The Language of Politics

Hello, everybody. Nice to have people writing back about my blog entry regarding PP driving deep into genocide. This post is a response to them and I am putting it on the blog forum because the great computer just makes one long hard-to-read paragraph in the ‘response to response’ mode:

The bramble fields of our brains…

I wasn't trying to demonize Margaret Sanger or PP. I am more of an observer rather than a participant out there trying to change the world or rule it. Philosophical anarchists are like that. They tend to anger the true believers and activists. I like freedom and it is about the only thing that I insist on. William James said that genius is 'simply that quality of viewing the world in non-habitual ways.' That leaves room for all of us to break out of the slogans, clichés or metaphors that are like the familiar rabbit trails (‘circuits’ to the Linguistic Darwinists) that lace the bramble fields of our brains. To have a different thought than the habitual, a person has to blaze a new path thru the thicket. The activists, true-believers and ideologues discourage this, consider such thinking as thought-crime, and try to kill it before it spreads by varying techniques that include bullying. This is all observable in the real world. In my opinion, the ideologues feel threatened by non-habitual thinking because mostly they are trying to create their utopian dream and new-thought is dangerous to their plans. How can their utopia be created when people are going off on thought tangents? All they want is some agreement on their view of the world, history, all of existence and the way things should be. Is that too much to ask? Non-conformity is dangerous to them. Communism is a form a utopianism, but it created the two most prolific mass murderers in the history of the world—Stalin and Mao—yet, some true-believers still want to give Communism a proper chance to work. What does it take to discredit a philosophy? The problem with any utopia is that one needs a state to enforce it or bring it about.

Margaret Sanger had a utopian view. All she needed was a little cooperation. ‘This is the dawn. Womanhood shakes off its bondage. It asserts its right to be free. In its freedom, its thoughts turn to the race. Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees. The race is but the amplification of its mother body, the multiplication of flesh habitations—beautiful and perfected for souls akin to the mother soul’ (page 242, The New Motherhood). Notice her use of the word ‘soul.’ Metaphysics and everything was part of her view of what could be created.

Lots of real nice people are involved with Planned Parenthood I’m sure, but its slogan is very tricky. My research recently has revealed to me how it doesn’t plan parenthood at all. It is a slogan that masks what it really does which is not planning any parenthood. I don’t say this as judgment, just as an observable fact that we can see in the real world. It plans parenthood in as much as it helps people who don’t want parenthood. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn’t have any midwives to help with childbirth. It doesn’t have birthing centers. It doesn’t help in any way with teaching people how to care for the new babies. No. It does something very different that planning for parenthood. And adoption? Don’t get them going on that subject.

So, Imus got into trouble for his stupid rhetorical misstep that contained a racial allusion, and we all hate to see the photos of the happy hangers standing by the tree with the black man at the end of their rope, but think about it. What does PP do that is any different than what the hangers did? PP just does it with a smiling face and with the attitude of doing somebody a favor, but isn’t the result the same? They position most of their clinics in low-income and minority districts for a purpose, and that purpose is the same as the happy hangers except that PP does it much more efficiently and in a much more socially acceptable way. PP used to be called the Birth Control League. That is a more accurate name than the propagandistic ‘Planned Parenthood.’

Well, I hope I didn’t write too much, but I have been having writing breakthroughs at Evergreen and that is what I do now. I am posting something on the class blog that discusses how PP contended all the way to the Supreme Court over the distance from a fetus’s chin to its navel and lost. PP has some explaining to do. Cheers.