Stanford University's logoA Poem on Stanford University’s ‘Harmful Language’ List, by James A. Tweedie The Society December 21, 2022 Culture, Poetry 28 Comments . “Use the Word ‘Cancel’ or ‘End’ Instead of ‘Abort'” —Stanford University’s ‘Harmful Language’ List What might have been What could have been What would have been A child who dared to climb a tree Who dared to jump and skin their knee Eyes filled with possibility, A child who learned to tie their shoe Who loved and who was loved by you Whose face was no one else’s face Who made the world a better place A child who might have come to be Someone who fell in love with me A child who never was Because . . James A. Tweedie is a retired pastor living in Long Beach, Washington. He has written and published six novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of poetry including Mostly Sonnets, all with Dunecrest Press. His poems have been published nationally and internationally in The Lyric, Poetry Salzburg (Austria) Review, California Quarterly, Asses of Parnassus, Lighten Up Online, Better than Starbucks, Dwell Time, Light, Deronda Review, The Road Not Taken, Fevers of the Mind, Sparks of Calliope, Dancing Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, Society of Classical Poets, and The Chained Muse. He was honored with being chosen as the winner of the 2021 SCP International Poetry Competition. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. Trending now: 28 Responses C.B. Anderson December 21, 2022 This poem, James, for reasons I can’t quite explain, was stunning. The at-will line lengths and end rhymes could have made it a busted feather pillow, but somehow everything dovetailed perfectly. The use of the possessive pronoun “their” instead of the traditional (gender-neutral) “his” is now accepted by many editors as a more compact version of “his or her.” I don’t care much either way, but I am sensitive to the distinction. I think you handled it just right. Reply James A. Tweedie December 22, 2022 I was stubbornly using their/they as a gender-neutral 3rd-person singular long before style manuals reluctantly began to allow it. Reply Russel Winick December 22, 2022 I enjoyed the poem, as a clever way to make an important point. I read Stanford’s list, and am just stunned by some of the absurd lengths many need to go to in order to feel particularly righteous. Reply Joseph S. Salemi December 22, 2022 Stanford’s absurd list (13 pages of stupidity) was eviscerated last night on Gutfeld’s TV show. Every idiotic example quoted from the text generated guffaws from the audience. It’s as if Leland Stanford University were deliberately trying to be a prime example of mealy-mouthed linguistic self-censorship. Unfortunately, this isn’t just an isolated case of administrative jackasses embarrassing themselves by patent virtue-signalling. It’s happening in countless colleges and universities nation-wide, and in foreign institutions infected by American influence. I’ve been an academic for over half a century. And I can tell you this with full experiential authority: academia is the black, festering, diseased heart of what afflicts us today. Reply Patricia Allred January 9, 2023 Terrifgly stated,, James. How far down the rabbit nho,e has academics crawled? Absurdly far, creating nations of morons with diplomas? Best, Patricia Allred Reply Patricia Allred January 9, 2023 Excuse errors in my reply. Ugh! I am turning bright red., James…Request your forgiveness! Patricia Allred Reply Joshua C. Frank December 22, 2022 I do like one thing about the list: to say “cancel” or “end” sounds worse than “abort” because we’re all used to the word “abort.” Maybe that will help some people wake up to the reality of it. Your poem is well-written; it sounds very musical, like song lyrics. However, I take issue with the lines “A child who might have come to be” and “A child who never was.” A child comes to be at the moment of conception. To say otherwise is to speak in favor of abortion, which seems very unlikely to be your intention. An abortion kills a child who already is. It’s just as bad as killing an already born baby. If you want to speak of a child who never was, I offer my own poem “Elegy for the Child Never Conceived” as an example: https://classicalpoets.org/2022/07/26/elegy-for-the-child-never-conceived-by-joshua-c-frank/ Sorry to be nit-picky, but I believe this is an important issue. If we’re concerned about the manipulation of language, then we all need to check our own eyes for beams. We need to stop saying someone has two children and one on the way instead of three children (just as we wouldn’t say two people and an African), or that a pregnant woman is going to be a mother (she already is a mother). The list goes on. The rest of the lines are great, and quite powerful. Well done, Reply James A. Tweedie