carnage and culture

Monday, August 10, 2015

An album that presents a lighter side of the talented Jason Isbell without ignoring the bleaker parts of his life.

By Barry Mazor

http://www.wsj.com/

August 4, 2015

When I saw Jason Isbell perform in 2003, at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J., he was a young relative newcomer to the Drive-By Truckers, and had just contributed a pair of startlingly conceived and executed songs to the album “Decoration Day” by that smart and song-rich band of Alabama-raised alternative-country rockers. One was the title number, concerning multigenerational feuding families, one family being his own; the other was “Outfit,” based on cautioning yet encouraging life and career advice he’d received from his father, a working-class house painter. (“Don’t call what you’re wearing an outfit . . . don’t worry about losing your accent.”)

In the course of the decade that followed, Mr. Isbell left that group, wrote new, rootsy, narrative yet melodic songs, some leaning toward rock, others more toward country or folk, and made new records, both solo and with his own accomplished band, the 400 Unit. (The band was named for a Muscle Shoals, Ala. area psychiatric ward.) He married, divorced and married again, had serious trouble with alcohol, and then worked to get and stay sober. All of that became ballad fodder for his acclaimed album of 2013, “Southeastern.” That sober and sobering look back garnered him Album of the Year, Artist of the Year, and also Song of the Year (for “Cover Me Up,” his moving song about finally being ready for love), at the 2014 Americana Music Association Awards.

Jason Isbell's New Morning

The former Drive-By Trucker blew up his life — then became a master of Southern-gothic heartache

Jason Isbell (David McClister)

BY PATRICK DOYLE August 7, 2015

http://www.rollingstone.com/

Jason Isbell felt a rush of familiarity when he watched the final episode of Mad Men on his tour bus. As he saw Don Draper go AWOL from his advertising job and embark on an aimless cross-country road trip, Isbell recalled his own life around 2008, after his first marriage had fallen apart and he'd been fired from the Drive-By Truckers due largely to his heavy drinking. Isbell bought a motorcycle and took off from his home in Alabama. "I drove down to Florida, back up through Georgia and visited some of the girls I had met on the road," he says in a husky Alabama drawl. "It's a wonder I didn't kill myself. I got home feeling and looking worse than when I'd left, just completely lost."

Isbell eventually went to rehab and turned his dark past into some of the best music to come out of Nashville this decade. On 2013's Southeastern, he reflected on cocaine nights at Super 8's, mistreating vulnerable women, and starting over. "I was behaving in a way that was deplorable on a lot of levels," Isbell says, drinking Red Bull and smoking cigarettes on his tour bus, outside the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, New York, one recent afternoon. "The problem with drinking is you can drown out your conscience until it shuts up." Bruce Springsteen called Southeastern a "lovely record" and sneaked up on Isbell at a Dr. John benefit to sing Isbell's song "Traveling Alone" into his ear. Isbell sold out four consecutive shows at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in October.

"I'm kind of picky about songwriters, you know," says John Prine. "But when I heard Southeastern, it just killed me. I loved it. I like songs that are clean and don't have much fat on them — every line is direct, and all people can relate to it. That's what I try to do, and that's what Jason does. I really haven't heard anybody that different in probably 30 years."

Old ghosts still exist on Isbell's new album, Something More Than Free, like an ex-lover who spills unflattering stories about Isbell to his wife. But Isbell finds more material in the common truths of the overworked and underprivileged people of the rural South — truck loaders, railroad workers, housewives. "I don't think on why I'm here or where it hurts/I'm just lucky to have the work," he declares on the title track, which he wrote partly about his father, a retired house painter. "Physical labor, manual labor — if you can stay close to those folks, there's always plenty to write about, 'cause their issues are real issues."

