
While Dublin is the focal point of this unique day, an international moment in honour of one writer, those who love James Joyce's Ulysses can--if they are lucky--attend readings and dramatisations at many bookstores and libraries from the book the Modern Library considers the most important work of literature in the 20th century.
To love the words and to love the story is to celebrate life. That is to say, Ulysses reminds us to step outside the daily grind and choose something better, luminous and wondrous.
As Joseph Campbell wrote when Joyce died in 1941, the author "went heroically forth from his native Dublin to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race and toiled thirty seven years to effect a divinely comical transmutation of the entire spectacle of human life."
Ulysses urges us to wake up. Whether we can't get enough of Molly Bloom's famous soliquy, the bawdy humor, the singing words, the connexions to Homer's Odyssey, or the story in its proud place between Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, this is a day to celebrate ourselves as James Joyce saw us.
We say "Yes!" just as Molly said it: "And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
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aw shucks, guys, nobody here reads Joyce?
That's flat discouraging.
TF
What a great spoken word I received from you!
It is simple to see that you are a deep thinker and have spent a lot of time meditating on the changes that are evolving around us. I agree with you on the good and the bad that Bush has done. Your most valid point was that Bin Laden enjoys seeing the loss of freedom in the name of security. I cannot remember any time that the government has made me feel secure. The larger government becomes, the less secure we all all, which you said and with which I agree. I believe we are seeing the not so slow removal of our freedom and these are not freedom bequeathed to us by our government. They come from our creator and no government has the ability to limit them in any way. Let me paste below this the introduction of my next novel, Quality of Life, which is a treatise on the culture of death. I think it will make you wonder what could be next, especially with a President Obama. God bless you and people like you give me hope for the future.
With true admiration,
Steven Clark Bradley
Introduction
How Shall We Then Live?
"After ruling our thoughts and our decisions about life and death
for nearly two thousand years, the traditional Western ethic has collapsed."
On this triumphant note, Professor Peter Singer began his milestone book, Rethinking Life and Death. His book proudly and shamelessly conveys an attitude of revolutionary confidence that brings to mind another atheistic iconoclast, Derek Humphry, when he said, "We are trying to overturn 2,000 years of Christian tradition." Attorney George J. Felos, a nationally recognized expert in right-to-die cases, is best known for the landmark case that helped establish an individual's constitutional right to refuse or have withdrawn unwanted medical treatment. This case known as Guardianship of Browning, and the most widely-known case of Terri Schiavo. Mr. Felos was featured on NBC's Dateline program and was propelled into the upper echelons of the Culture of Death movement. Felos has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including CBS's Early Show, CNN's Burden of Proof, Daybreak and Greenfield at Large, Court TV's Pros and Cons, Inside Edition, The Kathy Fountain Show, and NPR's All Things Considered. He has also presented seminars and debated end-of-life issues for various professional, civic and religious groups, and leads meditation and personal growth workshops.
Felos is the creator of the book, Meditation for Lawyers, the first-of-its-kind instructional course accredited for continuing legal education. His article by the same name has been published and posted in various journals. Felos graduated from Boston University School of Law, has practiced in Pinellas County since 1978, and is a founding member of the National Legal Advisors Committee on Choice in Dying, and served as Board Chair of The Hospice of the Florida Sun coast, the largest non-profit Hospice in the world. Together, those mentioned here represent a mere thimbleful of deceit from with the ocean of depravity in what is the culture of death in America.
