Dr. Jeff Koloze

Seventies politics aside, novel still relevant for fatherless young men

A friend recommended this novel for its abortion content, and it does mention that issue as well as infanticide.  However, what makes this work of dead white male literature more interesting for today is its depiction of men who suffer from father loss.  Thus, it comports with the best of academic discussion about the masculinist literary theory.

Plot details need not be elaborated here.  What I see in this work is more interesting: the deep hurt several male characters feel being fatherless, the connection between loss of Christian faith and support for abortion and infanticide, and the compelling nature of love which overcomes even the most disgusting and violent political and terrorist activity.

Dr. Eduardo Plarr, the ostensible protagonist of the novel, is the father of a child presumed to be the Honorary Consul’s, Charley Fortnum’s.  Unlike most dads who rejoice in their unborn children, Plarr not only may have done abortions (128), but also thinks of his unborn child as “a useless part of Clara like her appendix” (265).  Although it is a redeeming quality of this character that, eventually, “the child became real to him” (265), shortly after this affirmation of life, Plarr recounts how he would have committed infanticide of “a child born without hands and feet.  I would have killed it” (283).  Today’s disability rights and pro-life communities would be outraged at such violence against a handicapped newborn.

But then, what else can one expect from a physician who lost his Catholic faith?

Besides that, Plarr is just another man who is missing a vitally important element in his life, his father.  Reinforcing heterosexual normativity may not have been Greene’s intent on writing the novel in 1973, but the pain these men feel is obvious and worthy of college students’ exploration, especially if they have to write a literary research paper using one of the sanctioned theories demanded by leftist professors.

Consider: the discussion of masculinist literary theory concepts begins early in the novel, in an initial contrast between Latin-American and British men (16).  Plarr wonders whether his father is alive or dead; he learns late in the work that his father was killed trying to escape his imprisonment for political activity (219). Oddly, shortly after this revelation (three pages later), the author chose to include an account of a man who did not know who his father was (222).  Equally odd is Plarr’s declarative/interrogative that “We all of us seem to live with dead fathers, don’t we?” (272).  Does any college student detect ideas for a good research paper?

Best of all, though, the novel ends with an episode demonstrating the compelling nature of love.  The child whom Clara is carrying, conceived by Plarr, will not merely be raised by Charley Fortnum, but truly loved by him.  The unborn child is evidence that “Someone he [Charley] loved would survive” (335).

Thus, a novel concerned with terrorist activity, which mentions abortions and suicides and which illustrates the class warfare of Latin American society in a turbulent historical period, ends with that most life-affirming literary device: a newborn child bringing love to a shattered world.

Easy-to-read guide to assist pro-abortion persons to choose pro-life views.

Stephanie Gray’s work “in the trenches” among college students has resulted in this easy-to-read guide to assist persons who may think they must support abortion to reconsider their views and adopt pro-life positions.

Not a scholarly, point-counterpoint debate text, Gray’s work is much person-focused.  Pro-abortion people would most benefit from reading this work since she focuses not so much on what they believe but the person behind those beliefs.  The book is filled with anecdotes of how she engaged with pro-abortion persons successfully—often people who were most hostile and aggressive at first—but who later saw in Gray a pro-lifer who helped them to resolve their own personal problems which compelled them to think that they had to support abortion.

Pro-life readers will also benefit from Gray’s emphasis that we should listen and ask questions of pro-abortion persons instead of arguing the issue logically (13).  Gray recommends a three-step approach when discussing abortion with such persons: finding common ground, using stories and analogies to convey a pro-life truth, and asking questions of the pro-abortion individual (32).

Gary’s compassion towards abortion supporters is manifested in other areas, as when she affirms that “the pro-lifer’s task of being a voice for the pre-born also involves ministering compassion, love, and grace to the born” ([69]).

Finally, readers on both sides of the abortion issue will find some of Gray’s statements simply memorable.  Her account of two young people who were conceived through in-vitro fertilization is joyous in one instance, heartbreaking in the other.  When discussing why a pro-life friend would never drive a mother to an abortion clinic, a makeover of a common expression will stick in one’s mind: “Friends don’t drive friends to abortion clinics” (123; bold in original).

Lugubrious writing, yet how Catholics overcame British bigotry in the nineteenth century can apply to the pro-life movement today.

What do events two centuries ago have to do with life today?  If you can say “religious freedom”, “bigotry”, and “anti-Catholicism”, then those phrases should be enough to help contemporary readers understand how Protestant bigotry against “Papists” kept millions of people in second-class citizen status for centuries.  More importantly, though, Fraser’s book illustrates how the peaceful protests of activists like Daniel O’Connell and Catholic and Protestant aristocrats overcame such bigotry.