December 22, 2022 Point taken, Joshua. But also point missed. While I do not deny that an unborn person is, indeed, a person, in the poem the term “child” is used in its primary definitive developmental meaning in reference to “a person between birth and puberty.” The poem makes this clear insofar as it is only after birth that a child can climb a tree and tie their shoes. This is the ”child who never was.” An abortion takes a life not yet born. The point of the poem is that it also steals the possibilities inherent in that pre-birth infant’s post-birth future. Reply Joshua C. Frank December 22, 2022 I see what you mean, but then why do we say a pregnant woman is with child and not with fetus? Hence the bumper sticker: “It is not a choice. It is a child.” I like your message, don’t get me wrong, but my only problem is that it’s weakened by influence of liberals’ language changes, especially when you’re writing against both abortion and liberals’ language changes. Morrison Handley-Schachler January 9, 2023 I quite agree with Joshua that these words are at least as brutal as “abort” and also no doubt these words will be forbidden in due course and replaced with something else. Language is often used as a means of control by groups who are seeking power, not only as a means of controlling what may be expressed but as a way of telling who is and is not up-to-date with the latest shibboleths and, consequently, who is and who is not still part of their clique. Reply Allegra Silberstein December 22, 2022 Bravo! You make your point without preaching and with lovely language. Reply James A. Tweedie December 22, 2022 Joshua, Stanford insists that I use words in a certain way and you are insisting that I use a word in a certain way. I have explained how I am using the word “child.” It is only “weak” if your way of defining it is imposed on my poem. I am making my point my way. I am not making your point your way. If my use of the word offends you, feel free to draft your own list of preferred word-usage for everyone to follow. Reply Joshua C. Frank December 22, 2022 I understand your point. My intent is not to impose a word usage, but rather to correct the influence of liberal word usage pushed on us to the point where even many pro-life people use pro-abortion language. Imagine if, before the Civil War, abolitionists had been so strongly influenced by pro-slavery language that they started using it themselves. This is not a “you have to use words my way” issue. This is a “let’s not let the liberals influence how we use words even when we protest their decisions about how we use words” issue. But if you insist on using words despite knowing that the usage is influenced by the very people you’re trying to fight against, then I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Reply Joseph S. Salemi December 23, 2022 What you are not taking into account, Joshua, is idiom and time-honored usage. People have always said “She has two children and one on the way,” and of a pregnant woman that “She’s going to be a mother.” These were accepted and intelligible idioms used by Catholics and non-Catholics long before any abortion debate ever arose. Insisting (in the above cases) on a change to “She has three children” and “She’s a mother” is just as ideologically driven and absolutist as what Stanford University is trying to impose. Last night my wife and I were discussing the names of the week, and how (in English and many other European languages) they are based on the names of pagan gods (Wotan, Freya, Thor, Saturn, Tiw, Mars, Mercury, etc.) But a peculiar kind of ideological fanaticism in medieval Portugal insisted that these pagan names be banished, and now the names of the week in Portuguese are purely numerical (“prima fiera, segunda fiera, tierza fiera…) Changing language to change people’s thoughts is a bad idea, and a dangerous one, no matter from where in the political spectrum the idea comes. Joshua C. Frank December 23, 2022 Nevertheless, I make sure never to use those sayings myself… not to force others to do anything, but to make sure my speech is consistent with my thought. I used to volunteer to teach at a church in California. The director of religious education had a daughter who had three children, one of whom was unborn. She fumbled when trying to calculate how many children that made, and she finally came up with 2 7/8. For me, this hearkened back to the days when a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person or purposes of Congressional representation. So, I corrected her and said, “That’s three children.” Sheepishly, she admitted that I was right. A mother next to me agreed and thanked me. In this day and age, where the unborn are legally not human beings, I’m not so sure that these idioms, though time-honored, are such a good thing. After