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Saturday, March 26, 2005Mercy Killing?So another appeal has been rejected. And it looks like the process is coming to an end. Those on the one side are rightly horrified by what they perceive as a murder in progress. What about those on the other side? We've heard that Mr. Schiavo is overcome with concern for this matter, is adamant that his wife's desire not to languish on life support be honored. Leave aside his new lady, and his two children with her. Leave aside whether Schiavo should have had anything to do with this since his bolder steps to move on. Terri Schiavo's skin is flaking. Her tongue and eyes are said to be bleeding. Bit by bit, one by one, the systems of her body are failing. A half-dozen well wishers were arrested trying to bring her water. This is mercy? If the advocates of Terri Schiavo's death are true to their stated desires, the lady will die very soon. Will die not in a week from starvation but overnight from a morphine overdose. An unfortunate miscalculation of what was needed to stem pain, whatever it takes to end a truly awful misery. We have heard much about the angst and anguish of those wishing this end. If they have courage, they will now hasten it and stand forthrightly for what they have always stood for - the conviction that since, in their view, Terri Schiavo's life was not worth living, it ought to be taken away. I fear, however, that we will not see such moral courage. To stand alongside Terri while wishing that life may yet be found within her is one route. There is another route, with which I disagree, but which is defensible at least on its own terms, and that is to declare that there is no real life to be found and that the body should finally be separated from a life whose spirit has departed. As I see, it's not my position, but it's internally coherent and represents the logical conclusion of the thinking of those who wanted to pull the feeding tube. Alas, I fear that Terri's defenselessness will be abused to the last. That is, though there are those who deeply wish her death, they will lack the nerve to be its author, allowing a living, breathing human to starve to death for inability to feed herself, so that after watching her waste away they can write upon the death certificate, "natural causes." They say that success has many fathers, failure has none. It is curious, then, that if Schiavo's death is such a needful thing, none of the parties for it have found the nerve to step forward, say so forthrightly and volunteer for explicit parentage of the act to make it so. 
posted by gbarto at 11:03 PM Friday, March 25, 2005Cicero wonders where the "starve Schiavo" folks will be the next time screwed up parents fail to properly feed their children.Whether you believe Ms. Schiavo should live or die, it's pretty hard to seriously argue that starving her to death to avoid directly killing her is particularly humane. An "accidental" morphine overdose would at least give her the relief most pet owners provide their cats and dogs. Watching her waste away for a couple weeks in order to pretend that it's not euthanasia, just allowing a peaceful death, is bunk.
posted by gbarto at 11:09 PM Three sharp bits at LGF today: 1) Blame Bush... looks at how the insurgents in Iraq are doing. Not well. Our media does a lot on the harm the thugs perpetrate in an effort to discourage. But there's a flip side: the insurgents are being worn down by the insistence of the Iraqis and Americans to move forward in spite of their barbaric actions. 2) Jordanian U.N. peacekeepers evacuated from Timor for medical treatment - after attempting sex with goats. But we shouldn't make fun. When I lived in France, I went to McDonald's from time to time. Abroad, we all try from time to time to recapture the feeling of being in the homeland. (Oops! Did I make fun?) The sad side to this story is that these were relatively innocuous types. The real U.N. baddies were going after little kids. 3) Finally, "No room for hatred" looks at what I consider relatively hopeful news from Canada. A child in a Muslim school wrote a bucketful of antiSemitic bile (how's that for mixed metaphor?) and two teachers displayed it as though it were an accomplishment. The hopeful bit? Even though it was Canada, the teachers were given the sack and the principal denounced the antiSemitic shtick for the crass ugliness it was. No word on how soon the Canadian government will seek damages on behalf of... the fired teachers.
posted by gbarto at 10:54 PM Thursday, March 24, 2005Bobby Fischer heads for Iceland. Cicero reports that he "badly needs a haircut and a shave."And the U.S. needs a clue. While charges of tax evasion, etc, are worth exploring, his initial affront was reportedly playing a chess match in Yugoslavia when Americans were forbidden from doing business there. It seems strange to think that a Cold War hero has proven unworthy of the U.S. for the sin of turning a buck. Perhaps there are greater outrages I'm missing. Perhaps, absurdly, the mess that is and always has been Bobby Fischer, warrants serious punishment, not a bemused or bewildered shake of the head. But just in case he's not as awful as the extradition warrants claim, I wish him well in his new digs and hope he enjoys the hot springs.