Isbell grew up in the low-income town of Green Hill, Alabama. "People came to school [just] to eat lunch," he says. Green Hill is 20 miles from Muscle Shoals, where Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Percy Sledge and others did some of their best work. As a teenage guitarist, Isbell got to know many of the musicians on those records while sitting in at bars with bassist David Hood and organist Spooner Oldham.

As a student at the University of Memphis, Isbell made up songs to entertain his frat brothers and read original verse at poetry readings. One night, Isbell sat in with the Drive-By Truckers, a hard-living band led by Hood's son Patterson. The Truckers invited Isbell to join as a full member, and he left on tour with them just two days later, becoming the third great voice in the group after Hood and Mike Cooley, who had just completed Southern Rock Opera, a concept album about Lynyrd Skynyrd. Isbell boiled down complex ideas into novelistic songs like "Decoration Day," a devastating chronicle of family/neighbor turmoil, and "Danko/Manuel," in which he compared his demons to those of two fallen members of the Band.

Isbell had no problem adapting to the Truckers' lifestyle. He would wake up and start drinking, finishing off a fifth of Jack Daniel's by the end of a show. "We were lucky if we could walk off the stage," he says flatly. "I'd wake up in a lot of pain and not know where I was — some girl's house somewhere."

Isbell married bassist Shonna Tucker in 2002 after, he says, she saved his life one drunken night (she joined the band a year later). But the honeymoon didn't last long. "I slept with people I shouldn't have slept with," he says. "I started going outside the marriage." They separated — sort of. "We were still in the band together, and so we were only separated by the distance between those two bunks," he says. "She didn't deserve that, but I shouldn't have married her in the first place."

The toxic environment — combined with Isbell's explosive temper at the time — was too much for Hood and Cooley, who fired Isbell in 2007. (They've reconciled.) Isbell burned more bridges, lost more friends and recorded two albums with his band the 400 Unit. In 2011, he started seeing Amanda Shires, an old friend who had played fiddle and guitar with everyone from the Texas Playboys to Todd Snider. She had little tolerance for his excuses: "I told somebody in her presence, 'I don't drink in the morning,' and she said, 'Your morning is one in the afternoon. And you do drink at one in the afternoon.' " Shires and friend Ryan Adams convinced Isbell to go to rehab. "Rehab is like a divorce," he says. "The divorce isn't nearly as sad or shitty as the two or three years leading up to it."

After sobering up, Isbell started reading "big, thick books," including Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian — and dedicated six to eight hours a day to writing songs full of aphorisms like "There's one thing that's real clear to me/No one dies with dignity" and "Is your brother on a church kick?/Seems like just a different kind of dope sick."

"A lot of people in Nashville think that the best song is the catchiest, or the one that sells the most copies," he says at one point. "They're editing songs in a way that make them seem more consumable, I guess. I'm trying to edit them in a way that makes them more honest."

One of those songs is a new single, "24 Frames," a searing account about how loss can upend one's world. "I still have the problem of thinking I'm in control of things I'm not in control of," he says. "No matter what you thought your plans were, that's not how things are going to work out, and that's the only way you can really, I think, live successfully."

Isbell takes a long drag off his last cigarette and cracks another Red Bull. "With karma too, it's like, 'What have I done to deserve this?' That's always the wrong question. It doesn't matter. The only right question is 'What do I do now?' That's it."

From The Archives Issue 1241: August 13, 2015

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Robert Conquest, the Man Who Unearthed the Big Soviet Lie

By Michael Weiss
http://www.thedailybeast.com/
August 6, 2015

Robert Conquest in Red Square

Robert Conquest, who died on Tuesday at 98, was a historian, a novelist, a literary critic and a poet, although his genius (I use the word as discriminatingly as possible) was that he managed to exhibit the qualities of all four roles simultaneously. In a century of overspecialization, he partook of many subjects expertly, usually outclassing those singularly dedicated to one.