all, most of us no longer use language that dehumanizes other races (have you ever read Gone With the Wind?). If we won’t do this for the unborn, that sends a clear anti-life message that weakens any pro-life message we might have. Joseph S. Salemi December 23, 2022 Joshua, you do force people to do what you want when you “correct” them, as you corrected that girl. If the girl wanted to express herself in that 7/8 manner, what business was it of yours? You could have just as well laughed and taken it as the semi- facetious comment that it likely was. Also, it is absurd to keep on bringing up the slavery issue as a “trump-the-whole-question” device in an argument over abortion. Nobody in the history of the planet, whether pro-slavery or against it, ever seriously denied that slaves were human. Slavery is based on political status and hierarchy, not species-definition, conception-moments, or the counting of trimesters. In fact, your use of the slavery issue is a sign that YOU have been influenced by the language habits of the white liberal-left. You know that black slavery is a hot-button pressure point with them, so you have seized upon it as an attack-proof argument against abortion, even though this is a category error. Also, your use of the words “dehumanizing language” is right out of the catechism of left-liberal Newspeak. Language is just language. We can use it in whatever ways that we like, just as the author did in Gone with the Wind. Joshua C. Frank December 23, 2022 Of course I’m using liberal language, because liberalism is so pervasive that it has a lot of influence on even those who deny liberalism, so I have to speak within ideas that make sense to liberals when proclaiming an idea contrary to their beliefs. In any event, the issue of how far freedom of speech should go seems to be coming up a lot between you and me. So what exactly do you think people should be doing? As far as I can tell, what you propose seems to be to remain silent in the face of error attacking truth, on the grounds that doing otherwise denies someone’s right to freedom of speech. If so, with all due respect, that’s not going to work. In this culture that believes every lie imaginable, the truth has to be proclaimed. Joseph S. Salemi December 24, 2022 Remain silent? ME? Are you serious? My entire polemical practice is to shoot off my mouth as loudly and offensively as I can, whenever left-liberal stupidity raises its head. Our difference is this: you still believe (naively, I think) that it is actually worthwhile to argue logically with left-liberals, and present them with syllogistic proofs that we are correct and that they are wrong. Right now, in what Lenin would have called “the objective situation,” that belief is utterly hallucinatory. Left-liberals of all stripes are committed to their opinions in the same way that devout religionists are committed to their dogma. Do you think mere argument will change a feminist, a transgender advocate, a BLM partisan, an ANTIFA thug, an LGBT activist, a Democrat in Congress? These are proselytizing fanatics with a supercharged agenda. To quote you, “That’s not going to work.” My view is that we are now in the incipient stages of preparation for a civil war, and that in such a situation all that is left to us is what we on the right call “metapolitics.” This means savagely polemical attacks on the enemy, using satire, lampoon, memes, comedy, hard propaganda, and very biting prose that does include logical argument. The purpose of such metapolitics is to keep our own morale up, but also to show others that there are still persons who are willing to express real contempt and hatred for the illegitimate elite who now presume to govern us and dictate to us. And another important purpose of metapolitics is to keep left-liberals very scared and nervous. We can’t convince them, but we can make them SWEAT. This is very important. If there is a smoldering argument between us, it is that you, like many Roman Catholics, seem implicitly to believe in accepting authority from on high, and urging all kinds of restraints and self-censorship that make metapolitics impossible. The fact that you still think Bergoglio’s Novus Ordo hierarchy are reliable guides in the midst of our current culture wars is staggering to me. Joshua C. Frank December 24, 2022 Thank you for explaining your points. That’s helpful. First, my initial comment was not intended for liberals. It was intended for James, to point out that certain wordings aren’t exactly suitable for an anti-abortion poem. Somehow it’s blown up into more. For the next point, former liberals have told me that seeing syllogistic proofs like mine would have helped them find the truth sooner. I don’t write them for the person I’m arguing with as much as for anyone who may be reading. I agree that a lot