Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds comes to mind. In that hypnotically disturbing vision, the birds are mostly scavenging predators, crows and seagulls feeding upon the already dead, victims of the crowds crushing themselves to death in the panic.

With Hitchcock’s film in mind, imagine The Birds recast! Replaced by condors and vultures, large flying murderers that prey upon the very young and the very old, swooping down on them with abortion and euthanasia lodged in their beaks!

Not only that, they recruit our young into their ranks by making college not only obligatory but the very place in which these predators can brainwash their students into thinking as they do, into becoming condors of the intellect, flying flotillas of death and fetal tissue research. Full cadavers are welcome too.

Oh, they teach our young that "Population Control Policy" is the only acceptable solution to crime, poverty and hunger. The statistics prove that! Any half-decent member of the intelligentsia knows that. Those who disagree, such as Michael Moriarty, that "posturing artist" who thinks he’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan, deserve public opprobrium!

In the past 12 years, since leaving the TV series Law and Order, as well as my marriage, my city and my country, I’ve felt more like a "has-been" statue in the park, but a statue nonetheless. The statues in The Birds aren’t the least bit bothered by crows and seagulls. Oh, we get shit on by them, but that’s about all. The same goes for these condors of the Third Millennium. All they can really do is shit on me.

I doubt if my writings will propel me to the White House. Such a thing has never been done. Norman Mailer thought his novels, New Journalism and well-enunciated speeches could make him Mayor of New York, but no such luck for "posturing artists," as Michael Burleigh describes them in his book Earthly Powers.

If you resign yourself to letting a run for the Presidency be its own reward, and you watch, as a statue does, the old being divided from the young, it’s saddening, to say the least. Even Burleigh admits the price we’ve paid for "predatory intellects." He’s a Brit and hardly vulnerable to The Star Spangled Banner but nonetheless, there’s something majorly wrong here.

As I’ve reminded my readers repeatedly, the Roe v. Wade decision taken by the United States Supreme Court in 1973 virtually immolated our Declaration of Independence, which should now be called the Declaration of Dependence upon Government:

Condors, with the body and soul of Dr. Strangelove!

As I’ve titled the next few editorials The Italian Quartet, I must share with you the great anticipation I feel as I look forward to seeing Florence in a few days. You want statues? It was there, a year ago, I felt intimations of immortality. That I sit on my ass and think up editorials all day is a start. I am about to view the Biancone, as the Florentines affectionately call the statue of Neptune in the Piazza della Signore, and the immortal David of Michelangelo. There’s a pair of bird benches! They’ve survived and so will I… for the next couple of decades… and indeed, if I do make it to the Oval Office, I will commission a small sitting statue of me, nothing quite as grand as the Lincoln Memorial, but an American version of Rodin’s The Thinker.