The heroes of the book are the Duke of Wellington and O’Connell; the anti-Catholic bigotry of “beloved” writers like William Wordsworth and Robert Southey is simply disgusting.  The irrational anti-Catholic positions of George III and George IV testify to the inherent contradiction of the British monarchy: if a British king thought he was forced to uphold only Protestant Christianity, then he could not help those who believe in the Church which Protestantism left.  Those kings, who blocked Catholic Emancipation for forty years, also deserve our disgust for their bigotry against millions of their Catholic subjects.

However, the contemporary pro-life movement’s emphasis on peaceful protest and legislative action parallels O’Connell’s methods to provide civil rights for the millions of Catholics in Britain at the time.  The parallels are inescapable, especially when contrasted against the hostile, Antifa tactics which obstructionist Democrats endorse to keep abortion legal throughout the nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever.  That they want to have infanticide and euthanasia legalized makes pro-life efforts more vital in the new year and beyond.

Finally, I disagree with the opinions of the critics on the back cover about the quality of the writing.  In many places, passages are not as mellifluous as they could be; a clearer chronological order would have helped.  The uneven flow probably accounted for a reading which took three days instead of one.

Fields’ work is a lucid discussion of the fears mothers experience when faced with unexpected pregnancies.  Divided into nine easy-to-read chapters (can be done in a few hours), Fields offers suggestions on how to respond to an unexpected pregnancy so that both the mother and the child will have the best outcomes of often difficult—and, in some cases, insurmountable—circumstances.  All husbands and fathers should read this book of women’s experiences.  More importantly, it should be read by those men who think of their girlfriends only as objects for their sexual gratification.

Compelling expose of Hillary and Obama scandals.

Tom Fitton’s analysis of the numerous Hillary and Obama scandals which continue to plague the country makes compelling reading.  Confused about media coverage of their scandals?  Read his book instead for a lucid summary of major events over the eight years of the Obama White House.

Speaking about the lack of transparency on numerous conflicts created by the former president, Fitton writes, “If the Obama administration truly had nothing to hide, it would not have gone to such extraordinary lengths to keep information on what it was doing and its internal machinations from the public” (9).

Chapter four on voter fraud was especially compelling, particularly the hostile tactics of the New Black Panther Party in its attempts to suppress the white vote (120ff).

Regarding photo IDs needed for voting, Fitton declares that “There is simply no evidence to support the contention that the requirement to show a photo ID (which are provided for free in every state with such a requirement) discourages legitimate voters from voting” (123).

How Obama stole the 2008 election can be surmised from Fitton’s commentary from page 133 on.  Also, how was it possible that Obama released 36,000 criminal aliens into the country instead of deporting them?  Fitton’s analysis of Obama’s dereliction of duty as commander in chief and upholder of law is frightening (183ff).  Even more dangerous is Obama’s inaction regarding the creation of ISIS terror cells on US soil (192ff).

Not all is doom and gloom.  Fitton praises the investigative journalism of CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson (109ff).  As an Ohioan, I am particularly proud of Secretary of State Jon Husted, who worked with Judicial Watch and cleaned up the mess created and ignored by the previous secretary of state, Democrat Jennifer Brunner (128).

Readers will find some familiar names mentioned in Fitton’s study: Robert Mueller (208ff) and James Comey (236).  No wonder President Trump still has to deal with these people; they have been entrenched in Deep State self-preservation tactics for years.

A helpful appendix shows redacted emails from the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, where she targeted, no doubt with Obama’s approval, conservative political action groups.  Pages of notes and an ample index make research easy, especially for students.

Fitton’s summary was so impressive that I donated to Judicial Watch, liked its Facebook page, and subscribed to the group’s YouTube channel.  You will find this book so interesting that you will do the same.

Finally, given the scandals that Democrats continue to create and the stonewalling tactics which they use in their resistance to cleaning up Washington, Fitton will have much more to write about in subsequent years.

Has an abortion story with psychotic characters; a book meant for freakishly serious college profs.

A freakishly serious college English professor would assign this collection of short stories.  Thus, you’ll understand damned little.

But that may be the point.  The book jacket proclaims that “In this fiercely original [hyperbole] and blazingly brilliant [more hyperbole] debut, Flattery likewise deconstructs [here we go!  the first literary theory that leftist professors like to use to babble on about how words don’t mean what they’re supposed to mean] the conventions of genre [uh-huh; obviously, not an English professor who believes in the Judeo-Christian bases of the Western world] to serve up strange realities [riiight…].”

