's about it. Watching the news on TV, however, often generates an entirely different and far more lively response.

I don't believe the human psyche was designed to accept the constant barrage of information of the sort originating from the all-news cable channels. Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and whatever other news networks are out there, all fire a steady stream of bullet-like news items -- some newsworthy, most not -- at their targets, and that's you and me. Like the body of a soldier being hit repeatedly by withering machine-gun fire, our minds are unable to absorb the shock of all this information. Like those bullets, every story seems to carry equal weight. None is perceived to be more important than another, for each gets an allotted 10 or 20 or 30 seconds of air time: a man is executed in Florida; another is convicted of fraud in Texas; the president decides homosexual marriage is fine and dandy; the Iranians crank up another bunch of nuclear centrifuges; Egyptians Christians are murdered outside the doors of their church; newly elected Greeks fail to form a coalition government; a socialist government takes the reins in France; the Hollywood "elites" cough up millions for the president's reelection; the new, improved maniac in charge of North Korea threatens to destroy us; a 40-pound house cat dies; and on and on... Not only does all of this come at us rapid-fire, but there's never a ceasefire. It doesn't stop. The same stories are aired repeatedly for a day or two while new or revised stories are added to the mix. What's the average citizen to make of it all?

And so I pick up a book instead, or a magazine, or a newspaper, or even my iPad. In each instance I can at least partially control the source of the news and its depth of coverage. And because I can fully control the rate at which I receive this information, I can actually take some time to think about it and weigh its meaning. And these days I can even do a little fact-checking on my own.

David Bentley Hart

The first thing I read today was the June/July issue of First Things, which arrived in yesterday's mail. And the first thing I turned to in First Things was David Bentley Hart's monthly essay, "The Back Page." This month Dr. Hart addressed the subject of human death in his essay, "Death the Stranger." He wrote of death not as something natural but as something unnatural, as something that breaks unannounced into our humanity and interrupts "a story that might otherwise have continued to unfold." He makes a point of separating human death from the surrounding natural cycle of birth and death, a separation founded on our unique rationality, on the fact that unlike other creatures we are able to reflect on such matters as life and death. In his words, "Our consciousness of death constitutes an absolute alienation from the rest of the natural world." It's really quite a wonderful and profound essay. I recommend it, and suspect it will be available online in a few days; otherwise, subscribe to First Things. It's a great journal.

Thomas Howard

While reading Dr. Hart's essay, I couldn't help but recall an article published in last month's issue of First Things. Entitled "Two Deaths", it was written by Thomas Howard, a man whom I met on a few occasions and whose books and other writings I have enjoyed immensely over the years. A far more personal essay than Dr. Hart's, it addresses the execution of a friend, a death-row pen pal with whom Dr. Howard had regularly corresponded for 10 years. He then juxtaposed this one man's death with the recent death of another, Archduke Otto, the heir to the long-gone Hapsburg throne. It too is a beautiful essay, one of those brief pieces that leads your mind to think of many other things.

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Ireland, I've also been reading Joseph Pearce's fascinating biography of Oscar Wilde, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. In fact, I just finished it this afternoon. If you haven't read it, do so. It certainly changed my view of this complex man. And this morning Diane and I took a little break and drove the golf cart to our local library where I checked out Volume Three of W. B. Yeats' Collected Works, which includes his autobiographical writings. I have to be able to hold my own in the only nation in the world where everyone considers himself a literary critic. Even I, however, have my limits and I refuse to read James Joyce again. After making my way through Ulysses some years ago, I decided it should have come with a warning: "Drink before reading." It certainly appears that Joyce did just that as he sat down to write it.

Pax et bonum...