A Small Essay Endorsing the Killing of Grandma

In the spirit of Swift, I wish to offer the endorsement of the principle now under earnest debate in the American public and press - the killing of Grandma.

Euthanasia involves the deliberate termination of an innocent life. We use the supposition of "innocence" to distinguish this act from lawful homicide, which is the express provenance of the criminal court system.

Using the principles of "innocent until proven guilty," therefore, one is led to suppose that Grandma's termination is a "mercy killing," not some sort of State administered punishment.

Let us assume, for sake of argument, that Grandma is about seventy years old. She would have been born in the period of the Great Depression I, around 1935-1940 and grew up with three major influences in her young life; the Great Depression (I), World War II, and the Cold War. Grandma knew of matters such as civilization, and its ability to cause and cure suffering.

She was then given as an unmerited gift, great abundance, success and opportunity beyond her wildest dreams. Women of her childhood had little opportunity; she had more than even the children of the wealthy did in her parents' generation. She was educated, dressed, and respected in a manner unheard of in her parents' generation.

And regrettably, it spoiled her. Grandma caught perhaps a glimpse in her youth of a future based upon the pillars of Prosperity, Freedom and Abundance - and then spent the rest of her years of ability spurning the future, and spending it into penury. "I'm Spending My Children's Inheritance!" read her bumper sticker (no longer seen, as it might provoke vandalism.)

She allowed her country to do things and become things which were shameful, shocking and sorrowful in earlier days. She crafted a system for medical care and financial support for her retirement - and then pulled up the gang-plank for later generations, which would be spent into penury by waste and abuse.

She shrieked about "Government involvement" and then cashed her Federal Paycheck.

She raised two generations of snot-faced descendants unschooled in the ways of the Republic, the manners of civilization, and like her, immersed in selfishness and greed.

And now, her uncivilized and irrational crew, illiterate and innumerate, cannot understand anything of the law but what is told to them by lunatics on the radio, such as Father Coughlin, only without even HIS scruples.

And we are asked to argue for Grand-ma's life by those who cannot tell the difference between an Extermination Panel and an end-of-life conversation with a physician?

Mene, mene, tekel, uparsim. You are what you bring forth, grandma. The petard upon which you are hoisted, is your own. If you have now a State which will endorse euthanasia - in a generation which accepts military torture and the killing of civilian noncombatants - you should perhaps fear what you have wrought.

(PS:  No Grandmas were actually harmed in the writing of this essay.)

pro-euthanasia

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In Case You Don't Get It

The matter of the Arrest of Gates by Crowley dismays me terribly.  The privacy issues alone are worth discussion.  However, the case shows the absolute inability of the American People at large to detect bullshit whatsoever.  Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire is indeed fascism run amok.
But the American people first need to attune themselves to Reality and Reason before they can handle such things as discussion of an arrest. The Real World is inglorious, and the call on the case was made by Gates and Crowley, two pissed-off fellows trying to navigate the world as best they could.
The dangers of fascism do not come from the stoop of a Harvard residence. It runs deeper, and is far more our fault than we wish to admit.

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Here is the fundmental linguistic form of fascism.

(subject) should be (qualitative) (characteristic.)

Negroes should be more respectful.
Police should be less racist.

Any time that a missive is entered to THEM, and a subjunctive form of the indirect order is used, then fascism has whispered.  Officer Crowley might well indeed have lost control of the spiral by offering such advice, if he did so - Prof. Gates, you should be less agitated.
If Gates heard this (which is speculation) then he probably blew up (overreacted?) and the whole thing got on the Red Line to Hell.

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On the Passing of Robert McNamara

It seems disconjugate to condemn primitive thinking, as below, and then launch into Catilinian calumny of Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense of the United States.

Some years ago, an apology would not be needed. Robert McNamara was seen as an awful person a generation ago. But America has perfected the art of Political Redemption which, coupled with the insectile attention span of most citizens, allows us to be benignly puzzled by all the fuss about this old man. As long as we perfect the skill of forgetting wickedness, thus will it give us the gift of repeating it. George Santayana thought that the forgetting was due to mere accident and ignorance; it is not. That which is loathsome may either be cleansed through expiation, or trundled along with, neglected until the Last of Days.

Somewhere in the guilt assuaged by the fixation of magnetic Chinese "SUPPORT THE TROOPS" bumper stickers, is the weight of the burden lain down upon us by the Best and Brightest. Some hideous thing has been stuffed under, mouldering - and we have not done the Last Thing to end it.

Something happened between the Nüremberg trials and the McCarthy hearings that kindled some small spark, that has slowly been nurtured and burst into flame. It consumes one of our greatest treasures - the American Conscience. Were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to burst forth into fire and be consumed to ashes, in our National Archive, no patriot would long suffer the loss of those parchments - for the parchment is a thing, and the ideals are what matter. But the death of the Conscience? Nobody mourns.

The Examination of Conscience is a due and proper ritual in Catholicism. It is a ritual which ought to persist, even in the separation of the non-Catholic Christian sects, for it is a worthy thing in and of its own right. It is is the element of the Act of Contrition, an action by which one remedies one's discoveries. For those with a more sturdy and energetic pursuit of their Christian faith, there are the Exercises of Loyola, which enable a more thorough spiritual hygeine.

These concepts are absurd in America, as is the fundamental concept of Conscience itself. You win if you get away with it. But the predominance of Will over Conscience will always fail, for it takes an absolute and unbreakable Will to dominate; and in any mortal person, the will can flag. Those without conscience, whom we often refer to as psychopaths, often have such such power of will so as to dominate others. History has catalogued them; they all, eventually fail. Whether there is a fellow with such sapient evil and power of will to carry on an eternal struggle of Will, that is in the province of theology. Suffice it to say that we have chosen Will over Conscience, and we bear the marks of it.

Some have even wandered into the understanding of the group psychology of will, conscience and societal evil. I offer Scott Peck and Lobaczewski as references in the study of ponerology.

With the passing of McNamara, we pretend, so goes this burden of guilt. But the damage runs greater than the few dead in Vietnam, or even the more who were wounded, or the many Vietnam vets who were spat on and despised and homeless. The embarrassment and failure of the Generation of the Baby Boomers derives from his war. This could have been the greatest generation in America. Now, perhaps, it will go down in history as its assassin, America's Brutus, condemned to Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell for those who have destroyed Republics.

Grief and meditation should be foremost in the passing of this awful man; not for him, but for the Republic.