Consider this passage from his seminal study of the Stalinist purges, The Great Terror, which first appeared in 1968, when establishing the facts about a closed society was as much a matter of decryption and deduction as of research and recordation. (The book would be reissued in 1990, and then in 2007, as a “reassessment” which mainly reassessed just how prescient and correct the author had been before the opening of the Soviet archives). Conquest is describing the early internal opponents of Stalinism, all of whom would be jailed, shot, or exiled under varying circumstances:

“In fact, courage and clearheadedness are admirable in themselves. And if they do not rank high among the moral virtues, we can see in some of the Soviet oppositionists something rather better. It is true that those who did not confess, and were shot secretly, demonstrated not merely a higher courage, but a better sense of values. In them, however touched by the demands of Party and revolutionary loyalty, loyalty to the truth and the idea of a more humane regime prevailed. But even among those who confessed, we can often see the struggle between Party habits and the old impulses to justice which had originally, in many cases at least, been one of the motives for joining the Party…If the oppositionists were not spotless, it is at least true of their conduct during the Civil War that to have acted right or wrong
Within that furious age
was different from planning the cold-blooded Terror shortly to be launched.”

Few would think to repurpose a stanza from a 17th-century ballad sung by a disabled Red Coat to describe the nobility of pitiable Reds after their own liquidation by the Politburo.

Note, too, the generosity of motive—“old impulses to justice”—Conquest assigns to Old Bolsheviks who were devoured by the very regime they helped create. He could distinguish the ardent but lethally misguided true believer from the mere hack or apparatchik. The happy Cold Warrior born in 1917 who advised Margaret Thatcher and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and was denounced in 1990 at a plenum of the Soviet Central Committee as “anti-Sovietchik number one,” still outshines the younger revisionists who have argued that there was little choose between and amongst a Stalin, a Bukharin, a Trotsky or a Rakovsky. (Some have gone so far as to claim that worse tyrannies would have been birthed had the Georgian monster not taken over the Kremlin.) Conquest, without any hint of apologetics, exaggeration or recourse to revolutionary romanticism, could argue persuasively that this simply was not the case even while maintaining throughout his career that the core problem with the USSR began with Marxism as a mode of political economy, which he considered fraudulent and discredited.

As he did much of modernist literature. “Though there are praiseworthy exceptions, the great fault of the academic Anglo-American taste in poetry,” he observed mordantly, “has always been to take as aesthetic the thrill of penetrating novelties of vocabulary, contortions of syntax and general oddities of language. Mary had a little lamb, put into Sanskrit and read backwards, not only does not gain, but actually loses the one quality of the original.”

This insight came in a justly celebrated disembowelment of Ezra Pound, whom Conquest showed, against the canting fashions of the day, to be a poseur of the highest order, not to mention a lousy poet who garbled his own allusions to classical mythology and did so without any redeeming ingenuity or creativity. Also, Pound’s notorious fascism and egoism only added to his artistic debit. This paragraph, for instance, reads rather like the inverse of Orwell’s famous defense of P.G. Wodehouse, a sometime detainee of the S.S., but one was only ingenuous in the face of World War, whereas Pound was downright sinister:

“It is politically and morally relevant that we are called upon by admirers of Pound to find the Pisan Cantos a moving expression of the poet’s suffering. In fact, people go so far as to imply that the American army behaved with disgraceful brutality in keeping him in a wired camp without adequate protection from the weather. One may regret all the suffering, or even discomfort; but this took place at a time when the smoke had scarcely ceased to rise from Auschwitz, and millions were still in a far worse case than Pound’s. He had supported the anti-Semitic policies of the Axis (and even now when the facts have long been available to him, I do not think that he has shown much sympathy or pity for the victims of the gas-chambers). In the circumstances one may feel, in one’s heartless way, that having to sleep out in the rain for a bit was a suffering he might have done better to keep quiet about. And in any case, a humanity and sympathy which is mainly expressed for oneself can seldom be particularly moving.”

