What You Wished For
The Carolina win over Villanova
By Adam Lucas
March 26, 2005
SYRACUSE--It is supposed to be fun.
That's what you keep reminding yourself. This is what we waited for during those dark years, during 2002 and 2003 when we had to watch everyone else on television in March. We wanted these games, these down-to-the-wire, last-possession-wins-it, cheerleaders crying and bench players locking arms CBS specials. We missed it. We wanted to be a part of it.
Didn't we?
We did.
The score was 67-66 but you'll forget that almost immediately. A few years from now you'll be sitting around with your buddies and someone will bring up the Villanova game in 2005 and everyone will say, "Aw, man, the Raymond foul out game!"
You'll laugh a little, which is easier to do because the Tar Heels had the 67 and not the 66. And then you'll try to remember who it was that filled in so capably at point guard.
Keep it in mind: it was Melvin Scott. Senior Melvin Scott. Senior Melvin Scott who has quietly endured watching his minutes dwindle this season, senior Melvin Scott who instead of pouting has spent endless nights in the Smith Center hoisting shot after shot to try and stay in rhythm for when the Heels needed him.
Friday night, the Heels needed him.
Raymond Felton fouled out with 2:11 remaining. It was 64-56. How long can two minutes be? Sure, it would be nice for Felton to be out there at the end, but this isn't a crisis.
Is it?
Roy Williams grabbed Scott on his way to the scorer's table. "Come on," he said. "We need you. We need you to be big-time."
Melvin Scott has never had any doubts about being big-time. When he was struggling with his shot, he knew he was big-time. When he was losing his starting position to Jackie Manuel, he knew he was big-time. Even way back when he was a freshman and having to learn the point guard position after spending most of his life as a shooting guard, he knew he was big-time.
You can be forgiven, though, if you didn't know it. Because then it was melting down to 64-61 with 40 seconds left and all of a sudden this is feeling a little uncomfortable.
Jawad Williams knows how you felt.
"I felt like it was never going to end," he said. "Those last 40 seconds dragged out forever. There was always something, a time out, a foul, any kind of call."
There was a Randy Foye free throw that cut it to 64-62 and then there was Scott walking to the free throw line.
Remember, you wanted this situation. Up two points, 28.9 seconds, the Tar Heels playing for a slot in the final eight. It was the time in the game, as a partisan Big East crowd began to roar, when Dean Smith might have looked at his troops and said, "Aren't you glad we're in our position instead of theirs?"
Be honest: you were a little nervous when you saw it was Scott who was going to take the free throws. Even though a few years from now you will say, "Aw, man, Melvin was money in that game," at the moment he toed the line you were nervous.
Jawad Williams wasn't nervous. The senior leaned over to Felton on the Carolina bench and made a prediction.
"He's going to knock them down. Don't worry about it. Melvin's going to make them."
That is what a teammate knows, a teammate who has spent long nights in the Smith Center after everyone else has gone home. When Williams lost his shooting stroke last year, it was Scott who fed him pass after pass late at night. Later in the year when the same slump hit Scott, it was Williams who fed him pass after pass. So the seniors know each other, know without even speaking to each other.
"Everyone kept telling me, `You're fine, you're fine,'" Scott said with that trademark grin. "And I just wanted to tell them, `I know.'"
"When Melvin is relaxed and laughing, he always knocks the shots down," his senior classmate said.
Which is what he did, giving Carolina a 66-62 lead. It wasn't over until Kyle Lowry took his last-second 60-foot heave at the basket, a ball that, for that one second, with the clock already showing 0.00, looked like it might have a chance.
"I watched that shot all the way," Jawad Williams said. "I thought it might be the kind of shot that would hit the backboard and go in."
It did feel like that kind of game. It felt heart-wrenching and gut-dropping and hair-pulling and jubilation-shouting and dream-crushing and, finally, after all 40 minutes had been played, it felt something else, which is how you'll remember it a few years from now.
It felt good. And it felt like Carolina basketball.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Friday, March 25, 2005
Whose Life Is Worth Living?
By Orson Scott Card
It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book.
“Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed.
They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars.
I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not been invited to such gatherings since.
It’s so easy to decide that someone else’s life is not worth living. Lacking something that we regard as essential, we cannot fathom how they get through a day.
The nattering of intellectuals about the valuelessness of the “unexamined life” might be taken as hyperbole, if it weren’t for the fact that it is precisely our intellectual elite that has decided to set itself up as champions of the right to murder people “for their own good.”
*
We saw how intellectuals treat the issue in this year’s Oscar-winning deathwish movie, Million Dollar Baby. By now everyone knows that at the end, Hilary Swank lies in a bed, paralyzed from the neck down. Because of bedsores, one leg is amputated.
So, in despair, she begs Clint Eastwood to kill her.
And when he won’t, she tries to kill herself by biting off her own tongue.
At last he succumbs, becomes a murderer for her sake, and walks away as the audience weeps at the nobility of his sacrifice.
Sacrifice?
Hardly. Just think — now he won’t have to visit her every day in the hospital. No more time spent trying to talk her into staying alive.
Let’s see ...
What was her character suffering that Christopher Reeve didn’t suffer?
How dare I make such a comparison! Christopher Reeve didn’t ask people to kill him. He was a different person and made a different choice!
No, he wasn’t merely a different person.
The difference is that he was a person, and she wasn't.
Hillary Swank’s character was made up. She did what the author decided she should do. So after we see her grimly determined to overcome all obstacles, unwilling to be discouraged, adapting to whatever circumstances try to thwart her, suddenly the author decides that this time she’ll give up and start demanding that the people who love her most surrender their sense of decency and goodness in order to indulge her despair.
Do you think Christopher Reeve didn’t feel despair? He said so, in various interviews; there were even times he wished he were dead; but the love and encouragement of his family and friends gave him new purpose.
*
Plus, there’s that little thing called “adaptation.”
People get used to things.
In one experiment, people were fitted with lenses that turned everything upside down while shutting out any view of the right-side-up world.
In a surprisingly short time, their brains did a flip-flop and turned the upside-down-image right side up again.
In concentration camps, some people do indeed despair. It’s a well-known phenomenon: They turn their faces to the wall and take no interest in the world around them until they die — often very quickly.
Unloved, untouched babies also wither, losing brain function, becoming engulfed by lethargy, and sometimes simply dying.
But most people, given anything to hold on to, adapt and try. They find new purpose. They find work-arounds.
The quadriplegics who learn to paint with a brush held between their teeth.
Helen Keller.
Stephen Hawking.
I suppose, though, that we should have simply killed them as soon as the incurability of their problems became obvious. After all, what “quality of life” could they possibly have?
*
People make their own quality of life. There are people who are desperately unhappy in the midst of freedom and plenty, and people who are quite cheerful despite devastating deprivation and loss.
My wife was once at a gathering of church women, when one of them started complaining about how desperately hard it was to choose just the right dining room set for her new home.
She seemed genuinely distressed. And the other ladies commiserated. But my wife knew that one of the women was suffering through the breakup of her marriage, and another was worried because her husband was probably going to be laid off. Every one of them had problems that made choosing a dining room set almost laughably trivial.
But to that one woman, the dining room problem was the worst thing in her life. It’s as if she had a certain amount of misery she was determined to feel, and settled on whatever came to hand to be miserable about.
While other women in that same room turned their problems and suffering outward, and took their mind off their problems by either working to overcome them or, if they were insuperable, simply doing whatever was within their power to make the people around them a little happier.
The result was that they were happier themselves.
So whose quality of life was better?
Whose life was more worth living?
Nobody would suggest euthanizing a person because she’s suffering so terribly about choosing a table and chairs.
No, we’re still slightly careful about whom we can kill and then feel noble about it.
*
For instance, we now live in a country where you can kill your wife, as long as she’s tragically brain-damaged, lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak.
She does open her eyes, though. And she can track objects that move across her field of vision. She isn’t in a coma.
She even has people who want to take care of her. Her parents, her siblings.
And pay no attention to the “experts” who say that these apparent signs of intelligent life aren’t real. We once had an “expert” make the same sort of declaration about our son Charlie, after a mere half hour of observation, completely discounting the experience of Charlie’s parents and other caretakers who knew perfectly well that he really communicated with us.
The expert’s assumption was that anything seen through the eyes of people who loved Charlie was to be discounted completely. Ironically, though, it is precisely the people whose attention is concentrated by love who are best equipped to judge whether communication is happening — since it is happening with them.
The people who love Terri Schiavo apparently do not include her husband, who seems awfully impatient to get rid of her.
And under our bizarre laws, he has the only vote, and her parents and brothers and sisters are completely disregarded.
What is the husband’s case for killing her?
It couldn’t possibly be because he wants to be able to marry the woman he’s living with now. After all, to accomplish that he need only divorce the brain-damaged woman in a hospital bed.
Oh, but wait. If he divorces her, then he won’t get as much of that million-dollar settlement that’s paying for her care right now. Only if she dies will he get any of that.
No, his motive is completely noble and unselfish. He wants to shut off her feeding tube because she “wouldn’t have wanted to live like this.”
Hmmmm. Convenient that she can’t speak, isn’t it?
The incredible thing — to me, at least, and yet I have to believe it, don’t I — is that he was able to find a judge who would give him the right to kill this woman.
Despite the fact that she has loved ones who are desperate to keep her alive and take responsibility for her care. Despite the fact that the husband’s motives are suspect at best. Somehow, judges in Florida keep finding a “right to kill” hidden somewhere in the law.
Well, we have a precedent for that, don’t we. When it comes to legalized killing, our judges are way ahead of our legislatures ...
*
Once you plunge out onto that slippery slope of allowing the killing of another human organism for no better reason than personal convenience, it’s so hard to find a handhold to let you climb back up.
Yet it’s the proponents of legalized killing who whine about the “slippery slope.”
Are there times when it is justified to take a human life?
I believe so — and so do most people. Self-defense, defense of the helpless and innocent, aborting a baby to save the life of the mother; there’s almost always a trade-off, choosing one life over another.
In fact, under traditional law, there is more of a case for killing Terry Schiavo’s husband in order to save her from him than there is for killing the brain-damaged woman in the first place.
*
Whenever somebody wants to kill someone else, he will find excuses to justify the act. Most often, he will claim that his would-be victim is “not really human,” not a person.
It is precisely because of this human tendency that a decent society must go to extra effort, must draw the line firmly at a much earlier point, in order to prevent the killing of innocents. Especially those who are utterly incapable of speaking for themselves.
Inability to plead for your life should not be sufficient grounds for killing you.
If this woman can be murdered, with the active help of the courts that granted permission and blocked legislators from changing the law, then who is safe?
I suppose that my son Charlie Ben, who spoke very few words in his life and could not sit or stand or feed himself for all seventeen of his years — I suppose that under this new system of killing “for their own good,” I, as his parent, could have decided to stop feeding him and let him die.
But no. Isn’t this odd? Just because we were able to use a spoon and a tippy-cup to get food into his body, it would have been criminal negligence and I would have been convicted — rightly — of murder.
Fortunately, such an act never crossed my mind during his lifetime, and, if it had, would have been met with shame and loathing. So he had all seventeen of the years his body gave him. He was often happy, but sometimes sad and frustrated. He was cut off from certain kinds of relationships, yet he managed to bring joy and understanding to many people whose lives he touched.
Most emphatically, it was a life worth living.
And this poor woman — even if the only thing she can “do” is receive the loving service of her family, who is to say that this is not sufficient reason for her life to continue?
Even if her survival is only a testament to the importance of life in our society, is that not a good reason for her to stay alive?
*
We cannot get inside the head of someone else even when they can speak. So to take the life of someone based on speculation about what they “would have wanted” is arrogant at best, monstrous at worst.
So what if she might have said at one time, “I wouldn’t want to live like that”? She was only speculating herself at that time, guessing at how she would feel.
How many times have you ever said, “If that ever happens to me, then I hope you’ll just kill me”?
Even people suffering from such dark depression that they say they want to die — who is to say that at some later time they might have a completely different desire? But once they’re dead, they can’t change their mind.
We can’t prevent death indefinitely — it comes to everyone in the end. Sometimes it comes to those who are tragically young, as a murderer steals them from their beds, or a tsunami sweeps them out of their homes, or some enemy hacks them to death because they’re of the wrong tribe ... terrible things happen.
But when we can preserve a life, how dare we not do our best to do so?
Not just for the sake of that particular life, but for the sake of all the others who will be murdered once we open the floodgates and allow selfish people to kill those helpless ones who inconvenience them.
Once we accept the premise that it’s permissible — or even noble — to kill the helpless, then where do we draw the line?
If a civilization ceases protecting the weak and innocent from the strong and selfish, then what, precisely, is civilization for?
Imagine a woman who had an abortion but also had a couple of children who lived. What would we think of her if she ever said — or thought — “I only wish I’d aborted the others”?
We know exactly what we think of people who murder children — their own or other people’s.
How is Terry Schiavo not eligible for the special protection we give to children? Just because it’s an injury that makes her as helpless as a newborn; just because she doesn’t seem to have the potential of “growing out of it”; how dare we let her be murdered — and call ourselves civilized?
And if the judiciary actively conspires in the murder of such innocents, who will protect them then?
*
There are people whose lives are not worth living — or at least do not justify to society at large the trouble of keeping them alive. The murderers and torturers and ravishers of children, for instance — to protect innocents from them, a decent society might well choose to save all their future victims by killing the conscienceless perpetrator.
Yet because life is so precious, decent people are loath to use the death penalty, because it’s possible for the prosecutors to be wrong. Better to keep a thousand perpetrators of evil alive than to suffer one to be executed innocently.
But those who have harmed no one, whose only offense is to remain alive while being helpless, we can kill them.
We have forgotten how to be appropriately outraged. We can see people frothing at the mouth both for and against a promiscuous President, we can see people furious that others eat meat or wear fur or drill for oil in frozen wastelands — but starve a lone and helpless woman in the hospital, and ... where is the rage at such a wrong?
We talk about how terrible it is, and then shrug and say, “But what can I do?”
Why do we let the hypothetical trump the real?
We do it with our current abortion law: In order to save hypothetical women who might die from illegal back-alley abortions, we allow the killing of millions of separate human organisms for no better reason than their erstwhile parents’ convenience.
Likewise, because Terry Schiavo might hypothetically prefer death to her current state, we seem poised to allow the very real woman to be starved to death despite the desperate concern of her family who want her to be kept alive.
It is death that trumps life in this twisted, sick, upside down version of America we live in now.
Thus evil wins over and corrupts a whole society, because by our silence or inaction, our selfishness or laziness, we conspire in the slaughter of the innocents.
What is our quality of life, as a civilization, when this is what we tolerate?
Miss Liberty’s promise is false after all. Send us no more “huddled masses yearning to breathe.” There is no such right in our country anymore, and no one left to protect it.
We have nothing to teach the world if we let this murder be carried out before our eyes, with the consent of our judges.
If only Terry Schiavo had been convicted of some crime. Then the governor could stay her execution.
If she starves to death, something dies in all of us; and not a small thing, either, unless we have made it small by our lack of compassion for the helpless.
Let’s act on an old slogan that promotes life: “Love conquers all.”
It is not love of any kind that arrogantly says, “Better to be dead than live like that.”
My answer is, Better to be stupid than to be so “smart” you think you have the right to judge innocent lives as not worth living, just because you wouldn’t wish to live it yourself.
Originally published in the Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC
By Orson Scott Card
It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book.
“Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed.
They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars.
I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not been invited to such gatherings since.
It’s so easy to decide that someone else’s life is not worth living. Lacking something that we regard as essential, we cannot fathom how they get through a day.
The nattering of intellectuals about the valuelessness of the “unexamined life” might be taken as hyperbole, if it weren’t for the fact that it is precisely our intellectual elite that has decided to set itself up as champions of the right to murder people “for their own good.”
*
We saw how intellectuals treat the issue in this year’s Oscar-winning deathwish movie, Million Dollar Baby. By now everyone knows that at the end, Hilary Swank lies in a bed, paralyzed from the neck down. Because of bedsores, one leg is amputated.
So, in despair, she begs Clint Eastwood to kill her.
And when he won’t, she tries to kill herself by biting off her own tongue.
At last he succumbs, becomes a murderer for her sake, and walks away as the audience weeps at the nobility of his sacrifice.
Sacrifice?
Hardly. Just think — now he won’t have to visit her every day in the hospital. No more time spent trying to talk her into staying alive.
Let’s see ...
What was her character suffering that Christopher Reeve didn’t suffer?
How dare I make such a comparison! Christopher Reeve didn’t ask people to kill him. He was a different person and made a different choice!
No, he wasn’t merely a different person.
The difference is that he was a person, and she wasn't.
Hillary Swank’s character was made up. She did what the author decided she should do. So after we see her grimly determined to overcome all obstacles, unwilling to be discouraged, adapting to whatever circumstances try to thwart her, suddenly the author decides that this time she’ll give up and start demanding that the people who love her most surrender their sense of decency and goodness in order to indulge her despair.
Do you think Christopher Reeve didn’t feel despair? He said so, in various interviews; there were even times he wished he were dead; but the love and encouragement of his family and friends gave him new purpose.
*
Plus, there’s that little thing called “adaptation.”
People get used to things.
In one experiment, people were fitted with lenses that turned everything upside down while shutting out any view of the right-side-up world.
In a surprisingly short time, their brains did a flip-flop and turned the upside-down-image right side up again.
In concentration camps, some people do indeed despair. It’s a well-known phenomenon: They turn their faces to the wall and take no interest in the world around them until they die — often very quickly.
