Slightly less ill-considered post

Flannery O'Connor, rotting bodies, and the Times

            The first draft of this column, two days ago, ended in "Let's go for their throats!"

            Let's go for their throats! I loved it. When it popped into my head, I shouted it out! That is something I never do.

            My wife loved it, when I showed it to her.

            However.

            A little bird told me ... 

            Let me say this: I identify as liberal, yo.

            That yo --

            You know the Key and Poole pirate chantey number? It's on you-tube: a barroom full of scurvy tankard-waving lads belting out a feminist pirate chantey:

                        We say "yo, ho!" but we don't say "ho"

                        Cause "ho" is disrespectful, yo.

            The "yo" I threw in, up there, after "I identify as liberal," is in the same spirit as that "yo". 

            Or, not really. I was primarily seizing an excuse to quote from that chantey. Here's a full stanza:

                        There once was a girl from Leeds
                  Who I heard was good on her knees
                  So I docked my ship for an overnight trip
                  To take care of all of my needs.
                  She was fine as the tales could tell
                  And my mast began to swell
                  So I laid her down and raised her gown
                  And performed cunnilingus for an hour or so.

            But I was also putting off diving into the red-hot issue I was trying to find a liberal, rational way to address.

            While writing that first draft (Remember that? The first draft of this, which we -- or I, anyway -- was talking about?), I was drinking vodka. That is something I almost , while writing, never do.

            But I was pissed. By that I mean not pissed meaning drunk, as the Brits among you would have it, but pissed off. Enraged. Okay, the other pissed too, but --

            Here's what had pissed me off was the Supreme Court's presumable religious bias toward reproductive rights.

            Yo.

            On today's Times op-ed page, Mareen Dowd, who was raised Catholic herself, addresses this issue with requisite authority and tact, in a column headlined "Too Much Church In the State."

            She had not had Flannery O'Connor thrown into her face.

            That is to say, she had not had one of her favorite writers -- the greatest writer ever from my home state -- thrown into her face, two days before, on the same op-ed page. And the writer cackling about it.

            Not audibly cackling, but you could hear him cackling in the background. Got away with one here.

            (Let me just throw this in, now, which I shouldn't: What if seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices were not Catholics but, like, Southern Baptists? Would people be tip-toeing around . . . ? Wouldn't people, including me, be . . .)

            Flannery O'Connor was a great artist, beyond politics. But everybody has politics whether they want to or not. And here is how Matthew Walter, identified as "the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal," turned O'Connor to his account.

            He quotes from a letter, to a friend of hers, in which O'Connor, raised Catholic, deplored the apologetic way Catholic spokespersons were justifying the church's teachings regarding reproduction. Apparently these spokespersons, at the time, felt obliged to reassure the general public that those teachings would not lead to over-population.

            "I will rejoice in the day," wrote O'Connor to her friend, "when they say: 'This is right, whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may."

             The world's peoples rotting, and not abstractly, on top of one another -- that is not an image I would associate with the decorum of the Times. A decorum that is not as tight as it used to be, and let us all applaud that. But if O'Connor herself had been inspired to lay that image on the Times, either she or the Times would have thought better of it. And either or both of them would have been right.

            Global over-population, as Mr. Walter notes, is not the issue it was thought to be in 1959, when O'Connor wrote her letter. The issue now is that seven of the nine justices on our Supreme Court were presumably taught at a tender age (and only one of them, being a woman, got reliably over it) that abortion -- even birth control -- is baby-murder.

            Yo.

         Yet Another Limerick  -- They Keep on Coming

-- About a Reprehensible Man

A MAGA-believer named Hector

Exudes an unsavory nectar

       From a heavy coating

       He got from voting

Without a bullshit detector.