I have just read of a chant which, I gather, is sweeping or has swept through the Insurrectionary Colonies. And, in my characteristically broad-minded way, I have even watched and listened to the video clip!!
We shall fight! We shall win!
Put the foetus in the bin!
I suppose we should analyse this metrically as a double cretic followed by ... what? A septenarius? A trochaic dimeter catalectic? And the two lines are neatly linked by a rhyme which seals the conceptual unity of the entire chant-text.
We must never resist innovation; and I think that this metrical novelty has a really elegant force to it. I know you will not disagree with me.
But incessantly repeated, without any variatio, the chant might just possibly ... d'you think? ... come to seem just the teensy weensiest bit unsophisticated, except to very simple and very young female minds*. One could experiment; perhaps following Assertion with Question, by treating it as part of a responsive on-going dialogue. For example, the next couplet could be:
Shall you win? Who can tell?
Will Pelosi go to Hell?
In a classical Greek Orchestra the chorus, well rehearsed, would sway this way and then that, as antistrophe followed strophe. Divided into two responsive halves, one half of the chorus could wear Pelosimasks, the other Trumpmasks. I'm not sure what the comedy would be called.
I think we did lose a little something when the Spirit of Menander displaced the Spirit of Aristophanes. Two millennia from now, who will still be watching old episodes of Cheers?
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* Here, I firmly praetereo, as Tully and I always invariably do, the temptation to repeat a phrase of C S Lewis, "Feminine to the point of imbecillity". Even Lewis cautiously distanced himself from these words ... perhaps politically incorrect even in the 1940s ... by assigning them to the voice of Lord Feverstone (commenting on Major Hardcastle's professional assistants), rather than to the vox propria narrantis. I look to readers to keep this secret. We wouldn't want the vibrant young ladies of Cancel Culture to attack CSL.
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Not only in the insurrection art colonies of the United States. I have seen footage of its being not chanted but screeched at the nave door of St Mary's cathedral in Sydney (the see of that distinguished bioethicist Archbishop Fisher). Perhaps we should propagate it: it displays to the world the revolting sub- human nihilism of those who espouse it.
Apparently this occurred in Sydney Australia which I thought was one of the non-insurrectionary colonies which technically still remains part of the Commonwealth. Anyhow, this chanting was held on a day dedicated to those afflicted with Down's Syndrome. Apparently this is not one of the favored minority groups but one which the "pro choicers" feel should not be allowed to live.
One of my worst fears is after an unprovided death I should end up in Hell in an eternal poker game along with Pelosi, Hitler, and Stalin. I suppose you could call this a kind of imperfect contrition?
This week in Canadian Parliament, a Conservative backbencher introduced a bill that would make sex selective abortions illegal. The Conservative leader, one Erin O'Toole, villified this bill as anti-women and encouraged all to oppose it.
Not a word that it was anti-fetus as that is no longer allowed to invoke reason.
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