I watched as well dressed and well coifed and well shod reasonably well off people jumped and cheered and enthusiastically screamed at the passing of a bill that allowed for the murder of a child literally a minute before it was to born. The reaction to the taking of a human life was treated like the score of a junior high basketball game. Whatever one thinks of abortion the death of a child in those circumstances would seem to me to be a matter treated with sobriety rather than exuberant hooting and hollering. It occurred to me that I am like the sheriff in
Cormack McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men”. He felt things coming that he could not define but as nebulous as they were they were marked dark and sinister and black and poisonous and their very namelessness made them hideous. How do put a name to grown folks who probably are parents and grandparents jauntily and boisterously and extravagantly cheering for a child being murdered literally minutes before it is born? I felt that instant like I had entered a dark forest where blue painted ancestors of Jezebel followed her worship of human sacrifice and the the kind of noise that they produced might be like what I was witnessing here on TV. What makes all of this even more sinister and frightening is that those of us who are getting to be a curmudgeon are made to feel that our revulsion is anachronistic. Only and old fool would not see the marvelously progressive nature of what is getting dangerously close to infanticide.
The sheriff that I mentioned reminisced about running to be sheriff and how they would have picnics and ask people to vote-and if
they did you were sheriff and there was no school for sheriffs and no job description. He was the sheriff and he was the law and people followed and supported him and knew he would protect them. There was the unwritten understanding that he was there to protect their lives. He recalled how he saw the bad coming down the way in the enthusiasm of a women at one of his picnics who dreamed that her daughter would be able to have an abortion if she wanted one and if he thought it would ever happen. He said the way things were going he expected she could and he added when she does she will probably put you to sleep too.
Cormick McCarthy writes the way I talk or I talk the way he writes. He does not like punctuation or commas and says why ruin a good page with a bunch of silly marks? It is called polysyndeton and it has to do with piling on words so that the full force of what is coming on is felt hard in it’s round and complete wholeness and not mollified by a piecemeal list of horrors. Moses uses polysyndeton in Genesis 6
“And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually and it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart, and the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” Pretty much covers a lot of stuff. People screaming and cheering over the active murdering of a child should be thought of broadcast and repeated until the full force of what you are seeing and hearing gets though. Imagination is not only evil and thoughts of the hearts are not only evil but there is perversity that seems to genuinely want to show the depth of one depravity in order to frighten and disgust their political opponents. The action on the floor of the statehouse in New York was truly a horror show.