of liberals are almost as obstinate as the devils themselves. To use my own lines, “No more do they care for what’s good and what’s true/They don’t want to be saved anymore.” I’ve never heard of metapolitics, but that description is very helpful. As you may have seen in my poetry, sometimes I’ll do that, but because I’m not naturally as direct as you, the strategy I’ve found to be most effective is the Trojan horse. Still, there is a lot to be said for yours; I do like the idea of making them sweat. As for the question of today’s Church hierarchy, marvel no more. Fr. Frank Pavone getting defrocked by the Pope himself while all kinds of pedophiles, pro-aborts, and LGBT pushers still get to be priests and bishops was the last straw for me. He’s basically saying, “It’s time we stopped harassing the child butcherers and molesters and went after the real criminals.” I’m done defending such things. Phil S. Rogers December 22, 2022 Direct and to the point, a home run sir. Loved it! Reply Robert Zimmerman December 22, 2022 Hello James. I appreciate the narrative you have composed in this poem. I like the way you wrote it in a “future perfect” tense. (That’s the best way I can describe my impression). I appreciate this greatly. I still use pronouns the way I found them in high school in 1960. I will always be the guy chasing the caboose cause I won’t be allowed in the dining car. ─HAHA─ This is an excellent poem and a thought-provoking piece. Robert Reply Damian Robin December 23, 2022 More Stanford (Harvard, University of Alabama, the Redstone Arsenal, and NASA) shame: https://aish.com/harvard-stanford-and-nasa-are-still-glorifying-nazis/?acid=ccd98ddd34ef3f5a2b91e4e8289bb7ce&src=ac-rdm Reply Alena Casey December 24, 2022 The might have/could have/would have puts me in mind of a Taylor Swift song, whose chorus goes like this: Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye You were bigger than the whole sky You were more than just a short time And I’ve got a lot to pine about I’ve got a lot to live without I’m never gonna meet What could’ve been, would’ve been What should’ve been you To my knowledge Swift has not confirmed what she is writing about, but many women associate the song with miscarriage. Your poem also speaks to miscarriage, I find, because the varying line length, the sentence fragments, and the endless ending, all represent the disorientation of grief so well. It is a grief that is felt keenly in an unintended pregnancy loss, as well as for a specific regretted abortion, or at the crime in general. Reply James A. Tweedie December 24, 2022 Ty for your comment, Alena. The uneven line and rhyme patterns were intentional both to simplify and complicate the theme of what is lost when a pregnancy does not result in a live birth. Although the intent of the poem was to point in the direction of intentional termination of pre-born life the loss and grief that follows from a miscarriage can also be read into the poem albeit from a somewhat different direction. Your comment is much appreciated and the silent grief carried by women (and men) who have either lost a child to miscarriage or who carry the regret and guilt of a chosen abortion is far more widespread than we would like to think. Seasons that celebrate birth, such as Christmas, can be especially hard for some. Even so, the death and resurrection of Jesus offers us God’s consolation, forgiveness, and redemption as well as hope in the ultimate triumph of love and life over the pain of suffering, sin and death. There is a profound depth contained in your comment and, once again, I thank you for it. Reply Alena Casey December 27, 2022 You speak great words of comfort. I wrote my comment late at night while nursing my baby, and I was sufficiently aware of myself to attempt to not overshare, but not enough to realize that in that attempt I understated myself. I am indeed one of those women who grieves a miscarriage. But you saw that anyway and were quick to offer the best of comforts: reassurance and hope in Christ’s resurrection! Praise God for his mercy and for those who speak it. Joshua C. Frank January 4, 2023 Alena, how awful to lose a child, especially in a culture built on the narrative that he (I’m using masculine pronouns for convenience) wasn’t a “real” child. For all parents in a similar situation, I’ve written an elegy for a baby that age who died: https://classicalpoets.org/2022/12/09/elegy-for-miran-sutherland-by-joshua-c-frank/ Roy Eugene Peterson December 24, 2022 Good grief, Stanford! No matter how they attempt to disguise reality, it amounts to the same thing. I have also been using “they, their, and them” to connote “those” errant creatures. Wonderfully salient poem, as always full of meaning! Reply Laura Lesinski January 3, 2023 And to think Stanford was my dream school …. Back in 1981. Loved the poem. Enjoying the comments just as much. What was so great about Rush Limbaugh was his spot on insights and commentary using humor, parodies and sarcasm. He caused confusion for new listeners and took them a bit to catch on to his brilliance. Our society is indeed on a road to a civil war when we can’t agree that killing an unborn baby is murder. No matter how you say it….it is that. 