Unloved, untouched babies also wither, losing brain function, becoming engulfed by lethargy, and sometimes simply dying.
But most people, given anything to hold on to, adapt and try. They find new purpose. They find work-arounds.
The quadriplegics who learn to paint with a brush held between their teeth.
Helen Keller.
Stephen Hawking.
I suppose, though, that we should have simply killed them as soon as the incurability of their problems became obvious. After all, what “quality of life” could they possibly have?
*
People make their own quality of life. There are people who are desperately unhappy in the midst of freedom and plenty, and people who are quite cheerful despite devastating deprivation and loss.
My wife was once at a gathering of church women, when one of them started complaining about how desperately hard it was to choose just the right dining room set for her new home.
She seemed genuinely distressed. And the other ladies commiserated. But my wife knew that one of the women was suffering through the breakup of her marriage, and another was worried because her husband was probably going to be laid off. Every one of them had problems that made choosing a dining room set almost laughably trivial.
But to that one woman, the dining room problem was the worst thing in her life. It’s as if she had a certain amount of misery she was determined to feel, and settled on whatever came to hand to be miserable about.
While other women in that same room turned their problems and suffering outward, and took their mind off their problems by either working to overcome them or, if they were insuperable, simply doing whatever was within their power to make the people around them a little happier.
The result was that they were happier themselves.
So whose quality of life was better?
Whose life was more worth living?
Nobody would suggest euthanizing a person because she’s suffering so terribly about choosing a table and chairs.
No, we’re still slightly careful about whom we can kill and then feel noble about it.
*
For instance, we now live in a country where you can kill your wife, as long as she’s tragically brain-damaged, lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak.
She does open her eyes, though. And she can track objects that move across her field of vision. She isn’t in a coma.
She even has people who want to take care of her. Her parents, her siblings.
And pay no attention to the “experts” who say that these apparent signs of intelligent life aren’t real. We once had an “expert” make the same sort of declaration about our son Charlie, after a mere half hour of observation, completely discounting the experience of Charlie’s parents and other caretakers who knew perfectly well that he really communicated with us.
The expert’s assumption was that anything seen through the eyes of people who loved Charlie was to be discounted completely. Ironically, though, it is precisely the people whose attention is concentrated by love who are best equipped to judge whether communication is happening — since it is happening with them.
The people who love Terri Schiavo apparently do not include her husband, who seems awfully impatient to get rid of her.
And under our bizarre laws, he has the only vote, and her parents and brothers and sisters are completely disregarded.
What is the husband’s case for killing her?
It couldn’t possibly be because he wants to be able to marry the woman he’s living with now. After all, to accomplish that he need only divorce the brain-damaged woman in a hospital bed.
Oh, but wait. If he divorces her, then he won’t get as much of that million-dollar settlement that’s paying for her care right now. Only if she dies will he get any of that.
No, his motive is completely noble and unselfish. He wants to shut off her feeding tube because she “wouldn’t have wanted to live like this.”
Hmmmm. Convenient that she can’t speak, isn’t it?
The incredible thing — to me, at least, and yet I have to believe it, don’t I — is that he was able to find a judge who would give him the right to kill this woman.
Despite the fact that she has loved ones who are desperate to keep her alive and take responsibility for her care. Despite the fact that the husband’s motives are suspect at best. Somehow, judges in Florida keep finding a “right to kill” hidden somewhere in the law.
Well, we have a precedent for that, don’t we. When it comes to legalized killing, our judges are way ahead of our legislatures ...
*
Once you plunge out onto that slippery slope of allowing the killing of another human organism for no better reason than personal convenience, it’s so hard to find a handhold to let you climb back up.
Yet it’s the proponents of legalized killing who whine about the “slippery slope.”
Are there times when it is justified to take a human life?
I believe so — and so do most people. Self-defense, defense of the helpless and innocent, aborting a baby to save the life of the mother; there’s almost always a trade-off, choosing one life over another.
In fact, under traditional law, there is more of a case for killing Terry Schiavo’s husband in order to save her from him than there is for killing the brain-damaged woman in the first place.
*
Whenever somebody wants to kill someone else, he will find excuses to justify the act. Most often, he will claim that his would-be victim is “not really human,” not a person.
It is precisely because of this human tendency that a decent society must go to extra effort, must draw the line firmly at a much earlier point, in order to prevent the killing of innocents. Especially those who are utterly incapable of speaking for themselves.
Inability to plead for your life should not be sufficient grounds for killing you.
If this woman can be murdered, with the active help of the courts that granted permission and blocked legislators from changing the law, then who is safe?
I suppose that my son Charlie Ben, who spoke very few words in his life and could not sit or stand or feed himself for all seventeen of his years — I suppose that under this new system of killing “for their own good,” I, as his parent, could have decided to stop feeding him and let him die.
But no. Isn’t this odd? Just because we were able to use a spoon and a tippy-cup to get food into his body, it would have been criminal negligence and I would have been convicted — rightly — of murder.
Fortunately, such an act never crossed my mind during his lifetime, and, if it had, would have been met with shame and loathing. So he had all seventeen of the years his body gave him. He was often happy, but sometimes sad and frustrated. He was cut off from certain kinds of relationships, yet he managed to bring joy and understanding to many people whose lives he touched.
Most emphatically, it was a life worth living.
And this poor woman — even if the only thing she can “do” is receive the loving service of her family, who is to say that this is not sufficient reason for her life to continue?
Even if her survival is only a testament to the importance of life in our society, is that not a good reason for her to stay alive?
*
We cannot get inside the head of someone else even when they can speak. So to take the life of someone based on speculation about what they “would have wanted” is arrogant at best, monstrous at worst.
So what if she might have said at one time, “I wouldn’t want to live like that”? She was only speculating herself at that time, guessing at how she would feel.
How many times have you ever said, “If that ever happens to me, then I hope you’ll just kill me”?
Even people suffering from such dark depression that they say they want to die — who is to say that at some later time they might have a completely different desire? But once they’re dead, they can’t change their mind.
We can’t prevent death indefinitely — it comes to everyone in the end. Sometimes it comes to those who are tragically young, as a murderer steals them from their beds, or a tsunami sweeps them out of their homes, or some enemy hacks them to death because they’re of the wrong tribe ... terrible things happen.
But when we can preserve a life, how dare we not do our best to do so?
Not just for the sake of that particular life, but for the sake of all the others who will be murdered once we open the floodgates and allow selfish people to kill those helpless ones who inconvenience them.
Once we accept the premise that it’s permissible — or even noble — to kill the helpless, then where do we draw the line?
If a civilization ceases protecting the weak and innocent from the strong and selfish, then what, precisely, is civilization for?
Imagine a woman who had an abortion but also had a couple of children who lived. What would we think of her if she ever said — or thought — “I only wish I’d aborted the others”?
We know exactly what we think of people who murder children — their own or other people’s.
How is Terry Schiavo not eligible for the special protection we give to children? Just because it’s an injury that makes her as helpless as a newborn; just because she doesn’t seem to have the potential of “growing out of it”; how dare we let her be murdered — and call ourselves civilized?
And if the judiciary actively conspires in the murder of such innocents, who will protect them then?
*
There are people whose lives are not worth living — or at least do not justify to society at large the trouble of keeping them alive. The murderers and torturers and ravishers of children, for instance — to protect innocents from them, a decent society might well choose to save all their future victims by killing the conscienceless perpetrator.
Yet because life is so precious, decent people are loath to use the death penalty, because it’s possible for the prosecutors to be wrong. Better to keep a thousand perpetrators of evil alive than to suffer one to be executed innocently.
But those who have harmed no one, whose only offense is to remain alive while being helpless, we can kill them.
We have forgotten how to be appropriately outraged. We can see people frothing at the mouth both for and against a promiscuous President, we can see people furious that others eat meat or wear fur or drill for oil in frozen wastelands — but starve a lone and helpless woman in the hospital, and ... where is the rage at such a wrong?
We talk about how terrible it is, and then shrug and say, “But what can I do?”
Why do we let the hypothetical trump the real?
We do it with our current abortion law: In order to save hypothetical women who might die from illegal back-alley abortions, we allow the killing of millions of separate human organisms for no better reason than their erstwhile parents’ convenience.
Likewise, because Terry Schiavo might hypothetically prefer death to her current state, we seem poised to allow the very real woman to be starved to death despite the desperate concern of her family who want her to be kept alive.
It is death that trumps life in this twisted, sick, upside down version of America we live in now.
Thus evil wins over and corrupts a whole society, because by our silence or inaction, our selfishness or laziness, we conspire in the slaughter of the innocents.
What is our quality of life, as a civilization, when this is what we tolerate?
Miss Liberty’s promise is false after all. Send us no more “huddled masses yearning to breathe.” There is no such right in our country anymore, and no one left to protect it.
We have nothing to teach the world if we let this murder be carried out before our eyes, with the consent of our judges.
If only Terry Schiavo had been convicted of some crime. Then the governor could stay her execution.
If she starves to death, something dies in all of us; and not a small thing, either, unless we have made it small by our lack of compassion for the helpless.
Let’s act on an old slogan that promotes life: “Love conquers all.”
It is not love of any kind that arrogantly says, “Better to be dead than live like that.”
My answer is, Better to be stupid than to be so “smart” you think you have the right to judge innocent lives as not worth living, just because you wouldn’t wish to live it yourself.
Originally published in the Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC
Oasis
Don’t Believe The Truth’
Release Date: 30th May 2005
Oasis have confirmed the track listing for their highly anticipated sixth studio album, ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’, released on May 30th 2005 on Big Brother Recordings.The first single from the album will be ‘Lyla’ released on May 16th. Noel Gallagher describes the track as “the Soundtrack of our Lives doing The Who on Skol in a psychedelic city in the sky (or something!)” He continues, “while ‘Part Of The Queue’ doesn’t sound remotely like anything we’ve ever done before. Legendary Cuban percussionist Lenny Castro shuffles up a storm. Amazing.” concluding “’The Meaning Of Soul’ is simply “Elvis on Red Bull”.
Turn Up The Sun
Mucky Fingers
Lyla
Love Like A Bomb
The Importance Of Being Idle
The Meaning Of Soul
Guess God Thinks I’m Abel
Part Of The Queue
Keep The Dream Alive
A Bell Will Ring
Let There Be Love
Crowning what will be an extraordinary 2005, Oasis will embark on an extensive world tour that includes nine huge shows in the UK – including seven stadium gigs. Tickets for these dates and US dates sold out in record time, even challenging the speed with which they sold out their legendary Knebworth shows of 1996. Further UK, US and European dates to be announced soon.
“There is still no act that rock n' rolls like Oasis”. (The Observer)
Don’t Believe The Truth’
Release Date: 30th May 2005
Oasis have confirmed the track listing for their highly anticipated sixth studio album, ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’, released on May 30th 2005 on Big Brother Recordings.The first single from the album will be ‘Lyla’ released on May 16th. Noel Gallagher describes the track as “the Soundtrack of our Lives doing The Who on Skol in a psychedelic city in the sky (or something!)” He continues, “while ‘Part Of The Queue’ doesn’t sound remotely like anything we’ve ever done before. Legendary Cuban percussionist Lenny Castro shuffles up a storm. Amazing.” concluding “’The Meaning Of Soul’ is simply “Elvis on Red Bull”.
Turn Up The Sun
Mucky Fingers
Lyla
Love Like A Bomb
The Importance Of Being Idle
The Meaning Of Soul
Guess God Thinks I’m Abel
Part Of The Queue
Keep The Dream Alive
A Bell Will Ring
Let There Be Love
Crowning what will be an extraordinary 2005, Oasis will embark on an extensive world tour that includes nine huge shows in the UK – including seven stadium gigs. Tickets for these dates and US dates sold out in record time, even challenging the speed with which they sold out their legendary Knebworth shows of 1996. Further UK, US and European dates to be announced soon.
“There is still no act that rock n' rolls like Oasis”. (The Observer)
Thursday, March 24, 2005
From Opinion Journal.com:
In Love With Death
The bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people.
By Peggy Noonan
God made the world or he didn't.
God made you or he didn't.
If he did, your little human life is, and has been, touched by the divine. If this is true, it would be true of all humans, not only some. And so--again, if it is true--each human life is precious, of infinite value, worthy of great respect.
Most--not all, but probably most--of those who support Terri Schiavo's right to live believe the above. This explains their passion and emotionalism. They believe they are fighting for an invaluable and irreplaceable human life. They are like the mother who is famously said to have lifted the back of a small car off the ground to save a child caught under a tire. You're desperate to save a life, you're shot through with adrenaline, your strength is for half a second superhuman, you do the impossible.
That is what they are trying to do.
They do not want an innocent human life ended for what appear to be primarily practical and worldly reasons--e.g., Mrs. Schiavo's quality of life is low, her life is pointless. They say: Who is to say it is pointless? And what does pointless even mean? Maybe life itself is the point.
I do not understand the emotionalism of the pull-the-tube people. What is driving their engagement? Is it because they are compassionate, and their hearts bleed at the thought that Mrs. Schiavo suffers? But throughout this case no one has testified that she is in persistent pain, as those with terminal cancer are.
If they care so much about her pain, why are they unconcerned at the suffering caused her by the denial of food and water? And why do those who argue for Mrs. Schiavo's death employ language and imagery that is so violent and aggressive? The chairman of the Democratic National Committee calls Republicans "brain dead." Michael Schiavo, the husband, calls House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "a slithering snake."
Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo's right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having "kicked the sh-- out of the fascists." On Tuesday James Carville's face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren't a buffoon.
Why are they so committed to this woman's death?
They seem to have fallen half in love with death.
What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?
Why does this prospect so unnerve them? Again, if you think Terri Schiavo is a precious human gift of God, your passion is explicable. The passion of the pull-the-tube people is not.
I do not understand their certainty. I don't "know" that any degree of progress or healing is possible for Terri Schiavo; I only hope they are. We can't know, but we can "err on the side of life." How do the pro-death forces "know" there is no possibility of progress, healing, miracles? They seem to think they know. They seem to love the phrases they bandy about: "vegetative state," "brain dead," "liquefied cortex."
I do not understand why people who want to save the whales (so do I) find campaigns to save humans so much less arresting. I do not understand their lack of passion. But the save-the-whales people are somehow rarely the stop-abortion-please people.
The PETA people, who say they are committed to ending cruelty to animals, seem disinterested in the fact of late-term abortion, which is a cruel procedure performed on a human.
I do not understand why the don't-drill-in-Alaska-and-destroy-its-prime-beauty people do not join forces with the don't-end-a-life-that-holds-within-it-beauty people.
I do not understand why those who want a freeze on all death penalty cases in order to review each of them in light of DNA testing--an act of justice and compassion toward those who have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law--are uninterested in giving every last chance and every last test to a woman whom no one has ever accused of anything.
There are passionate groups of women in America who decry spousal abuse, give beaten wives shelter, insist that a woman is not a husband's chattel. This is good work. Why are they not taking part in the fight for Terri Schiavo? Again, what explains their lack of passion on this? If Mrs. Schiavo dies, it will be because her husband, and only her husband, insists she wanted to, or would want to, or said she wanted to in a hypothetical conversation long ago. A thin reed on which to base the killing of a human being.
The pull-the-tube people say, "She must hate being brain-damaged." Well, yes, she must. (This line of argument presumes she is to some degree or in some way thinking or experiencing emotions.) Who wouldn't feel extreme sadness at being extremely disabled? I'd weep every day, wouldn't you? But consider your life. Are there not facets of it, or facts of it, that make you feel extremely sad, pained, frustrated, angry? But you're still glad you're alive, aren't you? Me too. No one enjoys a deathbed. Very few want to leave.
Terri Schiavo may well die. No good will come of it. Those who are half in love with death will only become more red-fanged and ravenous.
And those who are still learning--our children--oh, what terrible lessons they're learning. What terrible stories are shaping them. They're witnessing the Schiavo drama on television and hearing it on radio. They are seeing a society--their society, their people--on the verge of famously accepting, even embracing, the idea that a damaged life is a throwaway life.
Our children have been reared in the age of abortion, and are coming of age in a time when seemingly respectable people are enthusiastic for euthanasia. It cannot be good for our children, and the world they will make, that they are given this new lesson that human life is not precious, not touched by the divine, not of infinite value.
Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
In Love With Death
The bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people.
By Peggy Noonan
God made the world or he didn't.
God made you or he didn't.
If he did, your little human life is, and has been, touched by the divine. If this is true, it would be true of all humans, not only some. And so--again, if it is true--each human life is precious, of infinite value, worthy of great respect.
Most--not all, but probably most--of those who support Terri Schiavo's right to live believe the above. This explains their passion and emotionalism. They believe they are fighting for an invaluable and irreplaceable human life. They are like the mother who is famously said to have lifted the back of a small car off the ground to save a child caught under a tire. You're desperate to save a life, you're shot through with adrenaline, your strength is for half a second superhuman, you do the impossible.
That is what they are trying to do.
They do not want an innocent human life ended for what appear to be primarily practical and worldly reasons--e.g., Mrs. Schiavo's quality of life is low, her life is pointless. They say: Who is to say it is pointless? And what does pointless even mean? Maybe life itself is the point.
I do not understand the emotionalism of the pull-the-tube people. What is driving their engagement? Is it because they are compassionate, and their hearts bleed at the thought that Mrs. Schiavo suffers? But throughout this case no one has testified that she is in persistent pain, as those with terminal cancer are.
