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A request to readers
Please do not send new, interesting, informative, or revelatory articles for me to read. It’s bothersome that people who mean me well so misunderstand my situation. I am not capable of absorbing and assimilating new ideas. I am in the process of summing up and finishing up my life work. not embarking on new work. Also please do not start arguments with me, challenging articles and argments I’ve posted. If you want to debate against my positions, debate them elsewhere, not with me. It’s appalling that people do not understand—even after I’ve explicitly explained this to them myself—that in my sick and weakened state defending my ideas from aggressive challenges is the last thing I want to do or am able to do. There’s a major element of self-absorption in the comments of some people, a blind obsession with what they want to say, and an indifference to the well-being of others, like the anti-Semite who wrote to me expressing joy over my move toward the Catholic Church and then immediately launched into an exterminationist anti-Semitic diatribe. There is a blindness to me as a person and my limitations and disabilities at this point. The most twisted man in America, Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, sent me a long e-mail this morning in which he started by highly praising my writing and analytical abilities, which he’s often done, and then segued into a condemnation of me as an extreme Zionist and racial “bigot” who indulges in “rants” about “savages.” That’s what this lost, Israel-obsessed traitor to conservatism who has voted for Obama twice yet still calls himself a conservative writes to a very sick man. Even though he already wrote a sub-moronic attack on me in TAC last month, he’s still got to get in one last lick against me before I die. Also my condition has become substantially worse for a few days at least. What I call “the unbearable pain”—which almost killed me in late January / early February until my pain management specialist gave me a celiac nerve plexus block which succcessfully removed the pain—has returned. She had told me the nerve block’s effects would last from a few weeks to a few months, and then wear off, and at that time I could have the procedure repeated. It has worn off, and I am in unbearable pain (not yet 100 percent of the original, but maybe 60 percent, and that’s bad enough), but the soonest the nerve block can be scheduled is Wednesday. So imagine my feelings when, rolling in a fiery gulf of pain, I received a supposedly friendly e-mail from Scott McConnell calling me a ranting bigot, and another e-mail from someone named Kent Peterson saying, “Given your present situation, do you have any regrets?” I sent him an Anglo-Saxon two-word reply, beginning with the letter “F” and closing with the letter “u.” He wrote back that my reply confirmed for him the evil of the Jews. I didn’t know that our exchange had to do with Jews. I interpreted his taunting “regrets” question as meaning, “Now that you are approaching death, do you have regrets for your racial bigotry?”
So there are two types of e-mail correspondents I’ve described in this entry: those who do have good will but are terribly self-absorbed and uncomprehending of other people and send me e-mails that are a bother to me; and those who have conscious malevolence toward me. To the latter I don’t make requests. I tell them to go to hell.
I enjoyed very much seeing the photos that you posted, taken by Mr. Ericson. I have never met you personally and never will, but somehow the photos made you seem more real and human to me, even when showing (or perhaps because of that) some of the effects of the debilitating disease and treatment. Also, the photos made me realize that you really are in no position to waste your precious time answering self-absorbed emails such as mine (so again I am sorry for what I wrote the other time).LA writes:
Here is a perfectly well meant letter of the kind that I don’t need and want:Thomas L. writes:
In some of your older posts I saw that you had written that Catholics must believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) on pain of sin. In my own, incomplete journey towards the Church my understanding is that is not the case for all articles of the CCC. The CCC has no greater authority than the individual Church documents that comprise its sources, and those documents vary widely in their levels of authority.LA replies:
Yes, I’m sure that the priest who is helping me would also have pointed that out. March 12 Here’s an example of a friendly, supportive, highly intelligent VFR commenter who through an excess of solicitude for me combined with a lamentable incomprehension of my condition causes me unnecessary annoyance and bother. He wrote this morning:
Things seem to have deteriorated, and so I wish you nothing but the best in your final hours. I do hope you get to receive the sacraments, they are such a tremendous blessing. I will remember you in my prayers.I replied:
On what do you base the conclusion that I am deteriorating and that I am in my final hours?He replied:
Oh, just your last post referring to the fact that you are now compiling your life’s work and are unable to absorb new ideas. Forgive me if I presume too much, but it seemed as if you were politely asking not to be bothered in your present condition. I took that as an indication that things were not well with you.I replied:
For heaven’s sake, for weeks now I’ve been repeatedly speaking of my final projects that I urgently need to complete before the end. Not only that, but since I first announced in June 2011 that I have cancer I have repeatedly explained that I have the ability to write short blog entries but not to write long articles and not to absorb complicated new information. So there was nothing new about what I said most recently in this thread, and no reason for you to assume that I am in my final hours. How would you feel if you were struggling with a grave disease and still functioning well despite the disease and someone wrote to you out of the blue and told you that you were in your final hours? Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2013 08:29 PM | Send Email entry |