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C.B. Anderson December 21, 2022 This poem, James, for reasons I can’t quite explain, was stunning. The at-will line lengths and end rhymes could have made it a busted feather pillow, but somehow everything dovetailed perfectly. The use of the possessive pronoun “their” instead of the traditional (gender-neutral) “his” is now accepted by many editors as a more compact version of “his or her.” I don’t care much either way, but I am sensitive to the distinction. I think you handled it just right. Reply
James A. Tweedie December 22, 2022 I was stubbornly using their/they as a gender-neutral 3rd-person singular long before style manuals reluctantly began to allow it. Reply
Russel Winick December 22, 2022 I enjoyed the poem, as a clever way to make an important point. I read Stanford’s list, and am just stunned by some of the absurd lengths many need to go to in order to feel particularly righteous. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi December 22, 2022 Stanford’s absurd list (13 pages of stupidity) was eviscerated last night on Gutfeld’s TV show. Every idiotic example quoted from the text generated guffaws from the audience. It’s as if Leland Stanford University were deliberately trying to be a prime example of mealy-mouthed linguistic self-censorship. Unfortunately, this isn’t just an isolated case of administrative jackasses embarrassing themselves by patent virtue-signalling. It’s happening in countless colleges and universities nation-wide, and in foreign institutions infected by American influence. I’ve been an academic for over half a century. And I can tell you this with full experiential authority: academia is the black, festering, diseased heart of what afflicts us today. Reply
Patricia Allred January 9, 2023 Terrifgly stated,, James. How far down the rabbit nho,e has academics crawled? Absurdly far, creating nations of morons with diplomas? Best, Patricia Allred Reply
Patricia Allred January 9, 2023 Excuse errors in my reply. Ugh! I am turning bright red., James…Request your forgiveness! Patricia Allred Reply
Joshua C. Frank December 22, 2022 I do like one thing about the list: to say “cancel” or “end” sounds worse than “abort” because we’re all used to the word “abort.” Maybe that will help some people wake up to the reality of it. Your poem is well-written; it sounds very musical, like song lyrics. However, I take issue with the lines “A child who might have come to be” and “A child who never was.” A child comes to be at the moment of conception. To say otherwise is to speak in favor of abortion, which seems very unlikely to be your intention. An abortion kills a child who already is. It’s just as bad as killing an already born baby. If you want to speak of a child who never was, I offer my own poem “Elegy for the Child Never Conceived” as an example: https://classicalpoets.org/2022/07/26/elegy-for-the-child-never-conceived-by-joshua-c-frank/ Sorry to be nit-picky, but I believe this is an important issue. If we’re concerned about the manipulation of language, then we all need to check our own eyes for beams. We need to stop saying someone has two children and one on the way instead of three children (just as we wouldn’t say two people and an African), or that a pregnant woman is going to be a mother (she already is a mother). The list goes on. The rest of the lines are great, and quite powerful. Well done, Reply
James A. Tweedie December 22, 2022 Point taken, Joshua. But also point missed. While I do not deny that an unborn person is, indeed, a person, in the poem the term “child” is used in its primary definitive developmental meaning in reference to “a person between birth and puberty.” The poem makes this clear insofar as it is only after birth that a child can climb a tree and tie their shoes. This is the ”child who never was.” An abortion takes a life not yet born. The point of the poem is that it also steals the possibilities inherent in that pre-birth infant’s post-birth future. Reply
Joshua C. Frank December 22, 2022 I see what you mean, but then why do we say a pregnant woman is with child and not with fetus? Hence the bumper sticker: “It is not a choice. It is a child.” I like your message, don’t get me wrong, but my only problem is that it’s weakened by influence of liberals’ language changes, especially when you’re writing against both abortion and liberals’ language changes.