If they care so much about her pain, why are they unconcerned at the suffering caused her by the denial of food and water? And why do those who argue for Mrs. Schiavo's death employ language and imagery that is so violent and aggressive? The chairman of the Democratic National Committee calls Republicans "brain dead." Michael Schiavo, the husband, calls House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "a slithering snake."
Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo's right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having "kicked the sh-- out of the fascists." On Tuesday James Carville's face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren't a buffoon.
Why are they so committed to this woman's death?
They seem to have fallen half in love with death.
What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?
Why does this prospect so unnerve them? Again, if you think Terri Schiavo is a precious human gift of God, your passion is explicable. The passion of the pull-the-tube people is not.
I do not understand their certainty. I don't "know" that any degree of progress or healing is possible for Terri Schiavo; I only hope they are. We can't know, but we can "err on the side of life." How do the pro-death forces "know" there is no possibility of progress, healing, miracles? They seem to think they know. They seem to love the phrases they bandy about: "vegetative state," "brain dead," "liquefied cortex."
I do not understand why people who want to save the whales (so do I) find campaigns to save humans so much less arresting. I do not understand their lack of passion. But the save-the-whales people are somehow rarely the stop-abortion-please people.
The PETA people, who say they are committed to ending cruelty to animals, seem disinterested in the fact of late-term abortion, which is a cruel procedure performed on a human.
I do not understand why the don't-drill-in-Alaska-and-destroy-its-prime-beauty people do not join forces with the don't-end-a-life-that-holds-within-it-beauty people.
I do not understand why those who want a freeze on all death penalty cases in order to review each of them in light of DNA testing--an act of justice and compassion toward those who have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law--are uninterested in giving every last chance and every last test to a woman whom no one has ever accused of anything.
There are passionate groups of women in America who decry spousal abuse, give beaten wives shelter, insist that a woman is not a husband's chattel. This is good work. Why are they not taking part in the fight for Terri Schiavo? Again, what explains their lack of passion on this? If Mrs. Schiavo dies, it will be because her husband, and only her husband, insists she wanted to, or would want to, or said she wanted to in a hypothetical conversation long ago. A thin reed on which to base the killing of a human being.
The pull-the-tube people say, "She must hate being brain-damaged." Well, yes, she must. (This line of argument presumes she is to some degree or in some way thinking or experiencing emotions.) Who wouldn't feel extreme sadness at being extremely disabled? I'd weep every day, wouldn't you? But consider your life. Are there not facets of it, or facts of it, that make you feel extremely sad, pained, frustrated, angry? But you're still glad you're alive, aren't you? Me too. No one enjoys a deathbed. Very few want to leave.
Terri Schiavo may well die. No good will come of it. Those who are half in love with death will only become more red-fanged and ravenous.
And those who are still learning--our children--oh, what terrible lessons they're learning. What terrible stories are shaping them. They're witnessing the Schiavo drama on television and hearing it on radio. They are seeing a society--their society, their people--on the verge of famously accepting, even embracing, the idea that a damaged life is a throwaway life.
Our children have been reared in the age of abortion, and are coming of age in a time when seemingly respectable people are enthusiastic for euthanasia. It cannot be good for our children, and the world they will make, that they are given this new lesson that human life is not precious, not touched by the divine, not of infinite value.
Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
From Chronicles.com:
Never Say Die
By Thomas Fleming
Hard cases make bad law. They also cause people to lose their moral bearings and their political principles. The case of Theresa Schiavo is no exception. Like many controversial issues, the Schiavo case pits states’-rights/limited-government Republicans against big-government Democrats who want to take power away from families and give it to federal judges. In this case, however, it is Barney Frank who is arguing for states’ rights and the entire Republican congressional caucus that is empowering judges. To take the irony one step further, President Bush—who, as President, has done next to nothing to protect innocent life—is now emerging as the spokesman for a “culture of life.” As governor of Texas, however, he signed a bill turning over the power to make decisions in apparently terminal cases to a medical-ethics board, which could authorize a hospital to end life support for a terminal patient even against the wishes of the next of kin. Under Texas “Advance Directives Act” of 1999, a children’s hospital, over the objection of the mother, removed a five-month-old boy from a ventilator. I should like to hear the President explain this away to the pro-life evangelicals he has betrayed at every turn.
Perhaps the most bizarre utterances have come from official Vatican spokesmen who compare the removal of Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube to capital punishment, apparently believing that an act of capital punishment is worse than an act of what they believe to be murder. This is the most nonsensical pro-life argument to come along since Lew Lehrman popularized the Roe v. Wade = Dred Scott analogy, which is predicated on the idea that killing the innocent is almost as bad as slavery. Cardinal Martino, former archbishop of Milan and a staunch leftist, has also weighed in, saying that, “If Mr. Schiavo succeeds legally in causing the death of his wife, this not only would be tragic in itself, but would be a grave step toward the legal approval of euthanasia in the United States.”
Cardinal Martino should consult his American brother-bishops on this question. The U.S. Conference of Bishops, in a humane and carefully nuanced set of answers to “Questions about Medically Assisted Nutrition and Hydration,” acknowledge the moral complexity:
Even Catholics who accept the same basic moral principles may strongly disagree on how to apply them to patients who appear to be persistently unconscious—that is, those who are in a permanent coma or a “persistent vegetative state” (PVS). Some moral questions in this area have not been explicitly resolved by the Church’s teaching authority.
Contrary to accounts in the popular press, the Catholic Church has never taught that capital punishment is per se evil (and, thus, forbidden) or that physical existence under all circumstances must be prolonged at any cost. As the bishops observe, “Our tradition does not demand heroic measures in fulfilling the obligation to sustain life.” The termination of special measures, however, is not to be made lightly, especially when there is reason to doubt, as there is in this case, that such a move has been authorized by the patient. The Catechism advises that
discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected.
From the perspective of the religious tradition to which the Schindlers are appealing, removal of the feeding and hydration tubes is probably permissible if, first, she is not conscious and, second, she has no hope of recovering consciousness. The decision would be made by her next of kin, which, in Florida, means her husband, and not by other family members or the courts. But is Mr. Schiavo making the correct decision?
To come to a proper understanding of this issue, we have to distinguish between what we know and what we do not know. Let us begin with the negatives. We do not actually know, for example, if Mrs. Schiavo can ever be made to regain consciousness. Her parents have claimed to find evidence of response and consciousness, but the evidence they present has not been verified, and the films of her interactions with them, having been edited, do not adequately reflect the hours of non-interaction that have been recorded. Even in their edited form, the disturbing films and images of Mrs. Schiavo’s responses—and her parents’ accounts of them—are perfectly consistent with the diagnosis of a permanent vegetative condition. In fact, the Schindlers had no trouble with that diagnosis when they supported their son-in-law’s malpractice suit or even later, when they attempted to replace him as legal guardian. What has changed in the interim? Certainly not her condition—not, at least, for the better.
The physicians who have examined the patient say flatly that she can never regain consciousness. Physicians have made mistakes, however, and the fact of their saying something does not make it so. But, in a dispute over facts, the only qualified authorities are the attending physicians, not bloggers, activist clergymen, or physicians who have not examined the patient. They sometimes cite miraculous recoveries, but everything lies in the details. To prove their case, they would have to cite medical histories of patients in a coma for over a decade after their brains had suffered serious damage as a result of being deprived of oxygen. This has not been done.
We also do not know enough to read the hearts and minds of the contestants, the husband—or, as I should prefer to consider him, the ex-husband—Michael Schiavo and Mrs. Schiavo’s parents. Partisans of each have sworn that the other side was only in it for the money, but there is little money left to quarrel about. There are rumors of possible book deals to be made by Mr. Schiavo, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the rather distressing marketing of the Terri Schiavo donor list to conservative non-profits. If I had to guess, I should say that the parents are entirely sincere in their desire for a miracle that would restore their daughter to them and that Mr. Schiavo is, at best, a weakling and, at worst, the contemptible self-seeking reptile denounced by his in-laws. He need not, however, be mercenary. In the early years, he did make heroic efforts in seeking treatment and therapy for his wife. When these failed, and the medical malpractice suit was settled, his attitude changed. He has, as he might complain to us, “moved on” with his life, found another woman, the fiancée with whom he has fathered two children. He needs no other motive than the very American desire to forget the past and pretend it never happened. (In his defense, however, Mr. Schiavo might point out that the Schindlers, while they were collaborating with him on the malpractice suit, encouraged him to go out with women, some of whom he introduced to his in-laws.)
Nor do I think we need to take very seriously Mr. Schaivo’s claims, repeated ad nauseam to Larry King and other gossip mongers, that his wife had told him she did not wish to be kept alive or that her father had demanded a share of the malpractice settlement. His originally good relations with the Schindlers have soured, and we can expect neither side to be fair to the other.
But supposing we still believe, despite the strong weight of evidence, that Mrs. Schiavo remains conscious at some level and might someday lead a normal life. The question then becomes not “What is the right thing to do,” but “Who is to decide?” As in so many human affairs, it is easier to have moral knowledge than knowledge of facts. We do know that, in our tradition, spouses are next of kin and empowered by law to make decisions when their wife or husband is incapable. That is why Mr. Schiavo, when the physicians concluded the case to be hopeless, was free to decide his wife’s fate. To change this legal tradition, in the heat of a passionate case, is a perilous undertaking.
I do not know what Mrs. Schiavo’s husband ought to do, but I do know that the decision belongs to him and not to either Jeb or George Bush. To those who wish to defend physical existence for its own sake at any cost, this will seem like Pilate’s decision. They are wrong. Pilate shirked his responsibility as Roman procurator by giving in to the mob. He should not have allowed the execution of Jesus, but neither should he have overturned both Roman and Jewish laws in order to strip families of their legal rights. The analogy, used with increasing frequency, between Mrs. Schiavo and Christ is blasphemous on many counts. She is not the God who willingly accepted death in order to redeem mankind. She is only a poor, frail mortal, like the rest of us, and her condition and death, so far from being a willing sacrifice, is the result, apparently, of binge dieting.
We also know, from our moral and legal traditions, that it can never be safe to entrust such a decision to the self-seeking politicians who seek public office, whether as state legislator, governor, congressman, or president, and that the only step more perilous than entrusting politicians with the power of life and death over members of our family is to give such power to the most dangerous enemies of morality and religion: federal judges. The Republican strategy, even if it had not been revealed in a GOP Senate memo as a cynical ploy, is subversive of the constitutional order of the United States and of what moral order is left in our society.
That much, a well-intentioned pagan might have said, but, for Christians, there is another dimension to this question. Liberal nonbelievers, who believe that “this is all there is,” may be pardoned for their hysterical attachment to physical life. This makes the non-Christian willingness to practice abortion and euthanasia all the more terrifying in its implications. For them, other people’s lives are mere commodities to be used when they are convenient, discarded when they are not.
Christians know better. They know, not only that life is a precious gift, but also that it is not all there is. There was a time when believers gratefully accepted even martyrdom because it was a chance to live and die for their faith. Life can and ought to be beautiful, and we who believe that God looked at His creation and saw that it was good cannot contemn the joy and beauty of everyday life. But we also know that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. We are sojourners here, like the Hebrews in the land of Egypt. Our home is elsewhere.
Mrs. Schiavo’s parents have the right and duty to do what they can for their daughter, but the rest of us—and, by the rest of us, I include Bill Frist, Tom Delay, George Bush, and the Vatican spokesmen who so cavalierly intrude themselves into legal and constitutional matters they do not understand—have no business. Playing politics with a dying woman, even if it advances the pro-life cause or expands the electoral base of the Republican Party, is contemptible.
The basic moral problem lies with Mr. Schiavo himself, and with a society that turns a blind eye to his adultery or bigamy. The American states, once upon a time, had stiff laws on both, and even today Florida’s statutes make living “in an open state of adultery . . . a misdemeanor of the second degree” punishable by up to 60 days in prison. Mr. Schiavo is also guilty of “lewd and lascivious behavior,” another second-class misdemeanor applied to “any man and woman, not being married to each other, [who] lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit.” In other words, the faithless husband might be sent to prison for 120 days and, if he returned to his “fiancée,” he might be slapped with a second set of sentences.
Michael Schiavo has effectively demonstrated that he does not regard Theresa as his wife: In filing obituary notices for each of his parents (in 1997 and again in 2001), he described them as survived by himself and his fiancée Jodi Centzone. This loving, caring husband, as he likes to portray himself, has effectively repudiated his first wife, and, if Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature wished to do anything productive, they would stiffen laws protecting marriage and strip people like Mr. Schiavo of their power to act on behalf of their wives. It is not judges who need more power, but families.
I do not propose to legislate for the people of Florida, but there are any number of useful measures that might be passed in response to this agonizing case. Apart from stripping adulterers of spousal rights, they could specify a line of authority passing from parents to siblings to aunts and uncles, and so on, with a final provision for a family council to be made up of a group of the nearest living relatives who can be found. Admittedly, a handful of cousins may not take their responsibility very seriously, but even a long-lost cousin is more closely attached to me than any judge or politician.
Every decent American must feel sympathy for poor Mrs. Schiavo and her parents, but thousands of people die every day, and 50 years from now—a mere twinkling of a star—all of us will be dead: the Schiavos, the Schindlers, even the Bushes. If Mr. Schiavo is, in fact, murdering his wife, he will hardly be the first husband to get away with such a crime on one or another technicality. In 2003, 599 people were murdered in Chicago alone. Although the homicide rates have taken a drop in recent years, the United States leads the way in the developed world. We can take comfort that South Africa, Russia, and the Baltic republics are even more homicidal. Nonetheless, judges and parole boards continue to put dangerous felons and psychotics back on the streets. I wish that the Vatican spokesmen who want to change the laws of these United States from the safe distance of Italy (a country with one-fifth the per capita homicides as the United States), would express as much concern about a criminal justice system that, for a variety of reasons—liberal theories of penology, minority sensitivities, political corruption—refuses to protect American citizens from murder. Yet it is to these judges—the class with the most blood on its hands—that we are expected to turn for protection. Every preventable murder is a travesty of justice, and every intentional murder that goes unpunished—i.e., does not end with the execution of the murderer—is a sin crying out for vengeance.
Christians are right to be disturbed by the culture of death that has made abortion and euthanasia not only acceptable but legal and is well on the way to legitimating that form of homicide that goes by the name “assisted suicide.” But Christians should also bear in mind that we are not called upon to keep our mortal bodies running for as long as possible—indeed, the saints were always somewhat careless in this regard. We need to lead moral lives, accepting our responsibilities, both those we have inherited and those we have undertaken willingly, in the knowledge that we are preparing for another, better life. Mrs. Schiavo, in her current condition, cannot get on with this, the most important business of life. Her parents and friends who have told us she was a good Christian woman can be confident that she is passing on to a better life. If we do not believe this, then what do we believe?
Never Say Die
By Thomas Fleming
Hard cases make bad law. They also cause people to lose their moral bearings and their political principles. The case of Theresa Schiavo is no exception. Like many controversial issues, the Schiavo case pits states’-rights/limited-government Republicans against big-government Democrats who want to take power away from families and give it to federal judges. In this case, however, it is Barney Frank who is arguing for states’ rights and the entire Republican congressional caucus that is empowering judges. To take the irony one step further, President Bush—who, as President, has done next to nothing to protect innocent life—is now emerging as the spokesman for a “culture of life.” As governor of Texas, however, he signed a bill turning over the power to make decisions in apparently terminal cases to a medical-ethics board, which could authorize a hospital to end life support for a terminal patient even against the wishes of the next of kin. Under Texas “Advance Directives Act” of 1999, a children’s hospital, over the objection of the mother, removed a five-month-old boy from a ventilator. I should like to hear the President explain this away to the pro-life evangelicals he has betrayed at every turn.
Perhaps the most bizarre utterances have come from official Vatican spokesmen who compare the removal of Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube to capital punishment, apparently believing that an act of capital punishment is worse than an act of what they believe to be murder. This is the most nonsensical pro-life argument to come along since Lew Lehrman popularized the Roe v. Wade = Dred Scott analogy, which is predicated on the idea that killing the innocent is almost as bad as slavery. Cardinal Martino, former archbishop of Milan and a staunch leftist, has also weighed in, saying that, “If Mr. Schiavo succeeds legally in causing the death of his wife, this not only would be tragic in itself, but would be a grave step toward the legal approval of euthanasia in the United States.”
Cardinal Martino should consult his American brother-bishops on this question. The U.S. Conference of Bishops, in a humane and carefully nuanced set of answers to “Questions about Medically Assisted Nutrition and Hydration,” acknowledge the moral complexity:
Even Catholics who accept the same basic moral principles may strongly disagree on how to apply them to patients who appear to be persistently unconscious—that is, those who are in a permanent coma or a “persistent vegetative state” (PVS). Some moral questions in this area have not been explicitly resolved by the Church’s teaching authority.
Contrary to accounts in the popular press, the Catholic Church has never taught that capital punishment is per se evil (and, thus, forbidden) or that physical existence under all circumstances must be prolonged at any cost. As the bishops observe, “Our tradition does not demand heroic measures in fulfilling the obligation to sustain life.” The termination of special measures, however, is not to be made lightly, especially when there is reason to doubt, as there is in this case, that such a move has been authorized by the patient. The Catechism advises that
discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected.
From the perspective of the religious tradition to which the Schindlers are appealing, removal of the feeding and hydration tubes is probably permissible if, first, she is not conscious and, second, she has no hope of recovering consciousness. The decision would be made by her next of kin, which, in Florida, means her husband, and not by other family members or the courts. But is Mr. Schiavo making the correct decision?