“Abortion, a Love Story” is a short story (which isn’t so short, spanning pages 65-150) worth reading in this collection, if only to demonstrate how abortion psychologically fractures a mother’s mind.  While it could be argued that Natasha had serious mental problems before she aborted the child conceived with her college lover, the fact that her college life is utterly in shambles after the event just proves what pro-lifers have known for decades: post-abortion syndrome (PAS) is real and devastating.

One more thing that “Abortion, a Love Story” demonstrates is that abortion can never be changed into comedy, as Lucy and Natasha (the halves of the fragmented aborted mother) conclude.  Natasha wants to make the play that the two women are writing a comedy (119), but by the story’s end it’s obvious that abortion simply cannot be funny.  When the “characters” are in what must be the scenery of the abortion clinic, Natasha affirms, “We’re not allowed to make a single joke here” (147).

Reading the rest of the stories will have you exclaiming “Wha-what?” or “OK…and what?”  A line from one of the stories could summarize anyone’s reaction to the entire collection: “Have you ever heard of anything so dumb?” (134).

Oh well, the 238 pages will only take a couple of hours to read, and it is good every now and then to explore how the diseased minds of characters view the world.

For over three decades, pro-life researchers like Steven Mosher have disclosed the horrors of forced abortions in China, resulting from the one-child policy.  Now, yet another contemporary critique of that disastrous policy reinforces the pioneering work of the early researchers.

Fong provides not only anecdotal evidence, but also official data to support several tenets repeated throughout the book: that China’s economic growth is not related to its population control (xi), that the one-child policy in China is unnecessary for economic prosperity (xiii), that the one-child policy is responsible for forced abortion in China (xv), that the one-child policy is based on “an arbitrary economic goal” (48), that China is experiencing severe problems associated with a rapidly aging population (139); and that the problems of an aging population will increase because of the success of the propaganda behind the one-child policy—successful because most middle class Chinese only want one child (208).  Unfortunately, these are only some of the negative consequences of China’s experiment in population control, social control (such as the suppression of filial piety under the Mao regime), and forced abortion.

Fong mentions several important recent episodes in Chinese abortion history: Feng Jianmei’s case, whose image of her seven-month aborted child, thanks to the Internet, led to world condemnation of China’s forced abortion practices (60-1); Steve Mosher’s seminal work in exposing the forced abortion component of the one-child policy (61); and Chen Guangcheng, the famous activist who sought legal action against family-planning officials for their coercive measures (80-1).

Fong’s empathy with Chinese mothers who are forced to abort matches sorrow of her own; she miscarried her first child, a sorrow balanced at the end of the book with a loving account of the birth of her twin sons.  Unfortunately, Fong cannot end her work happily regarding China’s future; the trajectory of the drastic one-child policy and forced abortions suggests a bleak future for the country.

Frankl’s book counters today’s Nazi-like forces which promote abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.

Decades ago, as a young activist in the pro-life movement, I remember reading that great respect is given to Frankl for his life-affirming ideas.  Now, I understand not only why he is so respected by the international pro-life community, but also how his ideas can combat the greatest threats to human life coming from the Democratic Party: abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and other medical killing.

Fortunately, Frankl’s book, written fresh after the ending of World War II, still teaches valuable lessons for civil rights/human rights/pro-life activists (same thing) in 2020.  What, exactly, can this book teach people who have not lived in concentration camps and have no idea what it was like to have their humanity stripped from them by Nazi racists, as the Jews were in Nazi Germany?

Specifically, while the book contains many general interest comments and profound philosophical statements, Frankl’s antidotes to the life-denying ideas of the Nazis (or today’s Democrats) are easy to summarize.

“The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things” (59).  This is an important statement, especially for Americans who think that the meaning in one’s life is based on one’s usefulness, income, or work that can be performed instead of one’s inherent value as a human being.

What Frankl has to say about suffering is foundational to understand his opposition to suicide (and our contemporary euphemism “assisted suicide”), euthanasia, and other forms of medical killing:

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task: his single and unique task.  He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe.  No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place.  His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”  (73)

Americans can easily reconcile this statement about suffering with their individualism and, thus, not fear suffering, which is why some turn to assisted suicide, euthanasia or other forms of medical killing.

What’s a good antidote to suicide?  Frankl claims:

“This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love.  When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.  A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.”  (75)

The uniqueness of every human life is reiterated later in the work:

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.  Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated.  Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”  (102)

The above are predicates for Frankl’s more life-affirming statements:

“An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being.  This is my psychiatric credo.  Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.  For whose sake?  Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired?  If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.”  (124)

Since human beings are more than “brain machines”, euthanasia is never justified.