posted by gbarto at 9:42 PM Wednesday, March 23, 2005Good Slate piece on the problem with the way the "pull the tube" crowd has approached the Schiavo case.The whole thing is starting to sound like a great topic for a bizarre litcrit piece. A hundred years ago, I wrote a (not very good) paper on the power of powerlessness, exploring how major characters in Beckett's Endgame and Marie Redonnet's Tir et Lir used their helplessness and the guilt it evoked in others in order to control the people around them. But there was one point I only now realize I might have but didn't explore: the need of a voice to invoke such powers. For strangely, the too common storyline in the Schiavo case is about how Michael Schiavo is powerless to live his own new life with the living specter of Terri in the background. Unable to speak, Terri's powerlessness, though far greater, is sidelined, turned as much into Michael's problem as it is her own. The person writing the article is living with a degenerative disease that she knows may leave her, too, unable to speak one day. By twist and turn of fate, any of us might find ourselves in such a place. Out of the world of litcrit and in a real world where such things aren't metaphors but facts of life, we would do well to find surer voices for those unable to speak. For we, ourselves, may one day be the ones being spoken for.
posted by gbarto at 11:37 PM Instapundit is writing at about the conservative crackup over at his MSNBC digs. Says Reynolds, the religious wing of the conservative coalition has overplayed its hand, upsetting both federalists and libertarians. All true. But... A fundamental question in here is what it means to be conservative. Inasmuch as the continental liberal/conservative divide has nothing to do with our split, let's refine the question: What defines an American conservative? I think Jonah Goldberg has answered this one fairly well: An American conservative is someone who believes that human nature is human nature, that we are by nature imperfectible if ever striving and that any reasonable and effective social system will take this into account. The conservative coalition may be headed toward a reshuffling. I don't think it's headed for a crackup. Why? Glenn talks a lot about specific people in lofty positions. And he cites his share of conservative commentators. But one feature of the conservative coalition is that there are always new groups spearheading it, joining it and, yes, drifting away from it. The conservative coalition that Reagan led was different from the one that let George H.W. get put out to pasture is different from the one that made Clinton's life miserable is different from the one that has supported Bush. Right now, some libertarians and federalists are being peeled away from the conservative coalition. It's not clear, however, where they're going to go. But at the same time, a lot of college students for whom discussion of Ms. Schiavo's fate will prompt the solitary question, "Who?" are being force-fed political correctness, even as a Clinton cabinet secretary watches his service go down the drain for asking a seemingly reasonable question. The dirty little secret of the right is that for all its efforts, most of its recruiting is done by the left. They used to say that a conservative was a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. The modern conservative, however, is an ordinary fellow, increasingly tolerant and open-minded to boot, who has been condescended to by one too many liberals. The conservative coalition today unites a motley bunch who have one thing in common: they have at least one major belief about the world that the MSM and its buddies in the education establishment look down upon. For libertarians, it's distrust of big government. For the religious, it's faith. For economic conservatives, it's the notion that the private sector ought run the economy, not the government. And so on. The Schiavo case has brought to the surface what separates, rather than uniting, different parties to the conservative coalition. But the MSM, with its scaremongering, and the education establishment, with its postmodern distrust of humble truth and its contradictory arrogant conviction that it alone has the answers, will soon enough have let enough Americans know who their betters are that the conservative movement will pick up new members for those it has lost. Thus will resume the real red-blue battle: between those who want to lead their own lives and those who want to run the lives of others. The Schiavo case stirs passions because it comingles elements of both, depending on the angle from which things are viewed. The Republicans overplayed their hands in suggesting the fed knows best, especially because the federal courts smacked them around over it. But their motivations were sincere enough in taking sides in this fight about who knows what's best for Schiavo - her worn-out husband or her obsessive parents - that the damage to the movement and to the system by which it gains new adherents as old ones move on should be minimal.