To come to a proper understanding of this issue, we have to distinguish between what we know and what we do not know. Let us begin with the negatives. We do not actually know, for example, if Mrs. Schiavo can ever be made to regain consciousness. Her parents have claimed to find evidence of response and consciousness, but the evidence they present has not been verified, and the films of her interactions with them, having been edited, do not adequately reflect the hours of non-interaction that have been recorded. Even in their edited form, the disturbing films and images of Mrs. Schiavo’s responses—and her parents’ accounts of them—are perfectly consistent with the diagnosis of a permanent vegetative condition. In fact, the Schindlers had no trouble with that diagnosis when they supported their son-in-law’s malpractice suit or even later, when they attempted to replace him as legal guardian. What has changed in the interim? Certainly not her condition—not, at least, for the better.
The physicians who have examined the patient say flatly that she can never regain consciousness. Physicians have made mistakes, however, and the fact of their saying something does not make it so. But, in a dispute over facts, the only qualified authorities are the attending physicians, not bloggers, activist clergymen, or physicians who have not examined the patient. They sometimes cite miraculous recoveries, but everything lies in the details. To prove their case, they would have to cite medical histories of patients in a coma for over a decade after their brains had suffered serious damage as a result of being deprived of oxygen. This has not been done.
We also do not know enough to read the hearts and minds of the contestants, the husband—or, as I should prefer to consider him, the ex-husband—Michael Schiavo and Mrs. Schiavo’s parents. Partisans of each have sworn that the other side was only in it for the money, but there is little money left to quarrel about. There are rumors of possible book deals to be made by Mr. Schiavo, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the rather distressing marketing of the Terri Schiavo donor list to conservative non-profits. If I had to guess, I should say that the parents are entirely sincere in their desire for a miracle that would restore their daughter to them and that Mr. Schiavo is, at best, a weakling and, at worst, the contemptible self-seeking reptile denounced by his in-laws. He need not, however, be mercenary. In the early years, he did make heroic efforts in seeking treatment and therapy for his wife. When these failed, and the medical malpractice suit was settled, his attitude changed. He has, as he might complain to us, “moved on” with his life, found another woman, the fiancée with whom he has fathered two children. He needs no other motive than the very American desire to forget the past and pretend it never happened. (In his defense, however, Mr. Schiavo might point out that the Schindlers, while they were collaborating with him on the malpractice suit, encouraged him to go out with women, some of whom he introduced to his in-laws.)
Nor do I think we need to take very seriously Mr. Schaivo’s claims, repeated ad nauseam to Larry King and other gossip mongers, that his wife had told him she did not wish to be kept alive or that her father had demanded a share of the malpractice settlement. His originally good relations with the Schindlers have soured, and we can expect neither side to be fair to the other.
But supposing we still believe, despite the strong weight of evidence, that Mrs. Schiavo remains conscious at some level and might someday lead a normal life. The question then becomes not “What is the right thing to do,” but “Who is to decide?” As in so many human affairs, it is easier to have moral knowledge than knowledge of facts. We do know that, in our tradition, spouses are next of kin and empowered by law to make decisions when their wife or husband is incapable. That is why Mr. Schiavo, when the physicians concluded the case to be hopeless, was free to decide his wife’s fate. To change this legal tradition, in the heat of a passionate case, is a perilous undertaking.
I do not know what Mrs. Schiavo’s husband ought to do, but I do know that the decision belongs to him and not to either Jeb or George Bush. To those who wish to defend physical existence for its own sake at any cost, this will seem like Pilate’s decision. They are wrong. Pilate shirked his responsibility as Roman procurator by giving in to the mob. He should not have allowed the execution of Jesus, but neither should he have overturned both Roman and Jewish laws in order to strip families of their legal rights. The analogy, used with increasing frequency, between Mrs. Schiavo and Christ is blasphemous on many counts. She is not the God who willingly accepted death in order to redeem mankind. She is only a poor, frail mortal, like the rest of us, and her condition and death, so far from being a willing sacrifice, is the result, apparently, of binge dieting.
We also know, from our moral and legal traditions, that it can never be safe to entrust such a decision to the self-seeking politicians who seek public office, whether as state legislator, governor, congressman, or president, and that the only step more perilous than entrusting politicians with the power of life and death over members of our family is to give such power to the most dangerous enemies of morality and religion: federal judges. The Republican strategy, even if it had not been revealed in a GOP Senate memo as a cynical ploy, is subversive of the constitutional order of the United States and of what moral order is left in our society.
That much, a well-intentioned pagan might have said, but, for Christians, there is another dimension to this question. Liberal nonbelievers, who believe that “this is all there is,” may be pardoned for their hysterical attachment to physical life. This makes the non-Christian willingness to practice abortion and euthanasia all the more terrifying in its implications. For them, other people’s lives are mere commodities to be used when they are convenient, discarded when they are not.
Christians know better. They know, not only that life is a precious gift, but also that it is not all there is. There was a time when believers gratefully accepted even martyrdom because it was a chance to live and die for their faith. Life can and ought to be beautiful, and we who believe that God looked at His creation and saw that it was good cannot contemn the joy and beauty of everyday life. But we also know that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. We are sojourners here, like the Hebrews in the land of Egypt. Our home is elsewhere.
Mrs. Schiavo’s parents have the right and duty to do what they can for their daughter, but the rest of us—and, by the rest of us, I include Bill Frist, Tom Delay, George Bush, and the Vatican spokesmen who so cavalierly intrude themselves into legal and constitutional matters they do not understand—have no business. Playing politics with a dying woman, even if it advances the pro-life cause or expands the electoral base of the Republican Party, is contemptible.
The basic moral problem lies with Mr. Schiavo himself, and with a society that turns a blind eye to his adultery or bigamy. The American states, once upon a time, had stiff laws on both, and even today Florida’s statutes make living “in an open state of adultery . . . a misdemeanor of the second degree” punishable by up to 60 days in prison. Mr. Schiavo is also guilty of “lewd and lascivious behavior,” another second-class misdemeanor applied to “any man and woman, not being married to each other, [who] lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit.” In other words, the faithless husband might be sent to prison for 120 days and, if he returned to his “fiancée,” he might be slapped with a second set of sentences.
Michael Schiavo has effectively demonstrated that he does not regard Theresa as his wife: In filing obituary notices for each of his parents (in 1997 and again in 2001), he described them as survived by himself and his fiancée Jodi Centzone. This loving, caring husband, as he likes to portray himself, has effectively repudiated his first wife, and, if Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature wished to do anything productive, they would stiffen laws protecting marriage and strip people like Mr. Schiavo of their power to act on behalf of their wives. It is not judges who need more power, but families.
I do not propose to legislate for the people of Florida, but there are any number of useful measures that might be passed in response to this agonizing case. Apart from stripping adulterers of spousal rights, they could specify a line of authority passing from parents to siblings to aunts and uncles, and so on, with a final provision for a family council to be made up of a group of the nearest living relatives who can be found. Admittedly, a handful of cousins may not take their responsibility very seriously, but even a long-lost cousin is more closely attached to me than any judge or politician.
Every decent American must feel sympathy for poor Mrs. Schiavo and her parents, but thousands of people die every day, and 50 years from now—a mere twinkling of a star—all of us will be dead: the Schiavos, the Schindlers, even the Bushes. If Mr. Schiavo is, in fact, murdering his wife, he will hardly be the first husband to get away with such a crime on one or another technicality. In 2003, 599 people were murdered in Chicago alone. Although the homicide rates have taken a drop in recent years, the United States leads the way in the developed world. We can take comfort that South Africa, Russia, and the Baltic republics are even more homicidal. Nonetheless, judges and parole boards continue to put dangerous felons and psychotics back on the streets. I wish that the Vatican spokesmen who want to change the laws of these United States from the safe distance of Italy (a country with one-fifth the per capita homicides as the United States), would express as much concern about a criminal justice system that, for a variety of reasons—liberal theories of penology, minority sensitivities, political corruption—refuses to protect American citizens from murder. Yet it is to these judges—the class with the most blood on its hands—that we are expected to turn for protection. Every preventable murder is a travesty of justice, and every intentional murder that goes unpunished—i.e., does not end with the execution of the murderer—is a sin crying out for vengeance.
Christians are right to be disturbed by the culture of death that has made abortion and euthanasia not only acceptable but legal and is well on the way to legitimating that form of homicide that goes by the name “assisted suicide.” But Christians should also bear in mind that we are not called upon to keep our mortal bodies running for as long as possible—indeed, the saints were always somewhat careless in this regard. We need to lead moral lives, accepting our responsibilities, both those we have inherited and those we have undertaken willingly, in the knowledge that we are preparing for another, better life. Mrs. Schiavo, in her current condition, cannot get on with this, the most important business of life. Her parents and friends who have told us she was a good Christian woman can be confident that she is passing on to a better life. If we do not believe this, then what do we believe?
Starved for Justice
By Ann Coulter
Democrats have called out armed federal agents in order to: 1) prevent black children from attending a public school in Little Rock, Ark. (National Guard), 2) investigate an alleged violation of federal gun laws in Waco, Texas (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), and 3) deport a small boy to Cuba (Immigration and Naturalization Service).
So how about a Republican governor sending in the National Guard to stop an innocent American woman from being starved to death in Florida? Republicans like the military. Democrats get excited about the use of military force only when it's against Americans.
In two of the three cases mentioned above, the Democrats' use of force was in direct contravention of court rulings. Admittedly, this was a very long time ago – back in U.S. history when the judiciary was only one of the three branches of our government. Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard expressly for purposes of defying rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts.
The decadent buffoon Bill Clinton sent armed agents from the INS to seize a small boy from an American family – despite rulings by the majestic and infallible Florida courts granting custody of the boy to that very family.
None of these exercises of military force has gone down in history as a noble moment, but that's because of the underlying purpose of the force, not the fact that force was used.
To the contrary, what has gone down in history as a glorious moment for the republic was when President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) called out military force of his own. In response to Gov. Faubus' abuse of the National Guard, Eisenhower simultaneously revoked Faubus' control of the National Guard and ordered the 101st Airborne Division to escort black students to school. (Minutes later, Democrats pronounced the Arkansas public schools a "hopeless quagmire" and demanded to know what Ike's exit strategy was.)
As important as it was to enforce the constitutional right to desegregated schools, isn't it also important to enforce Terri Schiavo's right to due process before she is killed by starvation?
Liberals' newfound respect for "federalism" is completely disingenuous. People who support a national policy on abortion are prohibited from ever using the word "federalism."
I note that whenever liberals talk about "federalism" or "states' rights," they are never talking about a state referendum or a law passed by the duly elected members of a state legislature – or anything voted on by the actual citizens of a state. What liberals mean by "federalism" is: a state court ruling. Just as "choice" refers to only one choice, "the rule of law" refers only to "the law as determined by a court."
As a practical matter, courts will generally have the last word in interpreting the law because courts decide cases. But that's a pragmatic point. There is nothing in the law, the Constitution or the concept of "federalism" that mandates giving courts the last word. Other public officials, including governors and presidents, are sworn to uphold the law, too.
It would be chaotic if public officials made a habit of disregarding court rulings simply because they disagreed with them. But a practice borne of practicality has led the courts to greater and greater flights of arrogance. Sublimely confident that no one will ever call their bluff, courts are now regularly discovering secret legal provisions requiring abortion and gay marriage and prohibiting public prayer and Ten Commandments displays.
Just once, we need an elected official to stand up to a clearly incorrect ruling by a court. Any incorrect ruling will do, but my vote is for a state court that has ordered a disabled woman to be starved to death at the request of her adulterous husband.
Florida state court Judge George Greer – last heard from when he denied an order of protection to a woman weeks before her husband stabbed her to death – determined that Terri would have wanted to be starved to death based on the testimony of her husband, who was then living with another woman. (The judge also took judicial notice of the positions of O.J. Simpson, Scott Peterson and Robert Blake.) The husband also happened to be the only person present when the oxygen was cut off to Terri's brain in the first place. He now has two children with another woman.
Greer has refused to order the most basic medical tests for brain damage before condemning a woman to death. Despite all those years of important, searching litigation we keep hearing about, Terri has yet to receive either an MRI or a PET scan – although she may be allowed to join a support group for women whose husbands are trying to kill them.
Greer has cut off the legal rights of Terri's real family and made her husband (now with a different family) her sole guardian, citing as precedent the landmark "Fox v. Henhouse" ruling of 1893. Throughout the process that would result in her death sentence, Terri was never permitted her own legal counsel. Evidently, they were all tied up defending the right to life of child-molesting murderers.
Given the country's fetishism about court rulings, this may be a rash assumption, but I presume if Greer had ordered that Terri Schiavo be shot at her husband's request – a more humane death, by the way – the whole country would not sit idly by, claiming to be bound by the court's ruling because of the "rule of law" and "federalism." President Bush would order the FBI to protect her and Gov. Bush would send in the state police.
What was supposed to be the "least dangerous" branch has become the most dangerous – literally to the point of ordering an innocent American woman to die, and willfully disregarding congressional subpoenas. They can't be stopped – solely because the entire country has agreed to treat the pronouncements of former ambulance-chasers as the word of God. The only power courts have is that everyone jumps when they say "jump." (Also, people seem a little intimidated by the black robes. From now on we should make all judges wear lime-green leisure suits.)
President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said of a Supreme Court ruling he opposed: "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." The court's ruling was ignored. And yet, somehow, the republic survived.
If Gov. Jeb Bush doesn't say something similar to the Florida courts that have ordered Terri Schiavo to die, he'll be the second Republican governor disgraced by the illiterate ramblings of a state judiciary. Gov. Mitt Romney will never recover from his acquiescence to the Massachusetts Supreme Court's miraculous discovery of a right to gay marriage. Neither will Gov. Bush if he doesn't stop the torture and murder of Terri Schiavo.
By Ann Coulter
Democrats have called out armed federal agents in order to: 1) prevent black children from attending a public school in Little Rock, Ark. (National Guard), 2) investigate an alleged violation of federal gun laws in Waco, Texas (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), and 3) deport a small boy to Cuba (Immigration and Naturalization Service).
So how about a Republican governor sending in the National Guard to stop an innocent American woman from being starved to death in Florida? Republicans like the military. Democrats get excited about the use of military force only when it's against Americans.
In two of the three cases mentioned above, the Democrats' use of force was in direct contravention of court rulings. Admittedly, this was a very long time ago – back in U.S. history when the judiciary was only one of the three branches of our government. Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard expressly for purposes of defying rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts.
The decadent buffoon Bill Clinton sent armed agents from the INS to seize a small boy from an American family – despite rulings by the majestic and infallible Florida courts granting custody of the boy to that very family.
None of these exercises of military force has gone down in history as a noble moment, but that's because of the underlying purpose of the force, not the fact that force was used.
To the contrary, what has gone down in history as a glorious moment for the republic was when President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) called out military force of his own. In response to Gov. Faubus' abuse of the National Guard, Eisenhower simultaneously revoked Faubus' control of the National Guard and ordered the 101st Airborne Division to escort black students to school. (Minutes later, Democrats pronounced the Arkansas public schools a "hopeless quagmire" and demanded to know what Ike's exit strategy was.)
As important as it was to enforce the constitutional right to desegregated schools, isn't it also important to enforce Terri Schiavo's right to due process before she is killed by starvation?
Liberals' newfound respect for "federalism" is completely disingenuous. People who support a national policy on abortion are prohibited from ever using the word "federalism."
I note that whenever liberals talk about "federalism" or "states' rights," they are never talking about a state referendum or a law passed by the duly elected members of a state legislature – or anything voted on by the actual citizens of a state. What liberals mean by "federalism" is: a state court ruling. Just as "choice" refers to only one choice, "the rule of law" refers only to "the law as determined by a court."
As a practical matter, courts will generally have the last word in interpreting the law because courts decide cases. But that's a pragmatic point. There is nothing in the law, the Constitution or the concept of "federalism" that mandates giving courts the last word. Other public officials, including governors and presidents, are sworn to uphold the law, too.
It would be chaotic if public officials made a habit of disregarding court rulings simply because they disagreed with them. But a practice borne of practicality has led the courts to greater and greater flights of arrogance. Sublimely confident that no one will ever call their bluff, courts are now regularly discovering secret legal provisions requiring abortion and gay marriage and prohibiting public prayer and Ten Commandments displays.
Just once, we need an elected official to stand up to a clearly incorrect ruling by a court. Any incorrect ruling will do, but my vote is for a state court that has ordered a disabled woman to be starved to death at the request of her adulterous husband.
Florida state court Judge George Greer – last heard from when he denied an order of protection to a woman weeks before her husband stabbed her to death – determined that Terri would have wanted to be starved to death based on the testimony of her husband, who was then living with another woman. (The judge also took judicial notice of the positions of O.J. Simpson, Scott Peterson and Robert Blake.) The husband also happened to be the only person present when the oxygen was cut off to Terri's brain in the first place. He now has two children with another woman.
Greer has refused to order the most basic medical tests for brain damage before condemning a woman to death. Despite all those years of important, searching litigation we keep hearing about, Terri has yet to receive either an MRI or a PET scan – although she may be allowed to join a support group for women whose husbands are trying to kill them.
Greer has cut off the legal rights of Terri's real family and made her husband (now with a different family) her sole guardian, citing as precedent the landmark "Fox v. Henhouse" ruling of 1893. Throughout the process that would result in her death sentence, Terri was never permitted her own legal counsel. Evidently, they were all tied up defending the right to life of child-molesting murderers.