It pays to remember that Conquest was himself, briefly, a Communist. He always maintained that the best anatomists of this particular malady were recovered sufferers of it. He joined the Party while at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1936 but only belonged for a mere 18 months—while also being a member of the Carlton Club. He professed that “girl trouble” took up too much of his time at university to preoccupy him with surplus value; also, he thought zealous adherents to the god that would eventually fail to be “bloody fools.” What turned him definitively against Marxism-Leninism was a firsthand encounter with it in practice, in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe. In 1944, Conquest served as a British liaison officer for the Bulgarian army, which was fighting the Nazis under Soviet command; he enlisted in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1939, the year the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, which does show his sensibleness overriding ideology early on. “If you’d been [in Bulgaria] in 1944-45,” he said, “you became anti-Communist in a shot. They were dreadful and got worse and worse.”

The experience hardened him to all forms of what he later called “mindslaughter,” broadly defined as the attempt by well-educated bourgeois (seldom does the affliction seem to befall the actually existing working classes) to deceive themselves into believing arrant or fashionable nonsense, especially when it contradicted their own stated principles. How was it, Conquest once teased his friend Kingsley Amis—whose affiliation with the CP lasted embarrassingly long, until 1956, when the Soviets invaded Hungary— that the author of Lucky Jimcould be quite so “progressive” about colonialism, of which he knew little, but quite conservative when it came to modern British education, about which Amis was exasperatingly well-informed. This insight led to Conquest’s First Law: “Generally speaking, everyone is reactionary on subjects he knows about.” (His Second Law is equally useful: “Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.”)

It was Amis who invented the most oft-cited story about Conquest, that he’d told his American publisher that the first reissue of The Great Terror be titled, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools,” a legend which stuck as plausible because it was in keeping with the satirical bent of both men of letters. They came to know each other through poetry, having hit it off at a PEN party in 1952, and bonded over shared artistic judgments, including an obsession with science fiction, not to mention their mutual enlistment in the genre of postwar English literature known as the “Movement.” It was Amis, too, who did us the favor of collecting several of Conquest’s limericks in the New Oxford Book of Light Verse, even if the contributions were given under pseudonyms such as “Victor Gray” and “Ted Pauker.”

This comic form was, Conquest noted, the “purest, if not the highest creation” because “[n]o consideration of money or publication apply” and whereas the “meaningless, and the structureless can now pass for serious verse” (again, see Pound), “the limerick remains a voice of talent and common sense.” Some examples were even fit for public consumption, such as:

When Gaugin was visiting Fiji

He said, ‘Things are different here, e.g.

While Tahitian skin

Calls for tan spread on thin,

You must splosh it on here with a squeegee.

And the famous parody of Shakespeare’s “Seven ages of man” monologue from As You Like It:

Seven ages: first puking and mewling;

Then very pissed off with one’s schooling;

Then fucks; and then fights;

Then judging chaps’ rights;

Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

Though many fell under the category of what Conquest liked to call “bawdy”—he wrote learned essays on the genre—the limericks were exchanged vigorously over the years with Amis and their other great friend and pen-pal Philip Larkin, who came in for much denunciation by the commissars of political correctness in the late ’90s when his Selected Letters were published. Many were conceived as verbal fusillades against assorted bores and enemies of the intellect and spirit, though today I suppose they require “trigger-warnings” for the tender-headed.

Of one unfortunate novelist-critic who had been rude to Amis in print, Conquest lampooned:

The first man to fuck Brigid Brophy

Has just won the Krafft-Ebing Trophy,

Plus ten thousand quid,

Which, for what the chap did,

Will be widely denounced as a low fee.

The communist president of the Oxford Union when Conquest joined the Party was Philip Toynbee, later the chief reviewer for the Observer, best described by another British journalist as an “ex-alcoholic who became a heavy drinker.” Even the quarry might have appreciated the artful use of enjambment here:

One cannot when dealing with Toynbee

Just pay him back in his own coin be-

Cause talking such piss

Would come rather amiss,

And so how would a kick in the groin be?

