He Gave His Life For You

A touching paen to a remarkable man from his devoted son:

Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor will receive a posthumous Ph.D. today in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle.

My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened.

Indeed, Lt. Col. O'Connor seemed the epitome of the warrior as the complete man:

In 1958, my dad was sent to Penn to study English in preparation for teaching at West Point. In his year at Penn, the young officer set aside the Cold War for Chaucer and refined his taste for poetry and prose.

After that teaching assignment and a year in Korea, my dad returned to Penn - living in Willingboro with Betsy and the six kids, teaching at Temple, and plodding through Ph.D. course work and research.

He studied German vocabulary flash cards late into the night, long after reading Dickens to us on the living room couch. My mother typed up his papers on a battered Smith-Corona.

He took some of the boys on summer bivouac with ROTC troops to Indiantown Gap. Quoting T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," he would intone, "This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends," as we hand-loaded rounds into mortar tubes and watched them arc into the summer sky.

An earnest regard for the arts and a grounded sense of history marked this man:

By the time ground troops were committed to Vietnam, my father's dissertation on "The Siege of Constantinople," a Henry Nevil Payne allegory of intrigue in the quasi-Catholic court of Charles II, was near completion. At its heart, the heroic tragedy was about doomed royal brothers fending off political and religious enemies. The parallel between 15th-century Byzantium and 17th-century England also eerily mirrored developments in Vietnam, where, as my father began his thesis, a Catholic regime run by brothers faced a Buddhist insurgency and treachery in the ranks.

He fell in battle, but his keen intellect would not be forgotten:

The dissertation sat unread in a battered briefcase for more than 40 years, set aside like so much of the past. Disinterred at last, it was sent to Penn, where the graduate English faculty recommended that the warrior be crowned a scholar.

No degree can change the lost years of a father's absence. But in literature, as in life, it can bring an unfinished story to a graceful conclusion. Ask Dr. O'Connor as he passes by in the Penn procession - the ghost with a sheepskin scroll and an M-16.

This man had a large and thriving family, a fertile mind valued by an Ivy League university and an endlessly bright future and he sacrificed it all for his country. We must always remember men like Dr. O'Connor as we face this generation's battle to preserve our freedom, which is threatened from forces within our very gates.

A heartfelt thank you to son O'Connor for reminding us of the Price of Liberty.

The West Chose Wrong

Esoteric aside

A few more thoughts on Pascal and our dying West...

The highlight of my university days was European Intellectual History class. Of the dozen or so philosophers and scientists we read up on during the course of the semester, three stood out and the reactions each induced in me remain stark in my memory to this day:

Descartes - Ice-cold robot. Instinctively hated him with a passion. Made a god of Reason and Science.

Voltaire - Rutting animal, bitchy little critic. If he were alive today he'd be one of those fruity guys on TMZ.

Pascal - Sticks of dynamite going off in my brain! Heart and soul, fire, a man who adamantly refused to hide from the unpleasant facts about the human condition.

He's painted as this ultra-pessimist but I immediately embraced the warmth of his convictions. A hard truth is a million times more enjoyable to ponder than an effete, self-indulgent lie or some damn "I think therefore I am" machine-like BS.

Pascal was so much more brilliant and so much more human than anyone else we learned about in that class. And it wasn't even close.

Unfortunately, the world went in the direction of the robots and the perverts.

Gee, it's all turned out so well, hasn't it?

Thoughts Inspired By Our First Jesuit Pope

Esoteric ramblings

The Jesuits were the intellectual vanguard of the Church at the time after the Reformation. They covered themselves in glory for centuries fighting the Protestant heretics and converting the savages of the New World, especially in South America. If you want to read about true heroism read about the English Jesuits who volunteered to leave the safe harbor of Continental Europe and go back to Protestant Elizabethan England and were tortured horribly and executed for being Catholic priests:

Then they produced a warrant for putting me to torture. They had it ready by them and handed it to me to read. (In this prison a special warrant is required for torture.) 

I saw that the warrant was properly prepared and signed, and then I answered, 'With God's help I shall never do anything that is unjust or act against my conscience or the Catholic faith. You have me in your power. You can do with me what God allows you to do - more you cannot do.'

The confidence that comes with a reply like that -- totally missing in the Western man of today. All gone.

Being intellectuals, however, they fell for the Modernist heresy at the turn of the 20th century more than any other Catholic order and went from being the Pope's most trusted footsoldiers to being a nest of revolutionary subversives.

All that orthodox Catholics despise they pushed in the Church and society throughout the 20th century. Multiculturalism, feminism, homosexuality, communism, contraception and abortion, the whole rotten ball of wax. The decline of the major U.S. Catholic colleges into complete apostasy is largely their doing.

The brilliant French philosopher Blaise Pascal had their number as far back as the 17th century. Even when they were still very good Catholics, their belief in and promotion of casuistry was seen by Pascal as a destructive system of thought that would eventually end in laxity and corruption. 

Casuistry is basically situation ethics, I don't care how many theologians say it isn't, that is exactly what it is. The Jesuits would teach that you could commit an evil to serve a greater good as long as you didn't intend to commit the evil you knew you were committing. They didn't say it that way but that is exactly what they stood for. It's a very important theological point that has been lost in the honorless world we inhabit today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry

Pascal properly foresaw that someone who could lie to promote a greater good AND convince himself he wasn't really lying at all was capable of doing and justifying any kind of behavior, including grave evil.

Thus, for Pascal, and I agree with him, the betrayal of the Jesuit order centuries later was preordained by their lax moral code.