Given the country's fetishism about court rulings, this may be a rash assumption, but I presume if Greer had ordered that Terri Schiavo be shot at her husband's request – a more humane death, by the way – the whole country would not sit idly by, claiming to be bound by the court's ruling because of the "rule of law" and "federalism." President Bush would order the FBI to protect her and Gov. Bush would send in the state police.
What was supposed to be the "least dangerous" branch has become the most dangerous – literally to the point of ordering an innocent American woman to die, and willfully disregarding congressional subpoenas. They can't be stopped – solely because the entire country has agreed to treat the pronouncements of former ambulance-chasers as the word of God. The only power courts have is that everyone jumps when they say "jump." (Also, people seem a little intimidated by the black robes. From now on we should make all judges wear lime-green leisure suits.)
President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said of a Supreme Court ruling he opposed: "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." The court's ruling was ignored. And yet, somehow, the republic survived.
If Gov. Jeb Bush doesn't say something similar to the Florida courts that have ordered Terri Schiavo to die, he'll be the second Republican governor disgraced by the illiterate ramblings of a state judiciary. Gov. Mitt Romney will never recover from his acquiescence to the Massachusetts Supreme Court's miraculous discovery of a right to gay marriage. Neither will Gov. Bush if he doesn't stop the torture and murder of Terri Schiavo.
From washingtonpost.com: Boswell on Bonds.
The Crash of a Titan
By Thomas Boswell
Last Friday, in an online chat with readers, I wrote, "Did you see that Barry Bonds had another knee surgery yesterday? I've been saying to friends ever since his use of steroids -- the clear and the cream -- was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle last winter that I thought there was a chance that he would never play another game.
"Just a gut feeling. Never pass Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron. Just a chance, not a probability. But it's increasing."
That chance increased enormously Tuesday, when Bonds said he didn't expect to return from his most recent knee surgery (his third since last season) until the middle of this season or, perhaps, next year. When you turn 41 in four months, next year is eternity.
"I'm done," said Bonds. As usual, he said it dramatically but ambiguously, drawing the most attention to himself. Bonds added (14 times, by one count) that he was "tired" and that "the media . . . everybody" had "finally brought me and my family down."
If you think that Bonds will ever play another big league game, just because he won the National League MVP award last year with the best all-around offensive season in baseball history, then you haven't been paying enough attention.
Bonds has been giving hints, amid outbursts of defiance, since an impromptu news conference last season at Shea Stadium. That night, Bonds said that he might retire after the '05 season. Not "would," just "might." But some of us have wondered if Bonds was preparing for an unexpected but widely welcomed exit from baseball before he could break Hank Aaron's record of 755 home runs.
Baseball has endured enormous self-inflicted damage from its indulgence of steroid cheaters since the late '80s. However, for Bonds, with his "clear" and "cream," to break the mark of Aaron, the sport's gentleman of gentlemen, might shatter the all-time record for most disgusting career "achievement" by any athlete in any sport at any time. Do you invite Hank to the game?
That night at Shea, Bonds was asked if he was concerned that he might have perjured himself before a grand jury in the BALCO case. "You couldn't get me if you tried," Bonds shot back.
What if the Justice Department got ahold of past urine samples? "What do I care what they do? What do I care what you think?" said Bonds. "I don't have to prove to you or anyone else in this world. . . . When you come up with the truth, then you write your [expletive]. Until then, shut up."
Long ago, Ted Williams spit at the press box after his 400th home run. You can get away with that. But going on TV and spitting at the Justice Department, the FBI and a grand jury just months after the president has talked about steroid abuse in baseball in his State of the Union address is not a real smart strategy.
Last week's congressional hearing on steroid use was merely another example of the government's power being arrayed against athletes who made the mistake of thinking they wouldn't get caught if they got fabulously rich and sinfully famous by gaining 25 pounds of muscle from a syringe.
Who knew a pendulum swing of pious reform would arrive so fast? The sinners of the '90s, plus a few scooped up in the seine by accident, are being humiliated these days. If powerful CEOs can be jailed or fired for infractions that practically drew praise in boom times, why can't we enforce the rules on a few jocks, too? Or, switch the rules, some of them might say. After all, who was praising Mark McGwire's 70th homer or Bonds's 73rd, if not the fans and media? Who was marketing them, if not baseball itself? And who was shielding them from tests to protect their own health if not their shameful union?
The same day McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro were testifying on Capitol Hill, Bonds was having a second surgery on his right knee. It was hardly the sharpest cut Bonds felt last week. Kimberly Bell, who says she was Bonds's girlfriend for nine years, reportedly described to the grand jury Bonds's use of steroids and his gifts of cash to her. So, the feds may now be pursuing Bonds on perjury and tax charges.
"You couldn't get me if you tried."
"What do I care what they do?"
"When you come up with the truth, then write your [expletive]. Until then, shut up."
Throwing down the gauntlet to a pitcher is pride. Throwing down the gauntlet to society -- criminal investigators, the judiciary, media and by extension the public -- is the kind of hubris that keeps all those old Greek plays in print. The pride that drives the rise is the pride, gone to excess, that precipitates the fall. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make great.
As Bonds's troubles mount, and he faces his final decision about whether to chase 755 amid a tornado of controversy, investigations and recriminations, his deepest issues have come to the surface. Last summer, out of the blue, he said, "Just because my dad . . . was an alcoholic, does that mean I was [drinking] with him? My brother does drugs, he's recovering, but he's still my brother and I love him to death. But am I going with my brother, doing drugs?" Until then, a generation of baseball people had kept Bobby Bonds's drinking problems private. As for a brother, how many even knew he had one?
Barry's mainspring has always been his complex relationship with Bobby. The elder Bonds, a star with 332 homers, played for eight teams in his last eight seasons, often switching clubs amid malicious rumors or vague criticism. At the time, Barry was ages 10 to 17. Imagine the hostility and distrust such an experience sows in a child. Then Barry conquered the same sport that had chewed up his dad -- with Bobby as his batting coach. Dr. Freud, check your Blackberry.
On Tuesday, the threads of the long, sad Bonds story seemed to weave themselves into what may be the first premonition of an ending. Before he answered questions, Bonds looked at the camera and said, "Can you get my son in this, too, not just me, so you guys can share the pain that you are causing my whole family?" The camera obligingly panned wider.
There was Nikolai, 15, heir to the bitterest tradition of glory in baseball history.
"Me and my son are going to try to enjoy each other," said Bonds. "That's all we've got. Everybody else has tried to destroy everything else." Then, turning to his boy, he said, "Let's go home."
They walked off camera together. You couldn't script it better. Or worse. All that was missing was, "The End."
The Crash of a Titan
By Thomas Boswell
Last Friday, in an online chat with readers, I wrote, "Did you see that Barry Bonds had another knee surgery yesterday? I've been saying to friends ever since his use of steroids -- the clear and the cream -- was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle last winter that I thought there was a chance that he would never play another game.
"Just a gut feeling. Never pass Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron. Just a chance, not a probability. But it's increasing."
That chance increased enormously Tuesday, when Bonds said he didn't expect to return from his most recent knee surgery (his third since last season) until the middle of this season or, perhaps, next year. When you turn 41 in four months, next year is eternity.
"I'm done," said Bonds. As usual, he said it dramatically but ambiguously, drawing the most attention to himself. Bonds added (14 times, by one count) that he was "tired" and that "the media . . . everybody" had "finally brought me and my family down."
If you think that Bonds will ever play another big league game, just because he won the National League MVP award last year with the best all-around offensive season in baseball history, then you haven't been paying enough attention.
Bonds has been giving hints, amid outbursts of defiance, since an impromptu news conference last season at Shea Stadium. That night, Bonds said that he might retire after the '05 season. Not "would," just "might." But some of us have wondered if Bonds was preparing for an unexpected but widely welcomed exit from baseball before he could break Hank Aaron's record of 755 home runs.
Baseball has endured enormous self-inflicted damage from its indulgence of steroid cheaters since the late '80s. However, for Bonds, with his "clear" and "cream," to break the mark of Aaron, the sport's gentleman of gentlemen, might shatter the all-time record for most disgusting career "achievement" by any athlete in any sport at any time. Do you invite Hank to the game?
That night at Shea, Bonds was asked if he was concerned that he might have perjured himself before a grand jury in the BALCO case. "You couldn't get me if you tried," Bonds shot back.
What if the Justice Department got ahold of past urine samples? "What do I care what they do? What do I care what you think?" said Bonds. "I don't have to prove to you or anyone else in this world. . . . When you come up with the truth, then you write your [expletive]. Until then, shut up."
Long ago, Ted Williams spit at the press box after his 400th home run. You can get away with that. But going on TV and spitting at the Justice Department, the FBI and a grand jury just months after the president has talked about steroid abuse in baseball in his State of the Union address is not a real smart strategy.
Last week's congressional hearing on steroid use was merely another example of the government's power being arrayed against athletes who made the mistake of thinking they wouldn't get caught if they got fabulously rich and sinfully famous by gaining 25 pounds of muscle from a syringe.
Who knew a pendulum swing of pious reform would arrive so fast? The sinners of the '90s, plus a few scooped up in the seine by accident, are being humiliated these days. If powerful CEOs can be jailed or fired for infractions that practically drew praise in boom times, why can't we enforce the rules on a few jocks, too? Or, switch the rules, some of them might say. After all, who was praising Mark McGwire's 70th homer or Bonds's 73rd, if not the fans and media? Who was marketing them, if not baseball itself? And who was shielding them from tests to protect their own health if not their shameful union?
The same day McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro were testifying on Capitol Hill, Bonds was having a second surgery on his right knee. It was hardly the sharpest cut Bonds felt last week. Kimberly Bell, who says she was Bonds's girlfriend for nine years, reportedly described to the grand jury Bonds's use of steroids and his gifts of cash to her. So, the feds may now be pursuing Bonds on perjury and tax charges.
"You couldn't get me if you tried."
"What do I care what they do?"
"When you come up with the truth, then write your [expletive]. Until then, shut up."
Throwing down the gauntlet to a pitcher is pride. Throwing down the gauntlet to society -- criminal investigators, the judiciary, media and by extension the public -- is the kind of hubris that keeps all those old Greek plays in print. The pride that drives the rise is the pride, gone to excess, that precipitates the fall. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make great.
As Bonds's troubles mount, and he faces his final decision about whether to chase 755 amid a tornado of controversy, investigations and recriminations, his deepest issues have come to the surface. Last summer, out of the blue, he said, "Just because my dad . . . was an alcoholic, does that mean I was [drinking] with him? My brother does drugs, he's recovering, but he's still my brother and I love him to death. But am I going with my brother, doing drugs?" Until then, a generation of baseball people had kept Bobby Bonds's drinking problems private. As for a brother, how many even knew he had one?
Barry's mainspring has always been his complex relationship with Bobby. The elder Bonds, a star with 332 homers, played for eight teams in his last eight seasons, often switching clubs amid malicious rumors or vague criticism. At the time, Barry was ages 10 to 17. Imagine the hostility and distrust such an experience sows in a child. Then Barry conquered the same sport that had chewed up his dad -- with Bobby as his batting coach. Dr. Freud, check your Blackberry.
On Tuesday, the threads of the long, sad Bonds story seemed to weave themselves into what may be the first premonition of an ending. Before he answered questions, Bonds looked at the camera and said, "Can you get my son in this, too, not just me, so you guys can share the pain that you are causing my whole family?" The camera obligingly panned wider.
There was Nikolai, 15, heir to the bitterest tradition of glory in baseball history.
"Me and my son are going to try to enjoy each other," said Bonds. "That's all we've got. Everybody else has tried to destroy everything else." Then, turning to his boy, he said, "Let's go home."
They walked off camera together. You couldn't script it better. Or worse. All that was missing was, "The End."
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
From National Review Online:
Screwtape Revisited
With gratitude (and apologies) to C. S. Lewis.
By Meghan Cox Gurdon
"Don't slink along the walls, boy, come in!" The voice is richer than the nephew remembers, vinous and lordlier, but with a reassuring tinge of malice just beneath the surface.
"By his tail, Uncle, this is fine," gasps Mildew, stepping cautiously into the center of the vast chamber that is his uncle's new office. The walls are hung with scarlet velvet; the temperature an agreeable Fahrenheit 911.
Screwtape stands in one corner behind a magnificent expanse of polished wood. "These desks are only given to the highest ranks," he says proudly. "Solid wormwood!" At the familiar name, the visitor flinches and slows his approach. Screwtape chuckles. "Shame about your brother, really," he murmurs, and just the tip of a red tongue flickers from his lips. "But let us hope you are made of more ambitious stuff?"
Mildew exhales loudly, as one bursting some inner restraint, and smiles. "Oh, I think so, Uncle. It is why I have been so eager to see you. Why I am so honored to see you — here."
"Wormwood," Screwtape repeats, pouring out two glasses of old Pharisee and handing one to his nephew. "It came with the promotion. So did the chairs. Sit down. They're Corinthian leather."
Mildew laughs politely and raises his glass. "To the Father of Lies."
"To the Father of Lies."
They drink, and put down their glasses. Screwtape looks hard at his nephew, his fingers moving the stem of his glass back and forth along the polished surface of the desk.
"I wonder, young Mildew, if you understand why I have been promoted — one might say exalted, even — to such heights?"
"I have heard," Mildew begins, and blushes. "The fact is, Uncle, I have heard things that seem impossible. Is it really true that you have found a way to get them to eat — "
" — their young?" Screwtape interrupts with a hungry smile.
"Yes. Yes! I have found the key, the key, my boy, to unlocking the worst in the human heart. Oh, massacres are entertaining enough, and reasonably productive. Rapine and thieving and savagery and the usual nonsense go a good distance to wrecking men's souls, but not in sufficient numbers. Not for us to win for good — that is, ha-ha, for ill. We must forever be stoking grievances, feeding pride, and constantly thrusting and parrying with the Enemy and his agents. No, the beautifully corrupting key that I have found is vanity."
"I've read about that," Mildew says, remembering. "In first year college, Know Thine Enemy 101, I think it was. All is vanity, saith the preacher," the nephew quotes, his mouth twisting as if he has bitten a bad snail.
Screwtape grimaces companionably. "Indeed. Fortunately most of them don't bother with that any more."
"But how do — "
Screwtape presses on. "What does Man want? He wants sex, he wants comfort, he wants to be young. He does not want to be told he can't have what he wants, or to be inconvenienced, or, worse, to be told his desires are wrong. This is where the Enemy's agents end up doing our work for us, Mildew, countless times!" Screwtape chortles. "Man is a creature of appetites, Mildew. Remember that."
"Appetites, yes, but eating their young, Uncle? I feel sure that I read somewhere that humans are naturally revolted by cannibalism. The Enemy's doing, no doubt, but still, there it is."
Screwtape fixes his nephew with a shriveling glare. "We are not inducing them to broil the little tykes, dear boy, this is no fricassee of first-graders." He sighs heavily, a sufferer of fools, but then brightens, clearly distracted by a pleasing thought. "That's an idea, though. Must get Singer to write something up for me on that...excellent. Now, where — "
"Not broiling them."
"Yes. My achievement, the reason for this — " Screwtape gestures largely about the handsome apartment — "is that I have managed, by appealing to man's love of self, his vanity, to convince millions that it is not cannibalism, but progress, to turn tiny human infants into medicine. The strong picking the weak apart, cell by cell, to be consumed by the strong? Brilliant!"
The uncle pours another red gout of Pharisee into each glass, and leans forward. "There are some envious others — " he continues softly, glancing around as if to suggest malevolent eavesdroppers," — who begrudge my rise. To them I say," and here Screwtape raises his voice, "Vanity is a rusty key that was left lying about, and it was I alone who saw what it could unlock at this point in human history."
"It is true," Screwtape continues with a shrug, "that much of the groundwork was already laid. We had already convinced people of the rightness of destroying inconvenient life. Now they talk quite coolly of "blastocysts," and "clumps of cells" and "surplus embryos." My genius was to recognize that they needed just a little push to be convinced, with their mania for recycling, that by harvesting something that would otherwise be chucked out, they are doing a positive good! Think of it: They believe they occupy "the moral high ground." Oh, the profits for us — "
"But Uncle," Mildew interjects, very respectfully, "there is one point I do not understand. Humans have shown great resistance to the genetic modification of fruits and vegetables — "
Screwtape sees where this is going, and gives what might almost be called a tender smile, were not so many sharply-pointed teeth involved.
"All of Europe was up in arms over plans to make a more tender ear of corn, Uncle, do you remember? Frankenfood, they called it. Gigantic monster tomatoes were inflated and displayed for countryfolk. I do not mean to contradict you, Uncle, but if people fear an altered cob, surely they will not accept a genetically modified human being? After all, that's what this cell-picking is about, isn't it?"
"Do you think," says the uncle witheringly, "that people who believe that life on earth is the only one they have, that once they die there is nothing, that there are no consequences to their choices — one of Our Father Below's most successful slogans, by the way, choice — do you think, my boy, that they will hesitate if we give them the chance to cut and sew their medical destinies for the mere price of another's life? As Our Father pointed out to the Enemy during that unfortunate incident involving the man Job, "A person will give up everything in order to stay alive."
Mildew tries to hold his uncle's eye, but cannot. He looks down and fiddles awkwardly with his tie.