There were “Fascist” lunches with Conquest’s Thatcherite set, including Kingsley and the great Soviet-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely in the ’70s at an Italian restaurant called Bertorelli (since shuttered, alas) on Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia. An occasional attendee of these was Christopher Hitchens, then a radical scribbler at The New Statesman and a friend of Martin Amis, who had an obvious filial in. It was at Hitch’s Menlo Park home where I met Conquest in the summer of 2007. Now happily ensconced for decades at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the Grand Old Man had just entered his 90th year and had recently been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom alongside Alan Greenspan and Aretha Franklin. (“Bob and the Queen of Soul” was the title of a photograph that got emailed around, with Conquest looking on quizzically at Franklin as she wept with apparent pride).

Bob could still recite 1930s trade union ballads word-perfectly as if he’d learnt them yesterday, and I was impressed by his opinion that a lot of the better stuff written on the Soviet “experiment” was done closer to the experimenters’ own time, such as Bertram Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution.

I have a photograph I took of him smiling as Hitch, hand on the elder writer’s shoulder, wears an expression of solemn reverence. This was just so. The younger polemicist’s Trotskyist groupuscule had, back in London, made The Great Terrorrequired reading and Hitch was also one of the few leftists to both understand the seriousness of Conquest’s contribution to anti-Stalinism—of which the Trotskyists were some of the earliest and shrewdest subscribers—and to see the purpose of the unleaded laddishness of his latter-day right-wing milieu. “[I]n my experience,” he wrote in a terrific defense of Larkin for the New Left Review, “when men like Conquest came across a real, one-dimensional, humourless bigotry they were bored by it… It all seemed so… pointless.”

The struggle against pointlessness or frivolousness, as Conquest often termed it, taking care to differentiate a genuine sense of humor from mirthless idiocy, was a hallmark of his moral style. In one of his later books, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, he reminded us that many of the modern era’s purveyors of “scientific” political theories held the least scientific beliefs. French collectivist Fourier, for instance, “sincerely believed that under socialism the sea could be turned into lemonade.” Marx was no exception. The Communist Manifesto contains unintentionally hilarious commentary on the supposedly predatory sex lives of the middle-classes when he was the one humping the help. The grey-beard Rhinelander also had more than a passing fondness for phrenology and at one point became “enthusiastic about the theories of the adventurer Pierre Trémaux, who held that the distinction between the races were attributable to the different soils on which they lived.”

Closer to our own time, Conquest noted the rotten core of so many fellow travelers and excuse-makers for the longer-lasting totalitarianism. Sartre, he pointed out, had but two objections to unearthing the whole sordid truth about the Gulag: “First, that the evidence was unofficial (though he accepted precisely similar testimony about French misconduct in Algeria); second, that such evidence would throw the French proletariat into despair.” Yet where the proletariat was thrown into genuine revolutionary ferment was also interesting: “It is an ironic commentary on this that the great workers’ risings took place in countries where capitalism had been overthrown, in cities like East Berlin, Poznan, Budapest, Gdansk.” Quite.

Conquest’s bête noire, however, was his exact contemporary, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom he outlived by a few years (which fact I’m sure gave him some satisfaction) and who in an interview with Michael Ignatieff in 1994 said that had the utopian dreams of Communism been realized, then the death of 15 or 20 million people would have been worth the price. Hobsbawm was made a Companion of Honour in 1998.

