The silent treatment
By Michael Moriarty
web posted December 6, 2010
I had planned for this editorial to write about Glenn Beck's relative silence regarding his personal positions on Roe v Wade and legalized abortion. Such questions of mine are seconded by a Mr. P.J. Gildernew's exclamatory enquiry on the blog, ResistNet.com which includes these words:
"Isn't it interesting how people like Glenn Beck say they're conservative and Godly People but DO NOT want to engage in a debate about abortion?!? Glenn did a big special on how communist regimes would commit genocide against their own countrymen, I ask how is abortion any different!!!???" (Punctuation marks his, not mine)
Beck's highlighting of the pro-life Alveda King at his big Washington Mall rally and this clip of her speech seems incomplete. At no time in this clip does she, while speaking of America's "moral poverty", mention Roe v Wade or her well-known opposition to abortion.
Was she somehow advised to not bring up abortion as part of "America's moral poverty?"
Let's hope that this clip is not a record of her entire speech that day. Otherwise, such an "editorial" decision, in light of her well-know reputation as a pro-life advocate, reflects badly on both Glenn Beck and Alveda King.
What are Glenn Beck's own, real feelings about abortion?
I can't believe one of the most controversial figures of American history is afraid of the known controversies over abortion.
Any discussion or objection to it might inspire violence? Is that why?
So again, a reliance upon silence. Silence as a strategy for the most un-silent man in television history?
Glenn Beck is a self-avowed Libertarian Mormon or Mormon Libertarian. I'm not sure in which order I should put that.
Libertarianism accepts a "woman's right to choose". However, Mormons disavow abortion.
Recently Glenn Beck explored the horrors of the Roman Empire and its Coliseum, tossing Christians to the lions. Legalized murder tosses children to the abortionist's table and into death by RU-486. RU-486 is a drinker's double entendre meaning "Are you for 86?" 86 is bar code for the "end" of some customer's night on a barstool.
As the name of an abortion pill? In general it means "Are you for death?"
"Death as a solution for the problems and challenges of life?"
In other words, Death Panels or a kind of legalized Murder Inc. as a solution to such Progressive Problems as overpopulation, healthcare for the elderly and the general inconveniences that inspire many men and women to applaud Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics.
Recent events in my life, however, have expanded Glenn Beck's relative silence over abortion into these brief meditations on the use of silence by humans in general.
My Lord used silence as a defense before the Pharisees. It may have contributed to his crucifixion but I doubt it. I believe the minds of the Pharisees had already been made up.
"Anything you say can and will be used against you!"
The Miranda warning even then.
Of course, there is the diabolically infectious silence during the Third Reich and Hitler's terrorist's reign over Europe.
"They came for the Jews and I said nothing ... etcetera … etcetera …"
Generally silence is not a good thing for anyone, including he or she who remains silent.
It is particularly disturbing when a lawyer I hired to represent my lady and I in an application for her residency rights in Canada went silent. For almost a week now, our lawyer has not responded to either phone calls nor an e-mail, except for his secretary telling us that he has "not been in yet".
"Is he well", we ask.
"Yes," she says with quivering certainty.
This indeed could be a generally accepted "cover" for illness.
Then I would suggest using the universal law that "honesty always triumphs over cover-ups" (Just ask the Nixon family) even if it means the polite cover-up about our universally human bouts with illness.
"He hasn't been feeling well", would be the more than acceptable response.
"Have him call me," I would say, "when he's feeling better. There is no hurry."
And there is no hurry. Our application to the Canadian immigration has been with that department for over a year and my lady and I have seven months before her recent visa expires. My own residency status took two and a half years to be approved. Apparently that is normal.
So, as I say, there is no hurry. But no response at all from our lawyer for a week?
And if my lawyer really is, as his secretary indicates, well enough to work, what are we to think? Is this anyway to run a business or treat anyone for that matter?
The "silence" is a precarious solution for any situation, no matter how difficult.
Of course, there must be a pause to think in many cases, but it takes a week to even mumble "Hello"?!
Hiring a lawyer is actually a "kind of" silence, insofar as The Law and what it has become, makes "attorney pro se" a foolish attorney's choice of a foolish client.
Silence, however, is no one's attorney. It is silence.
"Judge not, lest ye be judged".
Of course, "lest" is an evasion.
We are always judged, all of us, 24 hours a day.
True love, however, certainly of Christ's variety, forgives almost all human error.
Of course, there is the "tough love" of Alcoholics Anonymous, but even then it is better for the drunk to show up to AA meetings, talk and listen, rather than to go off in silence and sit in a drunken pout.
So is my lawyer sick, or in a pout, hoping I'll find another lawyer, or just like my father, the Detroit surgeon who used The Silent Treatment as his knee-jerk cudgel?
These professionals, lawyers and doctors … hmmm … many of whom – the lawyers I mean – become politicians, having learned the razzle-dazzle of rhetorical obfuscation.
The more they talk, the less we know.
At the risk of repeating something that many of my readers might already know, my father used The Silent Treatment in his first marriage to my mother and not only helped drive her to drink but, in his few moments of eloquence, persuaded her to have not one but two abortions.
Possibly "damned if he does and damned if he doesn't", he died a bitter, fat old misanthrope. Thank God his second wife was Italian and wouldn't endure The Silent Treatment anymore.
"George," said my stepmother to my father, "If you pull The Silent Treatment on me one more time, that will be the last time you see me."
In my father's case, that threat obviously meant something. To my lawyer, however, perhaps a threat like that is exactly what he's hoping for. You know the famous saying about "answered prayers"? If you don't know it, then some of your stupidest prayers have yet to be answered.
Actually, and I'm happy to say it, this is the first lawyer I've hired since I left New York City fifteen years ago.
In one episode of the television series Law and Order, I, as Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone, became my own attorney in a battle with an ex-convict who had become his own attorney pro se.
Although brilliant as an enfant terrible, the criminal-turned-attorney, in order to sue me, had obviously turned reality upside down for all of his life.
I firmly believed the spoiled-brat, Harvard Law graduate, Barack Obama, has reality entirely upside down and he and his wife's pro-abortion history is the clear evidence of that. Of course, we all know that the Clintons are guilty of the same delusions and they both occupied the White House for eight years.
Does that worldly success of theirs mean they're right and I'm wrong?
Does that mean Mao Zedong's indisputably triumphant legend in Communist China is evidence that he was right, and American, pro-life patriots are wrong?
Apparently to the Obama Nation the answer is "Yes!"
Apparently to the neo-Soviet ally of Red China, Vladimir Putin, the answer is also "Yes!"
It would have been nice to give the entire, and very Marxist, New World Order Progressive Movement my Moriarty version of The Silent Treatment but I can't. If only for one reason: I don't wish to follow in the footsteps of my profoundly self-deluded and miserably deceased father.
Because his use of The Silent Treatment, he died an already walking dead man.
I believe the entire New World Order Movement, from neo-Soviet Russia to the European Union and now the Obama Nation, is a massive ship of fools, of walking dead men and women.
As I've said many times before, legalized abortion will inevitably end up a Pied Piper's dance to unavoidable suicide. To kill one's own children is eventually to kill one's self.
As for The Silent Treatment, who or what uses it most?
Zombies. 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.