Lastly, for this section of my review, a quote from the 1984 Postscript encapsulates Frankl’s opposition to euthanasia from the perspective of one who suffered in the Nazi concentration camps.  Speaking about the difference between having inherent value as a human being and being useful, Frankl writes:

“If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.”  (143)

Christian religious readers (especially Byzantine and Catholic Christians, perhaps more orthodox Protestant Christians also) may object to Frankl’s apparent subjectivity about the “meaning” of life.  He writes that “the meaning of life [differs] from man to man, and from moment to moment.  Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way.  Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements” (72, an idea repeated on 101).  However, Frankl seems to redeem himself when he asserts in the 1984 Postscript that “I will not be elaborating here on the meaning of one’s life as a whole, although I do not deny that such a long-range meaning does exist” (135).

A glaring omission in the material is that the book says nothing about the historical fact of how Frankl and his first wife were forced by the Nazi regime to abort their unborn child.  That he says nothing about the death of this child speaks volumes, perhaps indicating that the sorrow over the loss of that child was more unspeakable than his life in concentration camps.  Imagine, then, how difficult it must be for today’s aborted mothers who suffer post-abortion syndrome (PAS) for their “legal, safe” abortions.

A final quote, this from one of the letters appended to main work, is important and can be prophetic for contemporary American readers, who suffer under a government which legalized abortion, the holocaust which kills unborn babies throughout the nine months of  pregnancy for any reason whatsoever and who have been exposed to the ideas of killing the handicapped newborn and the elderly or medically vulnerable: “every nation is in principle capable of a Holocaust!” (180).

Not only reading, but also implementing Frankl’s life-affirming ideas in our lives would do much to stop the nation’s acceptance of practices associated more with Nazi killers than Americans who believe in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Interesting plot, but lugubrious writing style .

A LinkedIn colleague asked if I would review this novel.  Excited that I could assist a publishing colleague, I agreed.  Unfortunately, Eady’s novel was a significant chore instead of a pleasurable reading experience.

The novel suffers excruciatingly from a dominance of “telling” instead of “showing”—the former being a characteristic of poor writing.  In fact, the verb “tell” and its variants and the narrator’s oft-repeated refrain that he would “like to briefly tell” (172) this and that appear frequently throughout the work.  Granted, that this novel is a first-person narrative may account for its tediousness, yet, in the hands of a skilled novelist, a successful first-person narrative can be accomplished.  Unfortunately, this is not a thick Charles Dickens novel, where the actions of various characters are anticipated with great expectation, even though most of Dickens’ novels normally run over several hundred pages.

Of course, the novel has its merits.  A scene where the main character visits a priest for confession involves dialogue which is realistic and not preachy (121ff).  Another character’s murder is described in tantalizingly brutal detail (312ff).  Beyond these episodes, the novel is a lugubrious account of a priest and his sidekick, who assist a young woman, Caitlin Madigan, escaping from the clutches of a former politician turned pimp.  The narrative is supposed to represent Caitlin as a modern Judith saving her son, Jake (named Israel later in the novel), from the evil former politician turned whoremaster, who thus symbolizes Holofernes.

Although the allegory works, it is unfortunate that the story is rendered in such a tedious way that the reader would most likely fall asleep several times, struggling to get through the narrative.  Even worse, the writing is consistently lugubrious and somniferous only until about seventy pages toward the end when the killings (the bludgeoning of the priest and the strangulation of Caitlin) are depicted.  Why should any reader wait so long to enjoy such good action?

That the narrator obviously has mental issues [affirmed explicitly when he says “You may have heard from some people already that I am crazy” (15), at novel’s end (316ff), and punctuated at several intervening points when he discourses on dead bodies being “effigies”] does not make his rendering of what happened a trustworthy account of events in the killing of his priest friend.  His mental condition does, however, justify the lugubrious narration as the unfortunate rantings of a mentally-ill person.

Moreover, while the following might be a minor technical error on the author’s part, it does speak to the narrator’s credibility and contradictory attitude about vulgar language and women.  The narrator’s affirmation “to bowdlerize or avoid” vulgar terms in his narrative to the murdered priest’s sister, even to the point of masking a vulgar term by saying that it “sounds like ‘mucked’” (14), did not prevent him from sanitizing Caitlin’s speech, when she explains that she attacked someone “because I thought a bitch’s brains had caught on fire” (225).

Overall judgment: a good attempt at transplanting the Judith/Holofernes account to modern circumstances, but the writing style is lugubrious and somniferous.  While I can definitely see this novel become a film about orthodox Canadian Catholics who fight for their church and who are involved in the reformation of a former prostitute, the film’s script, of course, would be much less verbose, the script being considerably shorter than (probably half of) this novel’s 331 pages.

