Ditch Doc

I’ve never understood why the heroes of sexual licence are so blind to its essential tendency to suicide. Ideas are passed on in the home. Contraception, abortion and homosexual acts drastically limit the number of children raised in homes where these things are accepted. Stable, sexually continent couples have more children every year, and then their children have more children. Arithmetic has no moral concerns, and condemns the hedonistic view without pausing to consider its truth or falsehood. Its champions should not abandon it for this reason, but they should stop writing paeans to the new world order and study the age-old art of the lament for a doomed glory. They sing like Romans marching through the gates of Carthage, the defenders either in hiding or already atop the pyre. But were they only to look up, they would recognize those walls for the cliffs of Thermopylae, and the men before them for the band of Leonidas. In a thousand years, they will be remembered not as the conquering army of Scipio, but the routed horde of Xerxes, who dared to flog the Hellespont.

It seems as though every Remembrance Day someone trots out the little trope that we remember our fathers’ sacrifices so that we won’t have to repeat them. I’m surprised it took me so long to realize the obvious error of this sentiment. We remember their sacrifices first of all to pray for their eternal rest, and second to honour those who remain. Of course these acts should affect our own disposition as well, the goal being to give us courage to follow in their footsteps. The only certain thing about freedom is that it will always require the blood of the free. Remembrance Day reminds us to offer it. When we finally decide “never again,” and act on it, we will have decided to live as slaves.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them, lest we forget.

The poor workman blames his tools, and so, I suppose, the good one doesn’t. But it’s not because he does a good job in spite of bad tools. It’s because he buys good tools.

There’s nothing more frustrating than an argument with a relativist. It’s kind of like playing chess like this:

“Aha! Mate in three moves.”
“Uh, not if I don’t move any of my pieces. Oh well, guess it’s another stalemate.”
“That’s not a stalemate, it’s…”
“Yeah, well that’s your opinion.”

The prayer service for those who donated their bodies to the anatomy department this year was held yesterday. All the donors’ names were read, and every few names a student presented a brief meditation. Here was mine:

“Perhaps it is fitting that every aspiring doctor, at the beginning of his career, is forced to contemplate its end. On the day we received our white coats, we pledged our lives to medicine, to the maintenance and preservation of human health. It was a heady day. Not long after, in the anatomy laboratory, we looked down at the most unsettling basic fact of medicine: no matter how cleverly we outwit death, or how long we hide our patients from his gaze, though we might snatch a thousand years out of his hands, all of our patients, and all of us, will end in the grave. Faced with death, we are forced to ask: what does life mean?

“These donors offer us an answer. This man on the table in front of me, whose name I do not know, loved his neighbours, loved me, so much that he submitted his body to the ignominy of my scalpel, so that I might learn from him how to treat my patients. His sacrifice demands another. To be loyal to this man’s gift, I must take his example and give my own life to those I treat.

“But what can I do for him? Is there anything we can do for those who have gone before? Our very presence at this prayer service proclaims our confident hope that there is. Though his body has been of use to me, I can be of use to his soul. Wherever I go in my medical career, I will keep his memory with me and pray that God might give him what medicine could not: life everlasting. Goodnight, sweet prince, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, and until we meet again, may you enjoy the reward of your generosity. You are in my prayers.”

Figure this one out for me:

A) Religious conservatives subscribe to the belief that there is an Almighty ruler of creation, but do not expect him to arrange a perfect state of political affairs before politics are permanently dissolved in the consummation of the ages.

B) Moral liberals tend to believe that the world operates according to some vague mixture of complete personal autonomy and the whims of Darwinian chance, but speak as though these forces were leading us into the age of universal peace and agreement. At least if we could get rid of those damn conservatives.

If you’re looking for a scathing condemnation of hypocrisy, keep looking. What the world needs now is more hypocrisy. It used to be that when you were a bad man, you paid lip-service to the virtues of the good man. Perhaps you even pretended to have them. This made you a hypocrite. Now, all the best bad men wear their badness on their sleeves and scream it from the rooftops. These aren’t hypocrites but men of integrity, with an honest, consistent dedication to sin. By word and example, they destroy even the idea of the good man. Give me a hypocrite any day.

I hope I’m being simplistic here, but why, when Canadian doctors make such a phenomenal profit from healthcare, do so many of them react so negatively to the idea of a medical system that generates profit? Just a question.

OK, girls, here’s the deal. I doubt that King Arthur opened many doors for himself. But it wasn’t because anyone thought he couldn’t. It was because his subjects didn’t think such a glorious hero of battle should have to take care of such a mundane consideration as a door. It breaks our hearts that you should think we open doors to objectify you or because we think you’re weak. When a man opens a door for you, take it as it’s probably meant: as a gesture of homage to a being just a little elevated above his own dusty sphere.

I didn’t follow the trial closely enough to have a very well formed opinion of Conrad’s guilt or innocence. I did follow it closely enough to get an idea what I thought of the standard news coverage of it, and whatever you may say about the verdict, you have to admit that there’s something deeply unsettling about a legion of reporters making fun of a former lord of their profession for having too big a vocabulary.