posted by gbarto at 10:49 PM Tuesday, March 22, 2005Ryan Sager (via Instapundit) suggests that Schiavo and steroids are on par as acts of Congressional frivolity. The steroids issue is unquestionably frivolous. The Schiavo case, which Sager also suggests is a Constitutional overreach, is another matter. Congressional overreach? Maybe. Frivolity? Certainly not.A Constitutional reading on the Schiavo case is a toughie. But if you're looking at original intent, the Declaration is a good place to start. Its most famous words concern, er, "certain inalienable rights" including life. While Congress is wrong to get involved in about 80% of what it does, the annihilation of a citizen under its jurisdiction would seem to be an issue. And while the right to one's own life may imply the right to choose one's own death, it's hard not to argue in favor of the first when there is doubt since the sustaining of life is readily reversible while its ending is not. Smart alecks have voiced what I would put thusly: Would the left be so ready to take its time if the issue were abortion and the woman were in danger of giving birth? It's been suggested that the right is being hypocritical in raising this point as a smokescreen to suggest that its hypocritical federalizing is okay since the left is possessed of a similarly hypocritical disposition. Two points. One: The right has always celebrated hypocrisy - the hommage vice pays to virtue - as a necessary element in a civlization comprised of fallen souls; the left is insufficiently humorous to appreciate the well-meaning cynicism in this. Two: The situations are not comparable. As I have said, the Congress is seeking to protect one of the three major rights for which we fought in the American Revolution. In a hyperlegalistic society, there is a lot of chitchat about which "i"s are dotted and which "t"s are crossed, but one suspects that the founders' silence on the matter of starving people to death can be found in the single syllable, "duh," which any modern day founder would surely utter if it were suggested that letting the helpless starve to death was wrong and quite possibly murder. Cicero, whom we pointed to last night (this morning?) had it exactly right when he suggested that this whole charade was an effort to euthanize Schiavo without actually using the word or the alternative phrase, mercy killing. But that's what this is about. Not about living wills, intent of patient or anything else. It's about whether you can off people whose lives you find insufficiently worthy of being lived. Mr. Schiavo found himself a judge who agreed that Terri was a drag, what's the point? As I've said before, if he feels this way, we need to find him a judge who will grant him a divorce. In the mean time, Congress was right to break new ground here, for now that we know that people like Mr. Schiavo exist as real human beings, and not just perverse hypotheticals in textbooks, we need to figure out as a society just what to do to insure that the right to life (and its potential corresponding right to death) are applied for the citizen to whom the right belongs, not the psychosocial convenience of related parties. Mr. Schiavo says he's ready to move on. But those protestations ring hollow if he cannot move on with her living but only with her dead. Killing people for the sake of "closure" is a bit much. Offer Schiavo his divorce and send him on his way. If he won't take it, tell him to sit down and shut up. Final thoughts: Nobody hates more than I to suggest that Congress get involved in anything it's not already involved in. But the issues in the Schiavo case go to the heart of a very big issue: What should our nation do to insure the right to life? Once upon a time, killing Blacks (they were called "Negroes" and worse at the time) was no big deal. If they were slaves, it was like putting down a horse. If they were Freemen, well, it's still not like they were white. That was the perverse standard our whole nation honored till the Civil War and that some Southern counties still hadn't worked out by the late 60s. It took action by Congress, with the Civil Rights Acts, to assert that the nation collectively honored fully the rights of Blacks to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With medical technology altering the way that life works, exists and continues, we are at a point today where what constitutes a living human being is in dispute, both in terms of vegetative or terminally ill patients and in terms of fetuses. The states will have to work out many policies, procedures and definitions for what to do in response to the questions raised. At the same time, there does need to be some larger consensus as to how to assure the rights of the citizens of our Consitutional Republic. And to determine where disagreement is or isn't permissible. Mississippi can't decide that Blacks don't, after all, have the same right to life as Whites. It also can't decide that fetuses do have the same right to life as people already breathing on their own. In both cases, the Feds set the rules. But Mississippi can decide that those who commit murder don't have the right to live. And it can put in place rules that implicitly make the lives of Mississippi fetuses more valued than those of, say, New York fetuses. In other words, there is room for both Federal standards and state by state variations within our existing socio-governmental framework. The process underway is doing the same thing that we've done with abortion and with the civil rights of Blacks - it's helping establish a framework for understanding and locating the intersection of the states' rights to self-government and the individual's protections under our national Constitution and government. The Schiavo case set the process in motion and the drama involved has caused heady rhetoric and bold action on all sides. But this is a debate we've needed to have and were going to have sooner or later. Congress and the President jumping in and getting the courts involved was thus necessary and appropriate, horrible as it is to suggest that the nation was for once better off for having Congress in session rather than on recess.