The progression of medical killing from vivisection on humans and abortion to euthanasia: Endo’s novel a prophecy from sixty years ago.

Shusaku Endo’s novel The Sea and Poison is as relevant in the twenty-first century as a warning against medical killing as it was when first published in 1958.  In fact, sixty years later, Endo’s novel functions as a warning of increasing threats against human life by those who should be in the business of protecting it, physicians.

The novel’s plot is simple, yet horrifying: Dr. Suguro participates in the vivisection of American prisoners of war in Japan.  That he was sent to prison for two years for his involvement is not a spoiler alert; the author himself provides this fact on page 27, so the remaining 140 pages constitute an in medias res narrative on Dr. Suguro’s moral anguish from his collaboration in the killing of the American POWs.

Along the way, the reader comes to understand the anti-life milieu which made the killing of the American POWs possible.  Toda, Dr. Suguro’s friend, enunciates a strict utilitarian view of human life, where the ends of medical progress trump any Jewish or Christian valuation of human life as sacred, as in this passage: “Killing a patient isn’t so solemn a matter as all that.  It’s nothing new in the world of medicine.  That’s how we’ve made our progress! [….]  But if she gets killed during an operation, no doubt about it, she becomes a living pillar upholding the temple of medical science” (51).

Toda is the mouthpiece for an earlier statement on the anti-life milieu of wartime Japan when he asserts that “Today everybody is on the way out.  The poor bastard who doesn’t die in the hospital gets his chance every night to die in an air raid” (42).  That Toda cannot distinguish between killing somebody in a medical setting versus someone dying in a bombing raid is a logical fallacy easily identifiable by college students in a first-year English course.  (Determining whether it is simply an invalid syllogism, a non sequitur, or a red herring would generate a wonderful essay, wouldn’t it?)

Of course, a serious study of Endo’s novel should make the slippery slope evident.  If someone can abort his own child, then that disrespect for human life will manifest itself against disrespect for the born.  The clinical language that Endo uses to describe Toda’s killing of his own child compares with American authors, both pro- and anti-life, whose abortionist characters regard the unborn child as a thing instead of a human being:

I borrowed the necessary instruments from a friend studying obstetrics, and with my own hands, I scraped out the foetus.  To see what I was doing, I had nothing to depend upon but one flashlight.  And so with sweat pouring off me, I pulled out the small, bloody lump of flesh.  The intention foremost in my mind was never to let anyone know about this unhappy miscalculation, not to have my whole life ruined because of a girl like this.  (122-3)

The literary technique of dehumanization of both the unborn child killed in the abortion (a “small, bloody lump of flesh” and an “unhappy miscalculation”) and the callous disregard for the aborted mother, who undergoes extreme pain in the abortion (“a girl like this”), is evident twenty pages later when the first American POW is killed in the vivisection (146-8).  While the reader sees a human being, the doctors see the equivalent of a laboratory rat.  The POWs are sedated with ether and then experimented on by having saline or air injected into their veins or having a portion of the lung removed so that the various times of death can “be ascertained” (77).  The passive voice verb shows that the dehumanization affects not only the POWs, but the doctors themselves, who are the agents of the killings.

A final remarkable thing about this novel is that Endo’s religious principles are unobtrusive.  With one exception, no character (except a foreigner, whose opinions are discounted for this brief review) evinces Jewish or Christian ethical principles on behalf of human life.  There is “God talk”, but there is no preachiness in the few instances where characters like Toda question whether there is a God.  This lack of clear religious support for the protection of human life may confuse readers who know that the author was Catholic.

However, Michael Gallagher, the translator, may have resolved this dilemma when he suggests that Endo admired Catholic writer Graham Greene, who is famously quoted as saying that

He would rather be known, therefore, as a writer who happened to be a Catholic than as a Catholic writer.  These remarks were widely quoted by critics of every shade of belief and disbelief, and can, I think, shed light on Endo’s own position.  What followed, however, seems to have been generally overlooked: “When one is a Catholic, everything that one writes is imbued with Catholicism.”  (6)

Contemporary students might spend an engaging few hours reading Endo’s sixty-year-old novel but then spend weeks delving into the lack of respect for human life which this novel illustrates—and then perhaps months more comparing the doctors in Endo’s novel with physicians today who are agents of the forms of medical killing known as assisted suicide and euthanasia.  The analysis of the novel would be time well spent, since these contemporary forms of medical killing are more aggressive now, sixty years later, than in Endo’s time.

Many thanks to a Twitter colleague who suggested that I read this novel in the interests of advancing right-to-life literary theory.