The Publishing Editor of The Review (a contemporary journal of ideas on the model of literary review commentary we have observed since the inception of the genre and form in the 18th century, if you will, as I do . . .) . . . he writes in his editorial post something on the nature of self-induced miscarriage . . . and this is what it is, not abortion, a word meant to evoke fear, trepidation from f-in’ holy rollers who are usually misguided or simply just wrong.
What a Bloody Mess We’ve Made
To fail to attain an intended or expected outcome; to miscarry; as in a pregnant woman; to have a miscarriage. An induced miscarriage is what it is as we say it is an abortion, to abort; to bring to a premature end because of a problem or fault . . . or fucking fear, screaming bloody mess—the woman, most likely a girl, was the one screaming. Aborted fetuses or embryos do not scream, or do they? No they don’t I hear people say. If they do, they do not at any decibel level high enough for anyone with human ears to hear? How could we let any girl shove anything up her cunt . . . if a tree falls in the forrest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
NO.
Sound is created by the ear; what the falling tree does create is a compression wave. If a girl induces a miscarriage and there is no one there to clean up the bloody fucking mess, is it an abortion?
How is aborting a fetus like a falling tree?
It is not; the girl is . . .
I would never shove up my ass, he said, Any of things that girls have shoved up their cunts—and they have shoved objects up their cunts to induce . . . only possibly to let in the air, yes, the air, he said they did. We hear the female protagonist say in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” they let in the air, or something like that.
He paused.
Do they still let in the air? He asked.
No one said anything. There was no one present, but that never prevented anyone from saying anything to him, as he thought, as he wrote, as he spoke out loud alone in his apartment.
We cannot go back to when girls would shove things up their cunts to induce . . . things that I would never shove up my ass. Hangers, curtain rods or whatever the f@#$ else a girl could imagine pushing up to the opening of the cervix, as I have said elsewhere, will say again in other places, how could I not, stop, remain mute?
The only thing that gives me relief from how impossible thick, semi-literate and under educated we have become is how utterly fucked up most other places in the world are today—that’s a real comfort. This shouldn’t, though, be the reason we beat our chests in monkey-pride, and we do, as if we were the freest people in the world simply because do not live in China. I want usto be the freest people in the world because we are the freest when placed against our own history, and not some comparatively lesser us remaining free in our slogans because we do not live in Iran.
We are better than most places in what we used to call the Third World—remember when we used to say that? Russia and China are mostly better than most of these places. What that says about us, you can imagine.
I just cannot play the political ping pong Americans like to play, deluding themselves that they are wrestling with serious world issues when they discuss politics as it gets discussed on in through too much of the mainstream media, including the idiot banter on social media. If any of those posting knew how awfully semi-literate they were—but then you would need to be literate to judge how under literate most social media postings are.
I am embarrassed, mostly, by what I hear and see and try awfully hard to read sometimes. We should be ashamed of ourselves for having allowed our politics to get to a point where the will of the people have lead us to Hilary and Donald.
The next time I see an idiot waving the American flag as if that were all anyone needed to do to protect liberty, I should ask him to write me five hundred words on why the four freedoms are necessary, or likewise on the flip-side of this American coin—I should ask any female college student today to write me five hundred words as to why Roe versus Wade is necessary. Maybe five hundred words are too hard; I should make it a thousand—and I am not trying for irony or absurdity. It is easier, at least for first time writers.
In matters of morality, the very vocal moralizer is usually wrong. You cannot mistake this—I am not here to play hop-scotch with the Truth so I can fit Sharia Law next to the Constitution of the United States, or basic—and yes, universal—human rights. Nor am I going to remain mute in face of fundamentalist Christian Theo-cratists who are no different in the long run from their fanatical Islamist brethren, flip-sides of the same coin—one metaphysical metal; one metaphysical minting. You know, ISIS would never have the balls to chop off the heads of real power . . .
The Falling Leaf Review 