A Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 6 August 2015.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake

The Planned Parenthood stuff has been eating at me, too.

I think in the case of the elected officials and billionaires who back them, we've got a case of human sacrifice to evil gods in exchange for power. I also think of Orwell, as usual: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."

As far as supporters go, I think we have two camps: one that sees abortion as a necessary evil and the health care services Planned Parenthood provides as an indispensable good (all of which can be swallowed by deconstructing or rationalizing what the preborn are or by looking the other way), and the Nietzscheans, who basically rank weak, dependent life as inferior to stronger, independent life, and an ideal as mattering more than a person.

In this case, we have the left's version of the right's frequent justification of war: if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. In terms of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood, I think their biggest mistake was bring Cecil the Lion into the discussion. They increased the polarization of people who might have been on the verge of converting. I think the videos were eye-opening; it's this stupid memifying effect of Facebook where people rejoice in their rightness and triumph over their enemies' wrongness that really ticks me off.

It's something I'd like to tie to the Sea Devil.

One of the things I love about Catholicism is that we're all sinners, we all have to enter the Church on our knees, and we are all elevated by God the Father's gift and sacrifice of His Son. We've got so many parents who want children and so many kids who are destroyed. I think the right tends to be unjust in not offering up enough support to single mothers, prenatal care, food and medical support, and adoption aid, and the left tends to be unjust in the same freaking way, except they pretend to be sympathetic by saying, "It's okay: we can make the pregnancy go away and offer all sorts of ways of pretending a child isn't a child."

So the right dumps you after you have the kid, and the left dumps the kid and then you after dumping the kid. The left is the more devious: if you look straight at what they are doing, you see the support they are willing to offer women is the extermination of their children.

In my world of paranoia about the ultra powerful, though, I have two thoughts about the right. One is that they need to consistently look like they are fighting abortion and deliberately keep on losing the fight so that they hold onto the Catholic vote indefinitely. The other is the fact that the ultra powerful are currently working on living indefinitely, which means they had to create a gigantic middle class to grow the sort of wealth necessary to fund all the technological advantages they hope to exploit.

And now that America has produced that sort of wealth, they can begin shrinking the middle class again, mainly through college debt. Meanwhile, they have helped rebrand the Nazi-style research necessary to live indefinitely as women's health, nanotech as cancer research, interfaces between human and artificial intelligence as progress, etc. In education, we've had to deemphasize the humanities so nobody has too much attachment to the human experience as we've known it.

The less art, music, and poetry in the world, the less people will value what it means to be human or feel nostalgia about things that exalted the human experience (mainly, God) or that created boundaries around the human experience (mainly, death).