posted by gbarto at 9:52 PM Monday, March 21, 2005Just stumbled on Cicero's response to something I posted about filibusters the other day. While I was writing about filibusters and he responded with thoughts on the courts, I think there's common ground here. Specifically, we both see a democracy that is dubious of letting the people govern. Cicero is right on the money when he notes that the right and left both put up with usurpation of power by the courts in the belief that the court will guard the most hallowed parts of their agendas from the teeming masses. The filibuster, of course, is a species of the same thing. Once, the Senate existed to protect the elites from the hoi polloi who would likely dominate the House. At the time, the Senators were even appointed - by the governors - as a means of assuring that the political classes controlled the upper chamber. The filibuster is a poor attempt at recreating the fussy temperament that earlier Senates are supposed to have had. By making it hard for the Senate to do anything, you make it a brake on the House, in effect.When our Constitution was adopted, insulating the people from power may have made some sense. We knew our rights as Englishman, but not exactly, and we were familiar with the rule of law, but not necessarily fond of it. Creating a wall between the people and power made sense in this context. And it was a fair exchange, since with the Bill of Rights there existed a corresponding wall between power and the people's everyday lives. However, when democracies - and peoples - grow up, there needs to be an evolution in the arrangements. The early American Republic was blissfully inconsequential in many ways. Many people identified with their states, rather than with the emerging nation, and for many people the governor was more important than the President. For better or worse, things have changed with the American Republic over the last two-plus centuries. As a people, we are more mature. And the government that exists and acts in our name is much, much bigger. Many are unhappy about this, but it's their forbearers' fault. Trusting in elites to tinker with stuff in Washington led to the folks in Washington tinkering with more and more while too many took their goodies and pretty much kept their mouth shut. And we are now in the same conundrum as the people in Arab kleptocracies - we have some measure of responsibility for who we let govern us. Thankfully, we have greater say in the matter. But we've got to use it. To use one's say in a democracy, however, doesn't just mean collecting your "I voted" sticker every two years. It requires reading the papers and following the news as carefully as one would follow a stock after having popped in a pretty penny or two. It requires knowing what's up and what you think about it. And it requires communicating to our elected officials just what you, as one who consents to be governed, thinks about how things are being done. Complaining about Congress is fun, but if you want them to actually do something, you've got to make them fearful that they're being watched by the people who get the final say on their employment. If I could count on my boss only coming by every two years and then, on seeing the place in a shambles, saying "Carry on," that wouldn't be much incentive for me to mind the store now, would it? But we do this with our elected officials all the time. And we get the lousy, overreaching, overindulgent government we deserve just as sure as a completely inattentive boss would deserve an underperforming department or bankruptcy for his company. It's kind of funny. Cicero wants to stop protecting the pols from the people. I think we need to stop protecting the people from themselves. For the people, just as surely as the pols, count on the courts, count on filibusters, count on the very intransigeance of government to protect them from the consequences of casting ill-thought ballots for people who talk all the more quickly for not taking the trouble to think things through. We should get the government we deserve, and often do. It is ill-considered, intemperate, more responsive to the last idea voiced than to a deeper understanding of cohering notions of what the major institution in our society ought to be doing. But more often, our marvelous founding fathers and our not so marvelous courts come together to allow us to vote for idiots in the confidence that someone will clean up after us. We vote for lower taxes - and the new senior center. Vote for moral values - and the sanctity of a libertine culture. Vote for a war - and for bringing the troops home. There's a lot of prattle about the parties, about the elites and yada, yada, yada, but we live in a society where you're freer to rant, rave and be a general nuisance about your beliefs than just about anywhere else. If we were willing to take the time to speak out and listen to others, the marketing departments known as our political parties would soon issue product conforming to our tastes. But when we mindlessly buy the spiced up politics up the extremes left and right and count on the courts to water it down, we find ourselves in precisely the soup we're in. We the People deserve to have abortion banned in some states, legal as hell in others. Deserve to not be able to get premium wines if we live in the wrong state. Deserve to be screwed over by police departments more eager to seize potentially drug-related assets and collect red-light fees than to keep our homes and streets safe. We deserve to be forced to make our voices heard, if only so we can find out how ridiculous we are. But we have to take the first steps. We can't expect the elites to take our politics seriously if we don't. So if you're mad at the court today, don't be grateful for it tomorrow. Stick to your guns and demand more democracy if you're prepared to live with the consequences of you and your drinking buddies making policy. Otherwise, give thanks to the courts for saving you the trouble of truly exercising your own citizenship. I think it's clear where I stand on this. Nixon is reported to have said, "The people have spoken, the bastards." I think we'd be better off if we all took a great enough stake in the system to find ourselves muttering the same thing from time to time, rather than drifting through a society where, like the Senate of old, power is invested in those at several removes from the people. On a side note, Cicero makes some good points on the Schiavo case here.