Morrison Handley-Schachler January 9, 2023 I quite agree with Joshua that these words are at least as brutal as “abort” and also no doubt these words will be forbidden in due course and replaced with something else. Language is often used as a means of control by groups who are seeking power, not only as a means of controlling what may be expressed but as a way of telling who is and is not up-to-date with the latest shibboleths and, consequently, who is and who is not still part of their clique. Reply
Allegra Silberstein December 22, 2022 Bravo! You make your point without preaching and with lovely language. Reply
James A. Tweedie December 22, 2022 Joshua, Stanford insists that I use words in a certain way and you are insisting that I use a word in a certain way. I have explained how I am using the word “child.” It is only “weak” if your way of defining it is imposed on my poem. I am making my point my way. I am not making your point your way. If my use of the word offends you, feel free to draft your own list of preferred word-usage for everyone to follow. Reply
Joshua C. Frank December 22, 2022 I understand your point. My intent is not to impose a word usage, but rather to correct the influence of liberal word usage pushed on us to the point where even many pro-life people use pro-abortion language. Imagine if, before the Civil War, abolitionists had been so strongly influenced by pro-slavery language that they started using it themselves. This is not a “you have to use words my way” issue. This is a “let’s not let the liberals influence how we use words even when we protest their decisions about how we use words” issue. But if you insist on using words despite knowing that the usage is influenced by the very people you’re trying to fight against, then I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi December 23, 2022 What you are not taking into account, Joshua, is idiom and time-honored usage. People have always said “She has two children and one on the way,” and of a pregnant woman that “She’s going to be a mother.” These were accepted and intelligible idioms used by Catholics and non-Catholics long before any abortion debate ever arose. Insisting (in the above cases) on a change to “She has three children” and “She’s a mother” is just as ideologically driven and absolutist as what Stanford University is trying to impose. Last night my wife and I were discussing the names of the week, and how (in English and many other European languages) they are based on the names of pagan gods (Wotan, Freya, Thor, Saturn, Tiw, Mars, Mercury, etc.) But a peculiar kind of ideological fanaticism in medieval Portugal insisted that these pagan names be banished, and now the names of the week in Portuguese are purely numerical (“prima fiera, segunda fiera, tierza fiera…) Changing language to change people’s thoughts is a bad idea, and a dangerous one, no matter from where in the political spectrum the idea comes.
Joshua C. Frank December 23, 2022 Nevertheless, I make sure never to use those sayings myself… not to force others to do anything, but to make sure my speech is consistent with my thought. I used to volunteer to teach at a church in California. The director of religious education had a daughter who had three children, one of whom was unborn. She fumbled when trying to calculate how many children that made, and she finally came up with 2 7/8. For me, this hearkened back to the days when a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person or purposes of Congressional representation. So, I corrected her and said, “That’s three children.” Sheepishly, she admitted that I was right. A mother next to me agreed and thanked me. In this day and age, where the unborn are legally not human beings, I’m not so sure that these idioms, though time-honored, are such a good thing. After all, most of us no longer use language that dehumanizes other races (have you ever read Gone With the Wind?). If we won’t do this for the unborn, that sends a clear anti-life message that weakens any pro-life message we might have.