For these and other reasons, Conquest believed, the priesthood of academics who were taken in by propaganda or machiavellian flattery were so much worse than ordinary men and women who took Occam’s razor to bullshit. The greatest compliment he paid to Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was to note that it gave a better justification of Stalinism than any that could be found in the official communist literature, which Conquest had read in multiple languages. Orwell was indeed the thoroughgoing model for saneness and good sense, distinguished in his acuity by apprehending that the barbarism first inflicted by the Soviets (and their surrogates in London) was upon language, which one needn’t have any Potemkin tours of Moscow or Siberia to know spelt further trouble ahead. Winston Smith idly observing that Big Brother’s claim to have manufactured 50 million pairs of boots last year might be a wholesale fabrication made Orwell, in Conquest’s judgment, more adept at understanding Stalinist statistics than many academic economists who were taken in by pieces of paper. Conquest was a fierce foil against the deceptions and self-deception of les clercs.

“Even today,” he wrote in an essay on 1984 in 1984, “the greatest hurdle to understanding the Soviet Union or similar regimes is the unthinking and inexplicit assumption that the basic motivations of the Soviet leaders differ little from our own. It was an advantage to Orwell that he knew nothing of one sort of ‘political science’—a supposed discipline which to this day, by concentrating on forms and structures, removes the essence of a given polity from active consideration. It is a notable fact that Orwell, like Koestler, was a novelist and journalist, and that in general, the record of such writers is far better than that of many ‘serious’ students. Perhaps the reason is that to understand the Stalin regime took an effort not only of the intellect, but also of the imagination.”

This judgment can have easily been applied to the man who made it, even if Conquest would have bridled at such a comparison to his hero. To think, though, that not 72 hours ago, there lived another public figure who helped bring down a totalitarian empire with an uncanny combination of historical imagination and old-fashioned English empiricism.

St. John Paul II Prepared Us For This Pro-Life Moment

BY JOHN PAUL SHIMEK
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jpshimek/
August 7, 2015

By Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France, via Wikimedia Commons

As the Center for Medical Progress continues to unveil evidence of the nefarious practices of America’s leading provider of abortion ‘services,’ it can be difficult to maintain composure. Like Christ himself, we might feel the urge to overturn tables.

But, we need to radiate peace. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “Do not abandon yourselves to despair.

We are the Easter people and ‘Hallelujah’ is our song.” We win this battle in the culture wars by letting the joy and peace of Easter overcome the darkness of Planned Parenthood.

In his 2013 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis gave us four principles to defuse the culture of death with the Joy of the Gospel.

First, privilege time over space.

Pope Francis said that “This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations … It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation” (EG, n. 223).

We have to become comfortable with the idea that we are not going to win the cause for life in a single sitting. This is going to be a long drawn-out debate about abortion, federal funding for CASC (contraception, abortion, sterilization, and counseling) ‘services,’ and the track record of Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. Patience is imperative here. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The culture of life and the civilization of love won’t be, either.

In the thick of heated debate, it is so important to keep in mind that we need to keep lines of communication open so that the discussion can continue to unfold over time. We keep them open when we remain calm, refusing to resort to yelling.

Second, prefer unity over conflict. As Pope Francis writes, “Conflict cannot be ignored or concealed. It has to be faced. But if we remain trapped in conflict, we lose our perspective, our horizons shrink and reality itself begins to fall apart. In the midst of conflict, we lose our sense of the profound unity of reality” (EG, n. 226).

Radiate the joy of the Gospel in difficult and tense discussions by capitalizing on what we have in common with our opponents. Build on what we share. We’ve all heard the saying, “you’ll attract a lot more bees with honey.”

Don’t neglect or paper over differences. Keep them out in front. But, draw in the opposition by offering them a bridge to crossover. No one wants to run toward fire. All of us enjoy a walk along a peaceful seashore.

Third, realities are more important than ideas. According to the Pope, “this principle impels us to put the word into practice, to perform works of justice and charity which make that word fruitful. Not to put the word into practice, not to make it reality, is to build on sand, to remain in the realm of pure ideas and to end up in a lifeless and unfruitful self-centeredness and Gnosticism” (EG, n. 233).

Being pro-life isn’t about espousing a theory. It is about taking up concrete plans of action to protect and defend life.