"No, my boy," Screwtape continues in kinder tones. "We are on the brink of wondrous things. This is better than the 18th century, when we convinced whole societies that black-skinned persons were things rather than people — "
"Bought and sold and damnation aplenty," Mildew nods, impressed, "but it didn't last."
"No thanks to Him," Screwtape snaps. "But we are winning now, I can feel it, Mildew. Think of this: In some rich societies, people are not just destroying blastocysts, not merely dismantling children in the womb, they are euthanizing newborn babies!" Screwtape pats the place where his heart would be, were he to have one. "That's one of my father's, you know. Euthanize. So clean, so modern-sounding. He got a bonus for that one. But not wormwood."
"The one I love," Mildew interjects enthusiastically, "is The Right to Die. It's so devilishly clever."
Screwtape looks thoughtfully into his empty glass. "It has potential, once we get the strong to use it regularly against the weak in the guise of being humane." The uncle frowns. "Unfortunately we're running into some difficulties with that slogan. This Florida case is not going as hoped. Right to Die tests well in some markets but the Enemy, blast Him, will keep enlisting these poisonous little brutes with their claptrap about the Culture of Life and whatnot. Things may improve when we are rid of that turbulent chief priest of His. It can't be long now."
Screwtape shakes his head as if to clear it.
"More wine? Let's finish the bottle, with a toast to a glorious future. These are heady times, Mildew, and we can use the Enemy's words against Him. He wants these creatures to believe that each one of them has value. The Enemy actually does value them, however tiny or aged, however mewling or puking or cleft of palate, if you can imagine it.
"The wonderful thing for us? It is increasingly easy to take that Enemy-given sense of intrinsic worth and twist it into cruel self-interest. With man's vanity, and a little medical breakthrough here and there, we can tempt them the prospect of a life without illness, inconvenience, or parasitical relatives. It will, for humans, be heaven on earth."
Screwtape chuckles darkly. "And afterwards? Why, we'll get to meet them down here. In person. And the loveliest bit of all is that their good intentions will have brought them here."
Uncle and nephew, grinning, raise their glasses once more.
"To the Father of Lies!"
Screwtape Revisited
With gratitude (and apologies) to C. S. Lewis.
By Meghan Cox Gurdon
"Don't slink along the walls, boy, come in!" The voice is richer than the nephew remembers, vinous and lordlier, but with a reassuring tinge of malice just beneath the surface.
"By his tail, Uncle, this is fine," gasps Mildew, stepping cautiously into the center of the vast chamber that is his uncle's new office. The walls are hung with scarlet velvet; the temperature an agreeable Fahrenheit 911.
Screwtape stands in one corner behind a magnificent expanse of polished wood. "These desks are only given to the highest ranks," he says proudly. "Solid wormwood!" At the familiar name, the visitor flinches and slows his approach. Screwtape chuckles. "Shame about your brother, really," he murmurs, and just the tip of a red tongue flickers from his lips. "But let us hope you are made of more ambitious stuff?"
Mildew exhales loudly, as one bursting some inner restraint, and smiles. "Oh, I think so, Uncle. It is why I have been so eager to see you. Why I am so honored to see you — here."
"Wormwood," Screwtape repeats, pouring out two glasses of old Pharisee and handing one to his nephew. "It came with the promotion. So did the chairs. Sit down. They're Corinthian leather."
Mildew laughs politely and raises his glass. "To the Father of Lies."
"To the Father of Lies."
They drink, and put down their glasses. Screwtape looks hard at his nephew, his fingers moving the stem of his glass back and forth along the polished surface of the desk.
"I wonder, young Mildew, if you understand why I have been promoted — one might say exalted, even — to such heights?"
"I have heard," Mildew begins, and blushes. "The fact is, Uncle, I have heard things that seem impossible. Is it really true that you have found a way to get them to eat — "
" — their young?" Screwtape interrupts with a hungry smile.
"Yes. Yes! I have found the key, the key, my boy, to unlocking the worst in the human heart. Oh, massacres are entertaining enough, and reasonably productive. Rapine and thieving and savagery and the usual nonsense go a good distance to wrecking men's souls, but not in sufficient numbers. Not for us to win for good — that is, ha-ha, for ill. We must forever be stoking grievances, feeding pride, and constantly thrusting and parrying with the Enemy and his agents. No, the beautifully corrupting key that I have found is vanity."
"I've read about that," Mildew says, remembering. "In first year college, Know Thine Enemy 101, I think it was. All is vanity, saith the preacher," the nephew quotes, his mouth twisting as if he has bitten a bad snail.
Screwtape grimaces companionably. "Indeed. Fortunately most of them don't bother with that any more."
"But how do — "
Screwtape presses on. "What does Man want? He wants sex, he wants comfort, he wants to be young. He does not want to be told he can't have what he wants, or to be inconvenienced, or, worse, to be told his desires are wrong. This is where the Enemy's agents end up doing our work for us, Mildew, countless times!" Screwtape chortles. "Man is a creature of appetites, Mildew. Remember that."
"Appetites, yes, but eating their young, Uncle? I feel sure that I read somewhere that humans are naturally revolted by cannibalism. The Enemy's doing, no doubt, but still, there it is."
Screwtape fixes his nephew with a shriveling glare. "We are not inducing them to broil the little tykes, dear boy, this is no fricassee of first-graders." He sighs heavily, a sufferer of fools, but then brightens, clearly distracted by a pleasing thought. "That's an idea, though. Must get Singer to write something up for me on that...excellent. Now, where — "
"Not broiling them."
"Yes. My achievement, the reason for this — " Screwtape gestures largely about the handsome apartment — "is that I have managed, by appealing to man's love of self, his vanity, to convince millions that it is not cannibalism, but progress, to turn tiny human infants into medicine. The strong picking the weak apart, cell by cell, to be consumed by the strong? Brilliant!"
The uncle pours another red gout of Pharisee into each glass, and leans forward. "There are some envious others — " he continues softly, glancing around as if to suggest malevolent eavesdroppers," — who begrudge my rise. To them I say," and here Screwtape raises his voice, "Vanity is a rusty key that was left lying about, and it was I alone who saw what it could unlock at this point in human history."
"It is true," Screwtape continues with a shrug, "that much of the groundwork was already laid. We had already convinced people of the rightness of destroying inconvenient life. Now they talk quite coolly of "blastocysts," and "clumps of cells" and "surplus embryos." My genius was to recognize that they needed just a little push to be convinced, with their mania for recycling, that by harvesting something that would otherwise be chucked out, they are doing a positive good! Think of it: They believe they occupy "the moral high ground." Oh, the profits for us — "
"But Uncle," Mildew interjects, very respectfully, "there is one point I do not understand. Humans have shown great resistance to the genetic modification of fruits and vegetables — "
Screwtape sees where this is going, and gives what might almost be called a tender smile, were not so many sharply-pointed teeth involved.
"All of Europe was up in arms over plans to make a more tender ear of corn, Uncle, do you remember? Frankenfood, they called it. Gigantic monster tomatoes were inflated and displayed for countryfolk. I do not mean to contradict you, Uncle, but if people fear an altered cob, surely they will not accept a genetically modified human being? After all, that's what this cell-picking is about, isn't it?"
"Do you think," says the uncle witheringly, "that people who believe that life on earth is the only one they have, that once they die there is nothing, that there are no consequences to their choices — one of Our Father Below's most successful slogans, by the way, choice — do you think, my boy, that they will hesitate if we give them the chance to cut and sew their medical destinies for the mere price of another's life? As Our Father pointed out to the Enemy during that unfortunate incident involving the man Job, "A person will give up everything in order to stay alive."
Mildew tries to hold his uncle's eye, but cannot. He looks down and fiddles awkwardly with his tie.
"No, my boy," Screwtape continues in kinder tones. "We are on the brink of wondrous things. This is better than the 18th century, when we convinced whole societies that black-skinned persons were things rather than people — "
"Bought and sold and damnation aplenty," Mildew nods, impressed, "but it didn't last."
"No thanks to Him," Screwtape snaps. "But we are winning now, I can feel it, Mildew. Think of this: In some rich societies, people are not just destroying blastocysts, not merely dismantling children in the womb, they are euthanizing newborn babies!" Screwtape pats the place where his heart would be, were he to have one. "That's one of my father's, you know. Euthanize. So clean, so modern-sounding. He got a bonus for that one. But not wormwood."
"The one I love," Mildew interjects enthusiastically, "is The Right to Die. It's so devilishly clever."
Screwtape looks thoughtfully into his empty glass. "It has potential, once we get the strong to use it regularly against the weak in the guise of being humane." The uncle frowns. "Unfortunately we're running into some difficulties with that slogan. This Florida case is not going as hoped. Right to Die tests well in some markets but the Enemy, blast Him, will keep enlisting these poisonous little brutes with their claptrap about the Culture of Life and whatnot. Things may improve when we are rid of that turbulent chief priest of His. It can't be long now."
Screwtape shakes his head as if to clear it.
"More wine? Let's finish the bottle, with a toast to a glorious future. These are heady times, Mildew, and we can use the Enemy's words against Him. He wants these creatures to believe that each one of them has value. The Enemy actually does value them, however tiny or aged, however mewling or puking or cleft of palate, if you can imagine it.
"The wonderful thing for us? It is increasingly easy to take that Enemy-given sense of intrinsic worth and twist it into cruel self-interest. With man's vanity, and a little medical breakthrough here and there, we can tempt them the prospect of a life without illness, inconvenience, or parasitical relatives. It will, for humans, be heaven on earth."
Screwtape chuckles darkly. "And afterwards? Why, we'll get to meet them down here. In person. And the loveliest bit of all is that their good intentions will have brought them here."
Uncle and nephew, grinning, raise their glasses once more.
"To the Father of Lies!"
From The Chicago Sun-Times:
Those in a rush to kill Schiavo ignoring facts of case
By John O'Sullivan
In November 1940, just one month before his assignment was due to end and 13 months before Hitler declared war on the United States, William L. Shirer, an American correspondent in Berlin, began to uncover disquieting evidence of one aspect of the Nazi government's then-unknown crimes against humanity. Oddly worded death notices began to appear in German provincial newspapers.
Shirer already suspected that the Nazis were contemplating a policy of the euthanasia of the mentally ill and incapacitated. He looked into the matter further. Shirer concluded that the Nazis were murdering the mentally ill.
It was a secretive and shameful business. Whatever Nazi theory held about the unfit, the Nazis feared the German people would resist the murder of innocent people with mental illnesses. Even in a society hardened by war and brutalized by Nazi propaganda, they took refuge in euphemisms. The official Nazi form letter sent to relatives included this sentence: "In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, his death, which saved him from a lifelong institutional sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release."
There are echoes in those words of the current advocacy of euthanasia and assisted suicide -- and, inevitably, of the Terri Schiavo case. In most such cases, the welfare of the proposed deceased is always said to be the dominant consideration. Yet the costs of looking after him or her -- social as well as individual -- are surely factors that inevitably push us toward seeing their deaths as necessary or beneficial. Unless there is a strong ethic of life to restrain us, we will always be able to find good reasons as to why a helpless invalid should quietly disappear and leave us in peace.
In the Schiavo case, supporters of the judicial decision that she be allowed to starve to death use a number of arguments: that it should be left to the spouse; that it is properly a matter for the states in which the feds should not intervene; that the Republicans are exploiting the case for partisan reasons, and that Congress has better things to do.
There is something unpleasantly legalistic and impersonal about applying such arguments as to whether an innocent woman should live or die. Still, let us examine each of these dry justifications in turn:
1. This is decision is traditionally -- and rightly -- left to the spouse. Such a tradition is reasonable, but it is surely open to question when a spouse has something to gain, either financially or psychologically, from the death of someone. Mr. Schiavo's motives may be entirely decent, but his wife's death might well be an unconscious psychological relief for him more than her. Besides, his status as a spouse is surely itself open to question when he has been living with someone else for several years. Bringing other relatives into the decision is more than reasonable -- it is necessary in such dubious cases.
2. This is a matter for the states rather than the feds. The Florida judge seems to have ignored some relevant medical evidence that would have pointed toward feeding Ms. Schiavo. For instance, she has not been given an MRI, and some of the doctors consulted believe she has a chance of partial recovery. And if there is the slightest chance of her recovery, surely she should be given it. When southern juries failed to convict the plain murderers of black Americans and civil rights workers, the feds intervened to protect the civil rights of the deceased. How much more reasonable it is to protect the civil rights of the still-not deceased Terri Schiavo from the questionable decisions of the judge.
3. Republicans are exploiting this sad case for partisan reasons. If that is so, there is a ready solution which many Democrats have already grasped and acted upon: namely, to prevent such exploitation by supporting the legislation to grant Ms. Schiavo a stay of execution.
4. Congress has better and more urgent things to do such as tackling global warming, etc. This is perhaps the most repellent argument of all. What is better or more urgent than saving an innocent person from an unjust death inflicted by ourselves? We used to think it was one of the glories of the Anglo-American political and legal system that it would take time out from such things as global energy regulation to ensure "let right be done" in an individual case. In the Archer-Shee case in Edwardian Britain -- brilliantly dramatized by Terence Rattigan and faithfully filmed by David Mamet as "The Winslow Boy" -- Parliament spent precious time debating whether a boy had been wrongly expelled from a naval school for allegedly stealing a five shilling postal order. Congress' attempt to save Schiavo illustrates the same profoundly decent set of priorities in a much more important matter.
This set of priorities is light years away from the cold impersonal heartlessness of the Nazi sociologists. We should be proud that we live in a country where the highest in the land can still spend days seeking to save the life of one helpless person who can never thank, assist or otherwise repay them.
Those in a rush to kill Schiavo ignoring facts of case
By John O'Sullivan
In November 1940, just one month before his assignment was due to end and 13 months before Hitler declared war on the United States, William L. Shirer, an American correspondent in Berlin, began to uncover disquieting evidence of one aspect of the Nazi government's then-unknown crimes against humanity. Oddly worded death notices began to appear in German provincial newspapers.
Shirer already suspected that the Nazis were contemplating a policy of the euthanasia of the mentally ill and incapacitated. He looked into the matter further. Shirer concluded that the Nazis were murdering the mentally ill.
It was a secretive and shameful business. Whatever Nazi theory held about the unfit, the Nazis feared the German people would resist the murder of innocent people with mental illnesses. Even in a society hardened by war and brutalized by Nazi propaganda, they took refuge in euphemisms. The official Nazi form letter sent to relatives included this sentence: "In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, his death, which saved him from a lifelong institutional sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release."
There are echoes in those words of the current advocacy of euthanasia and assisted suicide -- and, inevitably, of the Terri Schiavo case. In most such cases, the welfare of the proposed deceased is always said to be the dominant consideration. Yet the costs of looking after him or her -- social as well as individual -- are surely factors that inevitably push us toward seeing their deaths as necessary or beneficial. Unless there is a strong ethic of life to restrain us, we will always be able to find good reasons as to why a helpless invalid should quietly disappear and leave us in peace.
In the Schiavo case, supporters of the judicial decision that she be allowed to starve to death use a number of arguments: that it should be left to the spouse; that it is properly a matter for the states in which the feds should not intervene; that the Republicans are exploiting the case for partisan reasons, and that Congress has better things to do.
There is something unpleasantly legalistic and impersonal about applying such arguments as to whether an innocent woman should live or die. Still, let us examine each of these dry justifications in turn:
1. This is decision is traditionally -- and rightly -- left to the spouse. Such a tradition is reasonable, but it is surely open to question when a spouse has something to gain, either financially or psychologically, from the death of someone. Mr. Schiavo's motives may be entirely decent, but his wife's death might well be an unconscious psychological relief for him more than her. Besides, his status as a spouse is surely itself open to question when he has been living with someone else for several years. Bringing other relatives into the decision is more than reasonable -- it is necessary in such dubious cases.
2. This is a matter for the states rather than the feds. The Florida judge seems to have ignored some relevant medical evidence that would have pointed toward feeding Ms. Schiavo. For instance, she has not been given an MRI, and some of the doctors consulted believe she has a chance of partial recovery. And if there is the slightest chance of her recovery, surely she should be given it. When southern juries failed to convict the plain murderers of black Americans and civil rights workers, the feds intervened to protect the civil rights of the deceased. How much more reasonable it is to protect the civil rights of the still-not deceased Terri Schiavo from the questionable decisions of the judge.
3. Republicans are exploiting this sad case for partisan reasons. If that is so, there is a ready solution which many Democrats have already grasped and acted upon: namely, to prevent such exploitation by supporting the legislation to grant Ms. Schiavo a stay of execution.
4. Congress has better and more urgent things to do such as tackling global warming, etc. This is perhaps the most repellent argument of all. What is better or more urgent than saving an innocent person from an unjust death inflicted by ourselves? We used to think it was one of the glories of the Anglo-American political and legal system that it would take time out from such things as global energy regulation to ensure "let right be done" in an individual case. In the Archer-Shee case in Edwardian Britain -- brilliantly dramatized by Terence Rattigan and faithfully filmed by David Mamet as "The Winslow Boy" -- Parliament spent precious time debating whether a boy had been wrongly expelled from a naval school for allegedly stealing a five shilling postal order. Congress' attempt to save Schiavo illustrates the same profoundly decent set of priorities in a much more important matter.
This set of priorities is light years away from the cold impersonal heartlessness of the Nazi sociologists. We should be proud that we live in a country where the highest in the land can still spend days seeking to save the life of one helpless person who can never thank, assist or otherwise repay them.