Joseph S. Salemi December 23, 2022 Joshua, you do force people to do what you want when you “correct” them, as you corrected that girl. If the girl wanted to express herself in that 7/8 manner, what business was it of yours? You could have just as well laughed and taken it as the semi- facetious comment that it likely was. Also, it is absurd to keep on bringing up the slavery issue as a “trump-the-whole-question” device in an argument over abortion. Nobody in the history of the planet, whether pro-slavery or against it, ever seriously denied that slaves were human. Slavery is based on political status and hierarchy, not species-definition, conception-moments, or the counting of trimesters. In fact, your use of the slavery issue is a sign that YOU have been influenced by the language habits of the white liberal-left. You know that black slavery is a hot-button pressure point with them, so you have seized upon it as an attack-proof argument against abortion, even though this is a category error. Also, your use of the words “dehumanizing language” is right out of the catechism of left-liberal Newspeak. Language is just language. We can use it in whatever ways that we like, just as the author did in Gone with the Wind.
Joshua C. Frank December 23, 2022 Of course I’m using liberal language, because liberalism is so pervasive that it has a lot of influence on even those who deny liberalism, so I have to speak within ideas that make sense to liberals when proclaiming an idea contrary to their beliefs. In any event, the issue of how far freedom of speech should go seems to be coming up a lot between you and me. So what exactly do you think people should be doing? As far as I can tell, what you propose seems to be to remain silent in the face of error attacking truth, on the grounds that doing otherwise denies someone’s right to freedom of speech. If so, with all due respect, that’s not going to work. In this culture that believes every lie imaginable, the truth has to be proclaimed.
Joseph S. Salemi December 24, 2022 Remain silent? ME? Are you serious? My entire polemical practice is to shoot off my mouth as loudly and offensively as I can, whenever left-liberal stupidity raises its head. Our difference is this: you still believe (naively, I think) that it is actually worthwhile to argue logically with left-liberals, and present them with syllogistic proofs that we are correct and that they are wrong. Right now, in what Lenin would have called “the objective situation,” that belief is utterly hallucinatory. Left-liberals of all stripes are committed to their opinions in the same way that devout religionists are committed to their dogma. Do you think mere argument will change a feminist, a transgender advocate, a BLM partisan, an ANTIFA thug, an LGBT activist, a Democrat in Congress? These are proselytizing fanatics with a supercharged agenda. To quote you, “That’s not going to work.” My view is that we are now in the incipient stages of preparation for a civil war, and that in such a situation all that is left to us is what we on the right call “metapolitics.” This means savagely polemical attacks on the enemy, using satire, lampoon, memes, comedy, hard propaganda, and very biting prose that does include logical argument. The purpose of such metapolitics is to keep our own morale up, but also to show others that there are still persons who are willing to express real contempt and hatred for the illegitimate elite who now presume to govern us and dictate to us. And another important purpose of metapolitics is to keep left-liberals very scared and nervous. We can’t convince them, but we can make them SWEAT. This is very important. If there is a smoldering argument between us, it is that you, like many Roman Catholics, seem implicitly to believe in accepting authority from on high, and urging all kinds of restraints and self-censorship that make metapolitics impossible. The fact that you still think Bergoglio’s Novus Ordo hierarchy are reliable guides in the midst of our current culture wars is staggering to me.
Joshua C. Frank December 24, 2022 Thank you for explaining your points. That’s helpful. First, my initial comment was not intended for liberals. It was intended for James, to point out that certain wordings aren’t exactly suitable for an anti-abortion poem. Somehow it’s blown up into more. For the next point, former liberals have told me that seeing syllogistic proofs like mine would have helped them find the truth sooner. I don’t write them for the person I’m arguing with as much as for anyone who may be reading. I agree that a lot of liberals are almost as obstinate as the devils themselves. To use my own lines, “No more do they care for what’s good and what’s true/They don’t want to be saved anymore.” I’ve never heard of metapolitics, but that description is very helpful. As you may have seen in my poetry, sometimes I’ll do that, but because I’m not naturally as direct as you, the strategy I’ve found to be most effective is the Trojan horse. Still, there is a lot to be said for yours; I do like the idea of making them sweat. As for the question of today’s Church hierarchy, marvel no more. Fr. Frank Pavone getting defrocked by the Pope himself while all kinds of pedophiles, pro-aborts, and LGBT pushers still get to be priests and bishops was the last straw for me. He’s basically saying, “It’s time we stopped harassing the child butcherers and molesters and went after the real criminals.” I’m done defending such things.