When my sister was pregnant with her first child and I had the opportunity to go with her to her first ultrasound, I saw the little baby on the monitor. I watched him yawn. Now that he’s six months old, I see him yawn in exactly the same way he did inside his mother’s womb. Life is a continuum and we all get that instinctively.

When women show ultrasound pictures to their girlfriends, none of them says, “Here’s a picture of my fetus!” In our gut, all of us know the unborn life is a child.

If we stand with women and their unborn children, we’ll be motivated to pursue real plans of action, supporting women during crisis pregnancies or reaching out to underprivileged women in need of our assistance.

Fourth, prefer wholes over parts. Pope Francis teaches us that “The whole is greater than the part, but it is also greater than the sum of its parts. There is no need, then, to be overly obsessed with limited and particular questions. We constantly have to broaden our horizons and see the greater good which will benefit us all” (EG, n. 235).

We shouldn’t be forced into making this controversy about abortion. Yes, it is about that! But, that’s not all this debate is about. The pro-life movement exists to defend the woman just as much as the child.

In this debate, we need to make it clear that we want to get women the care they deserve. As Feminists for Life remind us, women deserve better care than abortion. By manipulating an abortion and endangering the health of a woman to obtain fetal body parts for corporate profit, Planned Parenthood does a great disservice to all women.

To build an authentic culture of life and a civilization of love, we cannot set the mother and her baby in opposition to one another. We are pro-life all the way from conception until natural death.

Now, I need to say a word about women who have had abortions. They’re a vitally important ally in this fight for life. In his encyclical letter on the Gospel of Life, Evangelium Vitae, Pope St. John Paul II said that because of their “own painful experience, [they] can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone’s right to life” (EV, n. 99). Post-abortion women have first-hand experience of the horrible reality that Planned Parenthood so desperately wants to keep from the American people.

Let’s get to know these women’s stories. Groups like the National Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing, Project Rachel, Rachel’s Vineyard, and so many others do us all a great service by shedding light on their experiences. Time and time again, they tell us in their own words that abortion never left them feeling self-actualized. Rather, it left them with a void and an emptiness they cannot fill.

When we realize how women have been deceived, robbed of their dignity, and stripped of their sense of security, we will be outraged. But, we will be moved to compassion for them. We will be moved to the eloquence of tears, not against, but radically on the side of women.

Those tears will wound the heart. Like a lance, they will pierce us. They will occasion an examination of our national conscience. And in that moment, we must turn toward prayer.

Let us pray for women and men religious across the country – the Missionaries of Charity, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Sisters for Life, and so many others – who daily defend women and unborn children, who care for the marginalized and heavy burdened. Their witness to the inestimable worth and value of every life lends credibility to our efforts to build a culture and a civilization of love. May God increase their numbers!

In a special way, we should turn in prayer to our beloved Pope St. John Paul II.

Before his death, he traveled for one final time to the United States. He came to the city of St. Louis, the gateway to the West, to meet with American young people on the threshold of the third Christian millennium.

With his health already failing, he spoke to us one last time.

On the horizon of this city stands the Gateway Arch, which often catches the sunlight in its different colors and hues. In a similar way, in a thousand different ways, you must reflect the light of Christ through your lives of prayer and joyful service of others. With the help of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the young people of America will do this magnificently!

Remember: Christ is calling you; the Church needs you; the Pope believes in you and he expects great things of you!

May we not disappoint him. Let us seize this moment in our national discussion about abortion to proclaim the Gospel of Life with the joy of all the saints.

This is the pro-life moment. For a moment such as this, he prepared us. Now, we go forth at the side of Francis to continue the work St. John Paul II began.

carnage and culture

Monday, August 10, 2015

Jason Isbell ~ BEHIND THE WALLS, Newport Folk 2015

CBS Morning News: The fall and rise of Jason Isbell

Review: ‘Something More Than Free’ by Jason Isbell