posted by gbarto at 6:16 PM Hmm... Dear eBay user,Key: awkward wrong huh? Sometimes the inability of fraudsters to use grammar and spell-check does more to protect consumers than all the software and legislation in the world. Clicking the link may not mean you deserve to be ripped off, but it indicates a certain predisposition to being taken advantage of. Should the authors of this e-mail desire, I offer English lessons at reasonable rates. Just send your name and banking information and after making a small withdrawal to confirm your identity, I will teach you about the wonders of persuasive English!
posted by gbarto at 3:23 PM Schiavo We are waiting to hear Leon Kass' disapproval of this artificial extension of human life. That said, we'll note that the President is acting within the confines of his "culture of life" agenda, and the consistency is probably a good thing. I have a difficult time with this issue, viewing mental, emotional and intellectual activity as the things that tell you human life is truly going on. But where that activity takes place is a mystery: they can see the spot light up on the MRI when you move your arm, but they have no idea how it happens that you can choose to do so. There is something at the end of the processes of human consciousness that defies location, let alone understanding. In that context, it is hard to know whether a person is truly gone or whether the anima is "merely" disconnected from the nerve centers it governs in the way a paralyzed person is still living even though his nerve centers for muscle control are disconnected from the actual muscles. Where all of Ms. Schiavo's centers to shut down, she would, of course, die. Not even an act of Congress could stop it. But right now her body goes on and it's hard to say to what extent that persistence is related to an underlying soul that, though no longer controlling her higher functions at the physical level, is not ready to give up. * * * The biggest problem I see here is the limbo others are left in by Schiavo's middle state. Her husband plainly is ready to move on. Her parents and siblings just as plainly aren't. And I fear that what happens to the lady in the middle has become to wrapped up in their interpersonal drama. It seems to me that it is time to grant Mr. Schiavo a divorce. Make it on grounds of lack of companionship or whatever. That he wants to let her starve to death indicates this marriage isn't going anyplace. So it would be wise to remove him from a picture he no longer wants to be a part of and let those who wish to remain do so. I hope he's not so ungallant as to wish her death so that he can move on as a widower instead of a divorcé. If so, one hopes he will find a good therapist. The thing is, Mr. Schiavo may well be in agony to see his once vibrant wife like this. If it is too much for him to handle, we should remember our own failings and weaknesses and understand that his is not an easy position. Casting him as an unloving bastard for his handling of a situation that most of us are thankfully spared is unfair. Best to take the charitable view, assume he's a good guy who was subject to too much and try to send him along a new path. In this way, the fate of Ms. Schiavo could cease to be a battle between those who want to pull the plug and those who don't and become an earnest question of how far we ought go in prolonging a life that cannot sustain itself. We don't know how far Schiavo's relatives might have gone had they not been doing so in opposition to her husband. In untangling such matters, we would be clearing the way for focussing less on what the two parties most wrapped up in Schiavo need for themselves and shifting the focus where it belongs: whether we harm or serve Schiavo in maintaining her life in the manner we now are.
posted by gbarto at 12:44 AM |
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