Robert Zimmerman December 22, 2022 Hello James. I appreciate the narrative you have composed in this poem. I like the way you wrote it in a “future perfect” tense. (That’s the best way I can describe my impression). I appreciate this greatly. I still use pronouns the way I found them in high school in 1960. I will always be the guy chasing the caboose cause I won’t be allowed in the dining car. ─HAHA─ This is an excellent poem and a thought-provoking piece. Robert Reply
Damian Robin December 23, 2022 More Stanford (Harvard, University of Alabama, the Redstone Arsenal, and NASA) shame: https://aish.com/harvard-stanford-and-nasa-are-still-glorifying-nazis/?acid=ccd98ddd34ef3f5a2b91e4e8289bb7ce&src=ac-rdm Reply
Alena Casey December 24, 2022 The might have/could have/would have puts me in mind of a Taylor Swift song, whose chorus goes like this: Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye You were bigger than the whole sky You were more than just a short time And I’ve got a lot to pine about I’ve got a lot to live without I’m never gonna meet What could’ve been, would’ve been What should’ve been you To my knowledge Swift has not confirmed what she is writing about, but many women associate the song with miscarriage. Your poem also speaks to miscarriage, I find, because the varying line length, the sentence fragments, and the endless ending, all represent the disorientation of grief so well. It is a grief that is felt keenly in an unintended pregnancy loss, as well as for a specific regretted abortion, or at the crime in general. Reply
James A. Tweedie December 24, 2022 Ty for your comment, Alena. The uneven line and rhyme patterns were intentional both to simplify and complicate the theme of what is lost when a pregnancy does not result in a live birth. Although the intent of the poem was to point in the direction of intentional termination of pre-born life the loss and grief that follows from a miscarriage can also be read into the poem albeit from a somewhat different direction. Your comment is much appreciated and the silent grief carried by women (and men) who have either lost a child to miscarriage or who carry the regret and guilt of a chosen abortion is far more widespread than we would like to think. Seasons that celebrate birth, such as Christmas, can be especially hard for some. Even so, the death and resurrection of Jesus offers us God’s consolation, forgiveness, and redemption as well as hope in the ultimate triumph of love and life over the pain of suffering, sin and death. There is a profound depth contained in your comment and, once again, I thank you for it. Reply
Alena Casey December 27, 2022 You speak great words of comfort. I wrote my comment late at night while nursing my baby, and I was sufficiently aware of myself to attempt to not overshare, but not enough to realize that in that attempt I understated myself. I am indeed one of those women who grieves a miscarriage. But you saw that anyway and were quick to offer the best of comforts: reassurance and hope in Christ’s resurrection! Praise God for his mercy and for those who speak it.
Joshua C. Frank January 4, 2023 Alena, how awful to lose a child, especially in a culture built on the narrative that he (I’m using masculine pronouns for convenience) wasn’t a “real” child. For all parents in a similar situation, I’ve written an elegy for a baby that age who died: https://classicalpoets.org/2022/12/09/elegy-for-miran-sutherland-by-joshua-c-frank/
Roy Eugene Peterson December 24, 2022 Good grief, Stanford! No matter how they attempt to disguise reality, it amounts to the same thing. I have also been using “they, their, and them” to connote “those” errant creatures. Wonderfully salient poem, as always full of meaning! Reply
Laura Lesinski January 3, 2023 And to think Stanford was my dream school …. Back in 1981. Loved the poem. Enjoying the comments just as much. What was so great about Rush Limbaugh was his spot on insights and commentary using humor, parodies and sarcasm. He caused confusion for new listeners and took them a bit to catch on to his brilliance. Our society is indeed on a road to a civil war when we can’t agree that killing an unborn baby is murder. No matter how you say it….it is that. Reply