If you’ve ever gone into a bank in America, and all of us have, you must have noticed just how quiet and serene that place was? There seems to be a reverence which rivals that found in most churches. The reason for such a display of piety is because in the unassuming financial institutions across America is the country’s fastest, biggest and most powerful religion, the worship of the Almighty Dollar. It can be truly stated that God is now green in America. Because of this devotion to this pious paper and pristine plastic, the nation has been plunged into the abyss of despair for the lives of the unborn, the infirm and the aged. Unborn children do not participate to a thriving economy, so their demise is of no avail. Those of us who cannot work, cannot walk, cannot feed ourselves are unproductive citizens, so we can be discarded as so-much rubbish if they cannot demonstrate some utility to the masses. “I’ll dare those old folks live so long and continue to drain our coffers of the funds that could be better spent studying the s*x lives of the sperm whale!” “Should they not just get out of the way and die so there is a bigger piece of the pie for everyone else?” Does this sound like lunacy? Quite possibly, such words are reminiscent of a page or two out of Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World? In reality, these unspeakable new age “Values” are found throughout the pages of yesterday’s and today’s newspapers, all throughout the country! Fitting examples are inexhaustible all around us. Perverted pedophiles are abducting and raping our children at an all-time alarming rate and they receive sentences that allow them to return back on the streets in incredibly short amounts of time only to again steal our children out of their beds and finally kill them. Yet, if you are the chairman of Enron or WorldCom and you can expect anything between 25 to 200 years. That should not be seen as shocking. After all, the offering up of our unborn and growing children, our disabled and bedridden citizens and the early demise of our elderly pales in comparison to any premeditated sacrilege against the Green God of America.
Is all life worth living? Do the old, unborn, the infirmed or mentally ill have no social value? The proposed and not so secret response from the brokers of the culture of death is a resounding, “NO!” In fact, it is easy to see that the whole catalyst of the death culture is centered around one overriding maxim purporting that population reduction must be accomplished without delay and by any means. Such culture transforming issues as abortion and such organizations as Planned Parenthood have led the way in what is considered to have changed the thinking of Main Street America in what now seems a permanently calloused culture and is considered as groundbreaking and deepening into a six-foot social grave. Though abortion is by far the most widely debated issue facing traditionally valued Americans, there are many movements afoot that are not even so quietly laying their framework of treachery and social engineering that also use the premise of population control as their dictum. The Euthanasia movement is now gaining great expanses of mental ground in the American psyche. The old, infirm and mentally impaired and their “safe”, “dignified” and “self-determined” death is considered one of the biggest pieces of the diabolical picture that is even now being sketched by the workers of woe within the Culture of Death. Matters such as the homosexual movement, assisted suicide, animal rights vs. human Rights, the environments movement and the dangers of socialized medicine in America and the financial constraints such a program will place on the keepers of the very life you cherish seem easy to isolate and identify within the society at large. Yet, it still remains that even the most docile and sanitized amongst us still require ears that hear and eyes that see.
Obviously, the raising of children in families that are so out of the natural order of things i.e. a mommy and a daddy will cause great concern and confusion for children and will cause them great concern about why they are so different from other families. Of course having a mommy and a daddy is preferable to having two mommies or two daddies. The whole issue of gay marriage fits into a nicely bundled, not so hidden, idea that it is necessary to reduce the world's population. Look at the issues that work all together to accomplish this task.
Though I am absolutely for planning a family and for the use of contraception, I would never support the use of abortion as a means of reducing the world's births. Margaret Sangor, the Founder of Planned Parenthood said herself, and I quote, "The most merciful thing a family does for one of its infant children is to kill it." She propagated wiping out the African American race and was a huge supporter of Hitler's views and today, her organization, with these goals, is supported even with federal dollars. George Felos, as pointed out earlier, is the leading lawyer for encouraging assisted suicide and euthanasia of the infirm, the elderly on the basis of some vague standard of the quality of life. Based on such a standard, would it not be logical to simply walk down the streets of our cities and rid the poor homeless of their lives devoid of quality? I know you do not think so, and nor do I, but is that not where such views eventually lead; to a place where no one has the right of self-determined longevity unless they possess some utility other than life itself? One need only us their mind to go beyond what your teachers taught us and let humanity speak to us and follow the statements to their logical end result.
