irony and the silent hound

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

This is the origin of the phrase, possibly more common in the UK than the US, of "the dog that didn't bark", which I guess is the opposite of "the elephant in the room". It's from the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, and I've been thinking of it after reading about the horriffic deaths of fourteen people when a light aircraft crashed into a cemetery in Butte, Montana on 23rd March, and burst into flames.

It's a story I came to through Don't poke the baby. The plane was carrying two daughters, two sons-in-law and five gandchildren of Dr Irving "Bud" Feldkamp (plus four family friends and the pilot) when, having diverted from its planned course, it crashed into the Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery, killing all on board.

It's the equivalent of a plane crashing into the grounds of Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church in Cambridge, next to the Memorial to the Unborn. Feldkamp, a dentist by trade, is the owner of the Family Planning Associates Medical Group, which is the biggest for-profit abortion provider in the US; the cemetery contains a Tomb of the Unborn.

Cyberspace frequent flyers will be familiar with this, because the news has gone through the blogosphere like John Barr's best beef. Day-trippers may not be quite so familiar, especially if they're from the UK, because the press has been silent about the issue. I found a short mention in the Sunday Express website, but it focussed exclusively on the family losses and didn't mention the abortion angle.

Over here, I don't think it's customary or popular for sections of the press to spend a lot of time thinking about how powerful the abortion industry is in Britain - so thank God for John Smeaton and Radagast and for Cranmer's forays into pro-life comment - but the Yorkshire Post's Bernard Dineen states that "the abortion surge is an inevitable victory for the powerful abortion industry": abortion services will now be advertised on TV. Which will lead not only to an intensification of the massacre of unborn children, but to unanticipated physical and psychological attrition upon mothers for a reason that Family Planning Associates makes no bones about on its website: "Patients are given complete information about what to expect when they leave the facility" (my italics - if you're new to pro-life posts, imagine the information you'd expect to receive from medical personnel beforehand if you were having your tonsils out.)

This crash is so ironic it hurts, but I hope the suffering of all of the plane's passengers was minimal. I also hope that, if the power of the abortion industry here was what caused our presshounds to be the dogs that didn't bark, they will soon recover their voices and that, in the words of the international campaign to heal the wounds abortion causes to women and men, they will be silent no more.