From The News and Observer:
Jawad Williams wants to give Tar Heels a lift
UNC senior struggled against Cyclones
By Robbi Pickeral
CHAPEL HILL -- With an aching left hip the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, North Carolina senior Jawad Williams wasn't able to give his team the physical lift he had hoped to provide.
But as the top-seeded Tar Heels (29-4) prepare to play No. 5 seed Villanova (24-7) in the round of 16 Friday in Syracuse, N.Y., Williams is determined to regain his lift and give the team one as well.
"I need to play big, and I know I will," said Williams, who has started all 33 games at power forward this season. "After a game like that, you've got nowhere to go but up."
Williams was referring to an 0-for-6 shooting performance Saturday against Iowa State. In the first two rounds, the 6-foot-9 senior averaged only 20 minutes and totaled 10 points and six rebounds.
Williams, who scored in double figures in the first 19 games of the season, has managed to produce that many only once in his past six games. During that span, he has made only 15 of 47 shots.
After twisting both of his knees in the final month of the season and suffering a hip flexor injury in practice nine days ago, Williams was called the team's most beaten-up player by Carolina coach Roy Williams. The player, however, refused to blame his weekend performance on his hip injury.
"It was just one of those games,'' he said, shaking his head.
Teammates said the hip, as well as the practices he missed as a result of the injury, tamed his speed and explosiveness around the basket.
"It was tough for him," center Sean May said. "Even against Oakland [in the first round], he was shooting the ball well, but he wasn't finishing plays as often around the basket as he normally does.
"There were a couple plays where I gave him a bounce pass, and normally he would have gone up and dunked it on somebody. He didn't have the lift that he normally has."
Against the Cyclones on Sunday, Williams started pressing to do too much, coach Roy Williams said. That hurt in a different way.
"You want something so badly that you start pressing," the coach said. "He missed his first jump shot, and then missed the two free throws, and then missed the layup. I thought it sort of snowballed. But he gave ... us tremendous effort. It just wasn't very effective."
Jawad Williams planned to participate fully in UNC's hard practice Tuesday, and how much he works out the rest of the week will be determined by how sore he feels, the coach said.
The player said Tuesday that he is feeling better, was shooting better, and plans to play better this weekend.
He knows a trip to the Final Four may depend on it.
"I talked with him on the way to Bible study," May said, "and he just said: 'Hey, man, I've been through some tough times before. This is nothing. I've had one bad game, and everybody thinks it's the end of the world. We won, and that's the only thing that matters.' "
Jawad Williams wants to give Tar Heels a lift
UNC senior struggled against Cyclones
By Robbi Pickeral
CHAPEL HILL -- With an aching left hip the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, North Carolina senior Jawad Williams wasn't able to give his team the physical lift he had hoped to provide.
But as the top-seeded Tar Heels (29-4) prepare to play No. 5 seed Villanova (24-7) in the round of 16 Friday in Syracuse, N.Y., Williams is determined to regain his lift and give the team one as well.
"I need to play big, and I know I will," said Williams, who has started all 33 games at power forward this season. "After a game like that, you've got nowhere to go but up."
Williams was referring to an 0-for-6 shooting performance Saturday against Iowa State. In the first two rounds, the 6-foot-9 senior averaged only 20 minutes and totaled 10 points and six rebounds.
Williams, who scored in double figures in the first 19 games of the season, has managed to produce that many only once in his past six games. During that span, he has made only 15 of 47 shots.
After twisting both of his knees in the final month of the season and suffering a hip flexor injury in practice nine days ago, Williams was called the team's most beaten-up player by Carolina coach Roy Williams. The player, however, refused to blame his weekend performance on his hip injury.
"It was just one of those games,'' he said, shaking his head.
Teammates said the hip, as well as the practices he missed as a result of the injury, tamed his speed and explosiveness around the basket.
"It was tough for him," center Sean May said. "Even against Oakland [in the first round], he was shooting the ball well, but he wasn't finishing plays as often around the basket as he normally does.
"There were a couple plays where I gave him a bounce pass, and normally he would have gone up and dunked it on somebody. He didn't have the lift that he normally has."
Against the Cyclones on Sunday, Williams started pressing to do too much, coach Roy Williams said. That hurt in a different way.
"You want something so badly that you start pressing," the coach said. "He missed his first jump shot, and then missed the two free throws, and then missed the layup. I thought it sort of snowballed. But he gave ... us tremendous effort. It just wasn't very effective."
Jawad Williams planned to participate fully in UNC's hard practice Tuesday, and how much he works out the rest of the week will be determined by how sore he feels, the coach said.
The player said Tuesday that he is feeling better, was shooting better, and plans to play better this weekend.
He knows a trip to the Final Four may depend on it.
"I talked with him on the way to Bible study," May said, "and he just said: 'Hey, man, I've been through some tough times before. This is nothing. I've had one bad game, and everybody thinks it's the end of the world. We won, and that's the only thing that matters.' "
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
From The UK Telegraph:
The strange death of the liberal West
By Mark Steyn
I am, as Tony Blair might say, deeply passionately personally deeply personally opposed to abortion. But, unlike him, I think it ought to be an election issue.
Not because of my personal beliefs: I happen to believe a lot of what we call "late-term abortion" is in reality early-term infanticide, but, if you don't accept that that's a human life that's being destroyed, my deeply personal passionate beliefs aren't likely to sway you one way or another. That's where so-called progressive politicians such as Blair and John Kerry have it all backwards: the point about abortion is not that it's a "matter of conscience" for individuals to "wrestle with", but that it's a crucial part of the central political challenge of our time.
Almost every issue facing the EU - from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities - has at its heart the same glaringly plain root cause: a huge lack of babies. I could understand a disinclination by sunny politicians to peddle doom and gloom were it not for the fact that, in all other areas of public policy, our rulers embrace doomsday scenarios at the drop of a hat. Most 20-year projections - on global warming, fuel resources, etc - are almost laughably speculative. They fail to take into account the most important factor of all - human inventiveness: "We can't feed the world!" they shriek. But we develop more efficient farming methods with nary a thought. "The oil will run out by the year 2000!" But we develop new extraction methods and find we've got enough oil for as long as we'll need it.
But human inventiveness depends on humans - and that's the one thing we really are running out of. When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2005, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2025 (or 2033, or 2041, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management, Systemic Racism and Gay Studies degrees). If that's not a political issue, what is? To cite only the most obviously affected corner of the realm, what's the long-term future of the Scottish National Party if there are no Scottish nationals?
When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.
Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?
Shortly after 9/11, I wrote in these pages about one of the most curious aspects of the new war - the assurance given to Islamist "martyrs" that 72 virgins were standing by to pleasure them for eternity. The notion that the after-life is a well-appointed brothel is a perplexing one to the Judaeo-Christian world, and I suggested that Americans would be sceptical if heaven were framed purely in terms of boundless earthly pleasures.
But, on reflection, if the Islamists are banal in portraying the next world purely in terms of sensual self-gratification, we're just as reductive in measuring this one the same way. America this Holy Week is following the frenzied efforts to halt the court-enforced starvation of a brain-damaged woman for no reason other than that her continued existence is an inconvenience to her husband. In Britain, two doctors escape prosecution for aborting an otherwise healthy baby with a treatable cleft palate because the authorities are satisfied they acted "in good faith". You can read similar stories in almost any corner of the developed world, except perhaps the Netherlands, where discretionary euthanasia is so advanced it's news if the kid makes it out of the maternity ward. As the New York Times reported the other day: "Babies born into what is certain to be a brief life of grievous suffering should have their lives ended by physicians under strict guidelines, according to two doctors in the Netherlands.
"The doctors, Eduard Verhagen and Pieter J. J. Sauer of the University Medical Center in Groningen, in an essay in today's New England Journal of Medicine, said they had developed guidelines, known as the Groningen protocol."
Ah, the protocols of the elders of science. Odd the way scientists have such little regard for scientific progress. It's highly likely that many birth defects - not just the bilateral cleft lips - will be treatable and correctible in the next decade or two. But once you start weighing the relative values of individual lives, there's no end to it. Much of that derives from the way abortion has redefined life - as a "choice", an option.
In practice, a culture that thinks Terri Schiavo's life in Florida or the cleft-lipped baby's in Herefordshire has no value winds up ascribing no value to life in general. Hence, the shrivelled fertility rates in Europe and in blue-state America: John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birth rates; George W Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.
The 19th-century Shaker communities were forbidden from breeding and could increase their number only by conversion. The Euro-Canadian-Democratic Party welfare secularists seem to have chosen the same predicament voluntarily, and are likely to meet the same fate. The martyrdom culture of radical Islam is a literal dead end. But so is the slyer death culture of post-Christian radical narcissism. This is the political issue that will determine all the others: it's the demography, stupid.
The strange death of the liberal West
By Mark Steyn
I am, as Tony Blair might say, deeply passionately personally deeply personally opposed to abortion. But, unlike him, I think it ought to be an election issue.
Not because of my personal beliefs: I happen to believe a lot of what we call "late-term abortion" is in reality early-term infanticide, but, if you don't accept that that's a human life that's being destroyed, my deeply personal passionate beliefs aren't likely to sway you one way or another. That's where so-called progressive politicians such as Blair and John Kerry have it all backwards: the point about abortion is not that it's a "matter of conscience" for individuals to "wrestle with", but that it's a crucial part of the central political challenge of our time.
Almost every issue facing the EU - from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities - has at its heart the same glaringly plain root cause: a huge lack of babies. I could understand a disinclination by sunny politicians to peddle doom and gloom were it not for the fact that, in all other areas of public policy, our rulers embrace doomsday scenarios at the drop of a hat. Most 20-year projections - on global warming, fuel resources, etc - are almost laughably speculative. They fail to take into account the most important factor of all - human inventiveness: "We can't feed the world!" they shriek. But we develop more efficient farming methods with nary a thought. "The oil will run out by the year 2000!" But we develop new extraction methods and find we've got enough oil for as long as we'll need it.
But human inventiveness depends on humans - and that's the one thing we really are running out of. When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2005, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2025 (or 2033, or 2041, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management, Systemic Racism and Gay Studies degrees). If that's not a political issue, what is? To cite only the most obviously affected corner of the realm, what's the long-term future of the Scottish National Party if there are no Scottish nationals?
When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.
Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?
Shortly after 9/11, I wrote in these pages about one of the most curious aspects of the new war - the assurance given to Islamist "martyrs" that 72 virgins were standing by to pleasure them for eternity. The notion that the after-life is a well-appointed brothel is a perplexing one to the Judaeo-Christian world, and I suggested that Americans would be sceptical if heaven were framed purely in terms of boundless earthly pleasures.
But, on reflection, if the Islamists are banal in portraying the next world purely in terms of sensual self-gratification, we're just as reductive in measuring this one the same way. America this Holy Week is following the frenzied efforts to halt the court-enforced starvation of a brain-damaged woman for no reason other than that her continued existence is an inconvenience to her husband. In Britain, two doctors escape prosecution for aborting an otherwise healthy baby with a treatable cleft palate because the authorities are satisfied they acted "in good faith". You can read similar stories in almost any corner of the developed world, except perhaps the Netherlands, where discretionary euthanasia is so advanced it's news if the kid makes it out of the maternity ward. As the New York Times reported the other day: "Babies born into what is certain to be a brief life of grievous suffering should have their lives ended by physicians under strict guidelines, according to two doctors in the Netherlands.
"The doctors, Eduard Verhagen and Pieter J. J. Sauer of the University Medical Center in Groningen, in an essay in today's New England Journal of Medicine, said they had developed guidelines, known as the Groningen protocol."
Ah, the protocols of the elders of science. Odd the way scientists have such little regard for scientific progress. It's highly likely that many birth defects - not just the bilateral cleft lips - will be treatable and correctible in the next decade or two. But once you start weighing the relative values of individual lives, there's no end to it. Much of that derives from the way abortion has redefined life - as a "choice", an option.
In practice, a culture that thinks Terri Schiavo's life in Florida or the cleft-lipped baby's in Herefordshire has no value winds up ascribing no value to life in general. Hence, the shrivelled fertility rates in Europe and in blue-state America: John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birth rates; George W Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.
The 19th-century Shaker communities were forbidden from breeding and could increase their number only by conversion. The Euro-Canadian-Democratic Party welfare secularists seem to have chosen the same predicament voluntarily, and are likely to meet the same fate. The martyrdom culture of radical Islam is a literal dead end. But so is the slyer death culture of post-Christian radical narcissism. This is the political issue that will determine all the others: it's the demography, stupid.
From Opinion Journal:
'Culture of Life'
The Schiavo case shows that it's about more than abortion.
By Brendan Miniter
During the presidential campaign last year, George W. Bush talked about the need to promote a "culture of life." Anyone who dismissed such talk as just a way to spin antiabortion views without scaring pro-choice voters should pay closer attention. Today the Terri Schiavo case is revealing that protecting life is much broader than that single issue, and that it is a central component of Mr. Bush's governing philosophy.
With Congress passing and President Bush signing legislation early yesterday morning that may end up saving Mrs. Schiavo's life, some are now accusing Republicans of crass political motives. That misses the larger public debate joined in America and largely promulgated by those the media often dismiss as "the religious right." From stem cells to abortion, Americans are confronting questions about life--when it begins and when it ceases to be valuable--more than at any time in our history. Partly we have science to blame for this debate, since medicine can sustain life long past the body's ability to function on its own. But the debate is so intense because it is about the direction in which we'd like our culture to move.
Perhaps it is fitting then that this debate should reach a crescendo in the run-up to Easter, a celebration ultimately about the resurrection of life. Several high-profile events have made Americans think about life in ways they might have otherwise been able to avoid. Ashley Smith helped bring in alleged murderer Brian Nichols by convincing him that his life still had meaning, even if he should spend the rest of it behind bars. One way she did this was by reading to him from the best-selling book "A Purpose-Driven Life." Scott Peterson was sentenced to death recently for the murder of his pregnant wife and their unborn son, Conner, who in different circumstances would have been considered a clump of cells. And Pope John Paul II's health has made many Catholics confront the realities of growing old and frail. He has persisted in carrying out his duties, even as Parkinson's disease is robbing him of his abilities, demonstrating that even a life much reduced has tremendous meaning.
This is the backdrop of the national stage upon which Terri Schiavo has been thrust. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, insists her life no longer has meaning and that it was her wish not to live on under such circumstances. Mr. Schaivo blames House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and other Republicans for bringing the federal government into what he sees as purely a private family matter. But this case was destined to make it into the national consciousness long before Washington politicians got involved. Her parents were never going to go along quietly with killing her. They even set up a foundation in Terri's name to help publicize her case, raise money and provide for her care. Mrs. Schiavo isn't a cause célèbre for Republicans. The struggle to keep her alive embodies the larger right-to-life battle millions of Americans have been fighting for decades.
A flashpoint has long been abortion, but it's wrong to think this battle is entirely about "a woman's right to choose" or about protecting only unborn life. A large segment of the population feels that there has been a coarsening of our culture, that as a society we no longer view life as precious and valuable in all its forms. Abortion on demand is a sign of that coarsening, but so is euthanasia and the push to use stem cells from frozen embryos and tissue from aborted babies. Like Terri Schiavo's family, many Americans have decided they aren't going to remain silent as lives are discarded as "worthless."
The president also decided he wasn't going to sit by on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, while Terri Schiavo slowly died of dehydration. It is said that tough cases make bad law, and that's why it was wise for Congress to legislate only on this specific case rather than "making law" for everyone.
But it is also true that extreme examples have a way of laying out cultural markers that help define our society. On stem cell research, cutting off federal funding of abortion clinics overseas, bringing faith-based groups into public policy and judicial nominations, President Bush has been nudging American society toward a culture of life. Now, by flying back to Washington and signing legislation well into the night, Mr. Bush is laying out a cultural marker. The president of the United States is saying, We're for life. That's not political pandering. It's the rise of a cultural movement.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
'Culture of Life'
The Schiavo case shows that it's about more than abortion.
By Brendan Miniter
During the presidential campaign last year, George W. Bush talked about the need to promote a "culture of life." Anyone who dismissed such talk as just a way to spin antiabortion views without scaring pro-choice voters should pay closer attention. Today the Terri Schiavo case is revealing that protecting life is much broader than that single issue, and that it is a central component of Mr. Bush's governing philosophy.
With Congress passing and President Bush signing legislation early yesterday morning that may end up saving Mrs. Schiavo's life, some are now accusing Republicans of crass political motives. That misses the larger public debate joined in America and largely promulgated by those the media often dismiss as "the religious right." From stem cells to abortion, Americans are confronting questions about life--when it begins and when it ceases to be valuable--more than at any time in our history. Partly we have science to blame for this debate, since medicine can sustain life long past the body's ability to function on its own. But the debate is so intense because it is about the direction in which we'd like our culture to move.
Perhaps it is fitting then that this debate should reach a crescendo in the run-up to Easter, a celebration ultimately about the resurrection of life. Several high-profile events have made Americans think about life in ways they might have otherwise been able to avoid. Ashley Smith helped bring in alleged murderer Brian Nichols by convincing him that his life still had meaning, even if he should spend the rest of it behind bars. One way she did this was by reading to him from the best-selling book "A Purpose-Driven Life." Scott Peterson was sentenced to death recently for the murder of his pregnant wife and their unborn son, Conner, who in different circumstances would have been considered a clump of cells. And Pope John Paul II's health has made many Catholics confront the realities of growing old and frail. He has persisted in carrying out his duties, even as Parkinson's disease is robbing him of his abilities, demonstrating that even a life much reduced has tremendous meaning.