The same package of death is applied to the growing support for gay marriage. There can be no population growth in such "families." This is not a conspiracy theory. Such conspiracy stories are germinated and hatched in the dark and hidden from public view and eventually disseminated piecemeal to the general public. These issues are not secretive in the least. They are out in the open for all to hear and research without the slightest bit of difficulty. I have learned these things as I have researched material in these areas for this novel. I want gays to live, children to grow and the elderly to have a long lives to bless their families. I want marriage to go on and to bless the mothers and fathers as they hold their first child in their arms. I support the spending of as much money as is required to find a cure for aides and to teach gays in America and Europe and heterosexuals in Africa where the disease is far from being mainly a "gay" disease to protect themselves. I want to see the world continue to possess a sanity where it is even worth having a child who can grow into a healthy, strong, values-based person.
Perhaps you feel these words are farfetched, but I have been around the world in 34 countries and I can say of a truth that the family and life itself is at risk by those who no longer hold anything sacred or of lasting value. The story you are about to invest your time in shall speak its mind and challenge you in many different ways concerning the dangers facing us. We fight to preserve a nation from terrorism, but if this is what we are fighting to preserve, would you lift a finger in the defense of an obtuse and reprobate society as that which I have just described?
Therefore, I wish to dedicate this book to all the Theresa Shiavos of America whose unfortunate lives have run headlong into the merciless, unrelenting will of the false god in whom increasing numbers of common people trust in this country today. This is not a book written against the liberals of this country. Nor is it a vindication of the political right, of which I have always considered myself one. In fact, it is an indictment of both sides of the massive green beast that runs roughshod over friend and foe alike. The real purpose of this book is to reveal the true nature of the culture of death that has come to pervade over every major decision we face. I will investigate many of the movements that have made America more the land of the freak and the slave than the free and the brave. It is not written with pride and bitterness. Rather, it has been penned to warn a great nation that a land is nothing without the care and mercy shown to its less fortunate. It is submitted to you to underscore that the measure of a great nation is not in its GNP or its S&P but in its TLC. On the contrary, the words written here have been tempered with fear and trembling for the nation I love. The indisputable facts laid out herein are written in shameful disgust over the failure of the moral base of America to adequately speak out and stand up to be counted. No great nation can long endure under the strains of the obtuse who seek to systematically destroy those whom our nation had so long defended.
America threw its youngest and brightest into WWII to fight an intolerable tyrant and the idea that only the State could decide who was worthy of life. We fought and died to bring Adolph Hitler and his regime to an utter end because of his disrespect and utter disregard for life. Now, today in America we have Judges seated in a leather chair behind some large desk not making choices to help someone live but rather deciding who should die. America stood tall and brave against the forces of Communism because of just such an evil philosophy as this, which religiously and progressively marched its people to a dreaded drum right to the very precipice of death and defeated; a defeat based on our commitment to freedom and life. Yet, today in America, are we really better than those we destroyed? Are we really different? Perhaps the Nazi movement and the Communist ideals are not so much dead as they are renamed and recast in more benign and more beguiling silhouettes; wrapped up in a tattered swath of red white and blue and empowered by a document that no more represents nor resembles the original constitution of the United States of America than did the Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Little Red Book! The diabolical forces at work in America must be rendered powerless. We cannot stop them from speaking out, lest we defeat the very freedom we seek to preserve, but we must always be vigilant and ready to work against them by recognizing the forces at work, and the masters they serve, which make up America’s emerging culture of death, lest none of us have any quality of life. It is imperative that we take another look and reaffirm the words of Philosopher, Francis Schaeffer when he said that there is no life that is not worth living. If we believe that, then we should pose ourselves the same question he asked, how shall we then live?
__________________________Author Steven Clark Bradley
oops, did you mean to put this on the loose ends post?
No matter, thanks for the comment. I appreciate it. It will be interesting--to say the least--to see how the ideas you brought up are discussed and debated during the next phase of the campaign.
TF