This is the backdrop of the national stage upon which Terri Schiavo has been thrust. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, insists her life no longer has meaning and that it was her wish not to live on under such circumstances. Mr. Schaivo blames House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and other Republicans for bringing the federal government into what he sees as purely a private family matter. But this case was destined to make it into the national consciousness long before Washington politicians got involved. Her parents were never going to go along quietly with killing her. They even set up a foundation in Terri's name to help publicize her case, raise money and provide for her care. Mrs. Schiavo isn't a cause célèbre for Republicans. The struggle to keep her alive embodies the larger right-to-life battle millions of Americans have been fighting for decades.
A flashpoint has long been abortion, but it's wrong to think this battle is entirely about "a woman's right to choose" or about protecting only unborn life. A large segment of the population feels that there has been a coarsening of our culture, that as a society we no longer view life as precious and valuable in all its forms. Abortion on demand is a sign of that coarsening, but so is euthanasia and the push to use stem cells from frozen embryos and tissue from aborted babies. Like Terri Schiavo's family, many Americans have decided they aren't going to remain silent as lives are discarded as "worthless."
The president also decided he wasn't going to sit by on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, while Terri Schiavo slowly died of dehydration. It is said that tough cases make bad law, and that's why it was wise for Congress to legislate only on this specific case rather than "making law" for everyone.
But it is also true that extreme examples have a way of laying out cultural markers that help define our society. On stem cell research, cutting off federal funding of abortion clinics overseas, bringing faith-based groups into public policy and judicial nominations, President Bush has been nudging American society toward a culture of life. Now, by flying back to Washington and signing legislation well into the night, Mr. Bush is laying out a cultural marker. The president of the United States is saying, We're for life. That's not political pandering. It's the rise of a cultural movement.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
From The New York Times-another cultural icon passes:
Bobby Short, Keeping the Party Going
By Stephen Holden
There are few entertainers about whom one could say, So-and-so is simply the best. For nearly four decades, Bobby Short reigned at the Cafe Carlyle on New York's Upper East Side as America's quintessential male cabaret singer-pianist. The best at what he did, Mr. Short, who died yesterday, elevated the humble role of the piano-bar entertainer to an art.
To the extent that it flourishes in the music of Michael Feinstein, Steve Ross, Eric Comstock and Billy Stritch, to name four talented younger practitioners, that tradition owes an incalculable debt to Bobby Short.
Twice a year, this eternally boyish bon vivant bounced into the Cafe Carlyle to play the indefatigably merry host of a Manhattan party that lasted for only a little more than an hour, but left you feeling refreshed and aglow. He evoked the joyful hi-de-ho of Cab Calloway, refined for the salon. Giving himself to performance with the enthusiasm of an excitable child, he would often leap from his piano bench and throw out his arms as if to embrace the room, all the while maintaining perfect enunciation. At this elegant bash, guests from downtown, uptown, out of town and out of the country partied side by side under the spell of his unflappable bonhomie.
To dismiss Mr. Short, as some did, as a plaything of the rich and the chic is to overlook his contribution to jazz and to New York cultural life. He was one of the last exponents of an ebullient dusk-till-dawn nightclub culture that flourished in Manhattan until it was done in by television, rock 'n' roll and its own inflationary pressures.
At the keyboard, Mr. Short refined his own personal brand of stride piano. Vigorous and sophisticated but devoid of fuss and frills, it was as distinctive as his voice, to which it was inextricably wedded. Over the years, his sound evolved from that of a caroling choirboy into a huskier baritone whose timbre varied from fogbound to clear, depending on the night and sometimes on the moment. As his voice acquired deeper shades and rougher textures, he made adroit, expressive use of each new facet.
Championing the work of African-American songwriters like Duke Ellington, Calloway, Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, he placed their music on the same pedestal as standards by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Each performance suggested a continuing dialogue between uptown and downtown that demonstrated the depth of communication between Harlem and Broadway. His performances and recordings played a crucial role in leveling the racial playing field of American pop and helping bring a shamefully obscured history to light.
Because he entertained predominantly white audiences in upscale spaces like the Cafe Carlyle, Mr. Short could be mistakenly written off as a snob. Contributing to that impression was the air of la-di-dah insouciance he shared with other performers, like his friend Mabel Mercer, the great cabaret singer. A sense of style, however, is not to be confused with superficiality. Like Ms. Mercer, Mr. Short could plumb the depths of a song when the occasion demanded.
That style was an expression of Mr. Short's personal philosophy. Because his career was a fantastic feat of self-invention, it is little wonder that the predominant spirit he conveyed was a childlike awe and pleasure at living the high life. As the years piled up and he suffered from debilitating ailments that made walking increasingly difficult in his final years, he concealed his discomfort. Each performance became an act of self-transformation in which he threw off his troubles. Every time he sang Razaf and J. C. Johnson's racy announcement, "Guess Who's in Town," he conveyed the exuberance of someone who had just breezed into the room to give the party a lift.
For all his elegance, Mr. Short could never be called effete, and his performances burst with a playful, robust sensuality. Lil Green's bumping and grinding hymn to uninhibited lovemaking, "Romance in the Dark," became a long-running showstopper that Mr. Short milked for every ounce of jolly lubricity.
Taken together, the songs that formed the backbone of his enormous repertory became variations of that upbeat philosophy. At the very heart of it stood "Just One of Those Things," Cole Porter's regret-free, laughing-it-off epitaph to a love affair that passes like a streak of lightning: "It was great fun, but it was just one of those things." If there are regrets, they are minor compared with the sheer thrill of being alive and of having the chance to begin again.
Bobby Short, Keeping the Party Going
By Stephen Holden
There are few entertainers about whom one could say, So-and-so is simply the best. For nearly four decades, Bobby Short reigned at the Cafe Carlyle on New York's Upper East Side as America's quintessential male cabaret singer-pianist. The best at what he did, Mr. Short, who died yesterday, elevated the humble role of the piano-bar entertainer to an art.
To the extent that it flourishes in the music of Michael Feinstein, Steve Ross, Eric Comstock and Billy Stritch, to name four talented younger practitioners, that tradition owes an incalculable debt to Bobby Short.
Twice a year, this eternally boyish bon vivant bounced into the Cafe Carlyle to play the indefatigably merry host of a Manhattan party that lasted for only a little more than an hour, but left you feeling refreshed and aglow. He evoked the joyful hi-de-ho of Cab Calloway, refined for the salon. Giving himself to performance with the enthusiasm of an excitable child, he would often leap from his piano bench and throw out his arms as if to embrace the room, all the while maintaining perfect enunciation. At this elegant bash, guests from downtown, uptown, out of town and out of the country partied side by side under the spell of his unflappable bonhomie.
To dismiss Mr. Short, as some did, as a plaything of the rich and the chic is to overlook his contribution to jazz and to New York cultural life. He was one of the last exponents of an ebullient dusk-till-dawn nightclub culture that flourished in Manhattan until it was done in by television, rock 'n' roll and its own inflationary pressures.
At the keyboard, Mr. Short refined his own personal brand of stride piano. Vigorous and sophisticated but devoid of fuss and frills, it was as distinctive as his voice, to which it was inextricably wedded. Over the years, his sound evolved from that of a caroling choirboy into a huskier baritone whose timbre varied from fogbound to clear, depending on the night and sometimes on the moment. As his voice acquired deeper shades and rougher textures, he made adroit, expressive use of each new facet.
Championing the work of African-American songwriters like Duke Ellington, Calloway, Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, he placed their music on the same pedestal as standards by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Each performance suggested a continuing dialogue between uptown and downtown that demonstrated the depth of communication between Harlem and Broadway. His performances and recordings played a crucial role in leveling the racial playing field of American pop and helping bring a shamefully obscured history to light.
Because he entertained predominantly white audiences in upscale spaces like the Cafe Carlyle, Mr. Short could be mistakenly written off as a snob. Contributing to that impression was the air of la-di-dah insouciance he shared with other performers, like his friend Mabel Mercer, the great cabaret singer. A sense of style, however, is not to be confused with superficiality. Like Ms. Mercer, Mr. Short could plumb the depths of a song when the occasion demanded.
That style was an expression of Mr. Short's personal philosophy. Because his career was a fantastic feat of self-invention, it is little wonder that the predominant spirit he conveyed was a childlike awe and pleasure at living the high life. As the years piled up and he suffered from debilitating ailments that made walking increasingly difficult in his final years, he concealed his discomfort. Each performance became an act of self-transformation in which he threw off his troubles. Every time he sang Razaf and J. C. Johnson's racy announcement, "Guess Who's in Town," he conveyed the exuberance of someone who had just breezed into the room to give the party a lift.
For all his elegance, Mr. Short could never be called effete, and his performances burst with a playful, robust sensuality. Lil Green's bumping and grinding hymn to uninhibited lovemaking, "Romance in the Dark," became a long-running showstopper that Mr. Short milked for every ounce of jolly lubricity.
Taken together, the songs that formed the backbone of his enormous repertory became variations of that upbeat philosophy. At the very heart of it stood "Just One of Those Things," Cole Porter's regret-free, laughing-it-off epitaph to a love affair that passes like a streak of lightning: "It was great fun, but it was just one of those things." If there are regrets, they are minor compared with the sheer thrill of being alive and of having the chance to begin again.
From washingtonpost.com: Another well thought out piece on MLB's steroid scandals.
Hearing Is Believing
By Sally Jenkins
A week ago, the emerald chessboard crowd predicted the congressional hearing into steroid use in Major League Baseball would be a pointless farce. A week later, we're still talking about them. The hearings are far from over, and here are some of the things we've already learned: Not only do steroids shrink your organs into onions and induce suicide, but they turn heroes into cowards, and baseball officials into worms.
The House Government Reform Committee has shone an unmerciful light on baseball. And things look different under the light. In fact, some things look to be the exact opposite of what they were a week ago. A week ago, the committee's inquiry looked illegitimate to some, and baseball was being persecuted. This week, under the light, it's baseball that looks illegitimate.
A home run king basically pleaded the Fifth. Baseball officials thoroughly discredited themselves with disingenuous promises. Subpoenas showed MLB's anti-drug policy had loopholes bigger than Jose Canseco's biceps. Anyone still think the hearing was a farce? On the contrary, the hearing has been revelatory. It has revealed, among other things, character.
What the hearing has demonstrated, more than anything, is a pattern of arrogant duplicity and willful collusion that reaches throughout the game, from players to owners to commissioners to union officials, who would keep us all quiet and in the dark on steroid use. The evasive performances of some of the seven former and current major leaguers and officials before the committee last week simply begged more questions -- and that's apparently what they're going to get. On Sunday, the committee chairman, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), suggested that baseball will undergo further investigation during an interview with Bob Schieffer on CBS's "Face the Nation."
"We consider steroid abuse to still be rampant," he said. "And we're going to have a lot more to say."
If it weren't for the blast of stage lighting that was turned on baseball's drug policy last week, we might not have known about a provision that would have allowed players to be anonymously fined instead of publicly suspended for failing a drug test. By the start of this week, baseball had reversed itself and done away with that nifty little clause, out of sheer public embarrassment.
If it weren't for the blast of stage lighting, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) might still think baseball didn't need any help cleaning itself up. As recently as a week ago, he looked skeptically on inquiries by the House committee, but he has now done an about face and concluded that baseball officials won't change until they're forced to, even if that means federal legislation. "It just seems to me they can't be trusted," McCain told ABC's "This Week."
"I was a little dubious about the necessity of having hearings because I had been told that baseball had installed a weak, but legitimate, regimen," McCain added. "I now applaud my colleagues in the House because what this highlighted was the absolute insensitivity of both the owners and the players to the American people."
Similarly, a week ago Canseco was a self-aggrandizing villain, and Mark McGwire was a benign and unfairly targeted victim. Baseball's passionate defenders went to great lengths to discredit the Canseco book, and protect McGwire. This week, while the book still seems written to inflame and entertain, it's also clearly on the money in its essentials. And McGwire is the one who looks like the self-aggrandizing villain.
A week ago, steroids were a cold abstraction. We were numbed by generalities (steroids ruin the health of our young), or bogged down in technical jargon (doctors discuss vowel-laden substances that end in zols), or lost in the intricate police procedurals of the star-chamber-like U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (with its false negatives and non-analytical positives).
But the House Government Reform Committee has changed everything. The most important single accomplishment of the hearing is that it made steroids a more vivid and important issue to us. And that is the real reason why baseball commissioner Bud Selig and player representative Donald Fehr found common cause in criticizing and opposing the hearing: because they understood that putting major leaguers and baseball officials under the light, in front of congressional microphones, would rivet us in a way no public lecture or four-part investigative series could.
The hearing isn't going to provide definitive answers. It won't force a full confession from a major leaguer. But it has provided a more subtle kind of information. The unspoken subtext throughout Thursday's hearing was that few of the baseball people who testified think there is anything really very wrong with steroids. If McGwire really thought steroids were an evil, he would have answered questions more straightforwardly. If Selig and Fehr really thought steroids were an evil, they would have fashioned a direct and effective anti-drug policy, without Congress having to force them into it with the legal equivalents of a flashlight and a whiplash.
The hearing has uncovered something important: the extent to which the people in baseball believed they are above the law and accountable to no one. Baseball's passionate defenders have accused the committee of political grandstanding, exceeding authority, and witch hunting. But if the hearing has proved one thing, it's this: we need more hearings, because baseball is as sick as it is secretive.
Hearing Is Believing
By Sally Jenkins
A week ago, the emerald chessboard crowd predicted the congressional hearing into steroid use in Major League Baseball would be a pointless farce. A week later, we're still talking about them. The hearings are far from over, and here are some of the things we've already learned: Not only do steroids shrink your organs into onions and induce suicide, but they turn heroes into cowards, and baseball officials into worms.
The House Government Reform Committee has shone an unmerciful light on baseball. And things look different under the light. In fact, some things look to be the exact opposite of what they were a week ago. A week ago, the committee's inquiry looked illegitimate to some, and baseball was being persecuted. This week, under the light, it's baseball that looks illegitimate.
A home run king basically pleaded the Fifth. Baseball officials thoroughly discredited themselves with disingenuous promises. Subpoenas showed MLB's anti-drug policy had loopholes bigger than Jose Canseco's biceps. Anyone still think the hearing was a farce? On the contrary, the hearing has been revelatory. It has revealed, among other things, character.
What the hearing has demonstrated, more than anything, is a pattern of arrogant duplicity and willful collusion that reaches throughout the game, from players to owners to commissioners to union officials, who would keep us all quiet and in the dark on steroid use. The evasive performances of some of the seven former and current major leaguers and officials before the committee last week simply begged more questions -- and that's apparently what they're going to get. On Sunday, the committee chairman, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), suggested that baseball will undergo further investigation during an interview with Bob Schieffer on CBS's "Face the Nation."
"We consider steroid abuse to still be rampant," he said. "And we're going to have a lot more to say."
If it weren't for the blast of stage lighting that was turned on baseball's drug policy last week, we might not have known about a provision that would have allowed players to be anonymously fined instead of publicly suspended for failing a drug test. By the start of this week, baseball had reversed itself and done away with that nifty little clause, out of sheer public embarrassment.
If it weren't for the blast of stage lighting, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) might still think baseball didn't need any help cleaning itself up. As recently as a week ago, he looked skeptically on inquiries by the House committee, but he has now done an about face and concluded that baseball officials won't change until they're forced to, even if that means federal legislation. "It just seems to me they can't be trusted," McCain told ABC's "This Week."
"I was a little dubious about the necessity of having hearings because I had been told that baseball had installed a weak, but legitimate, regimen," McCain added. "I now applaud my colleagues in the House because what this highlighted was the absolute insensitivity of both the owners and the players to the American people."
Similarly, a week ago Canseco was a self-aggrandizing villain, and Mark McGwire was a benign and unfairly targeted victim. Baseball's passionate defenders went to great lengths to discredit the Canseco book, and protect McGwire. This week, while the book still seems written to inflame and entertain, it's also clearly on the money in its essentials. And McGwire is the one who looks like the self-aggrandizing villain.
A week ago, steroids were a cold abstraction. We were numbed by generalities (steroids ruin the health of our young), or bogged down in technical jargon (doctors discuss vowel-laden substances that end in zols), or lost in the intricate police procedurals of the star-chamber-like U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (with its false negatives and non-analytical positives).
But the House Government Reform Committee has changed everything. The most important single accomplishment of the hearing is that it made steroids a more vivid and important issue to us. And that is the real reason why baseball commissioner Bud Selig and player representative Donald Fehr found common cause in criticizing and opposing the hearing: because they understood that putting major leaguers and baseball officials under the light, in front of congressional microphones, would rivet us in a way no public lecture or four-part investigative series could.
The hearing isn't going to provide definitive answers. It won't force a full confession from a major leaguer. But it has provided a more subtle kind of information. The unspoken subtext throughout Thursday's hearing was that few of the baseball people who testified think there is anything really very wrong with steroids. If McGwire really thought steroids were an evil, he would have answered questions more straightforwardly. If Selig and Fehr really thought steroids were an evil, they would have fashioned a direct and effective anti-drug policy, without Congress having to force them into it with the legal equivalents of a flashlight and a whiplash.
The hearing has uncovered something important: the extent to which the people in baseball believed they are above the law and accountable to no one. Baseball's passionate defenders have accused the committee of political grandstanding, exceeding authority, and witch hunting. But if the hearing has proved one thing, it's this: we need more hearings, because baseball is as sick as it is secretive.
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