Category: default || By jt3y

I spent last night reading about the Terri Schiavo case, despite telling myself, over and over again, that I wouldn't. So don't hang around here expecting something light-hearted today; it isn't going to happen.

I have strong feelings on the Schiavo tragedy, and I could write a big, long soliloquy about the case, but there's nothing that I could argue that hasn't already been argue by people both better and worse informed than I am. There's also nothing particularly local about the case, so it's not really Almanac material.

It's just a thoroughly depressing affair, and it's really hard to imagine the hell that everyone --- Schiavo's parents, her husband, their families, their neighbors, the judges --- must be going through. Place yourself in the shoes of Terri Schiavo's parents. Of course they want their daughter to live, by any means necessary, even if she's only a shell of the person they raised. Her physical presence is a reminder, every day, of better times. And can you imagine how painful it must be for people like Michael Schiavo to watch, for 15 years, what's left of someone they loved whither away to nothing?

Neither side could have possibly predicted that their private grief would be turned into an international media circus, that they would be assigned motives by every idiot with a talk show and, yes, a Web page. The radio and cable TV yobbos keep obsessively dissecting little tiny scraps of information over and over again like a dog chewing on a bone, and listening to them blabber for 15 minutes makes it perfectly, painfully clear that they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

Anyone who can't sympathize with both sides in this debate is simply blinded by their own ideology, and the blowhards and greedheads who are exploiting this family's grief to score a few cheap Nielsen ratings points or to further their own political causes have the intellectual depth of puddles and the morals of alley cats in heat.

Which brings us, naturally, to the lunatics in the Senate and House --- and the White House --- who decided, on the basis of almost no information, to jump in with both feet and see if they couldn't make a bad situation even worse. When Democrats were in charge of Congress, Republicans used to joke that the scariest phrase in the English language was, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Well, seeing the Republican "help" over the weekend should leave any thinking American just as scared.

No matter what happens, there will never be any resolution for either the Schindlers or the Schiavos that leaves them satisfied. Whether Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is reinserted or not, she will never have a productive and happy life. After CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC and the chattering radio nimrods move onto to the next big "breaking news story," the Schindlers and Schiavos will be left alone with their heartbreak, forever.

Like I said, I could work myself up into a lather over this, but there's very little that I could write that hasn't been written better. Here are links to some of the better things I've read recently about the Schiavo case, and hopefully we'll have a lighter, happier Almanac on Thursday.

(P.S. The nearest newspaper to Pinellas Park, Fla., where Schiavo is hospitalized, is the St. Petersburg Times, which is regarded as one of the best newspapers of its size in the country. They have a complete archive of Schiavo coverage that is well worth your time, if you're so inclined.)

...

The end justifies the means.

When you have enough power, you can tell the courts to get lost, you can overrule the self-government of an entire state, you can obliterate the rule of law.

It does not matter that Florida's courts ruled that Terri Schiavo expressed the wish not to be kept alive artificially. We are entitled to ignore court rulings.

Neither does it matter that the doctors say that her brain has largely turned to fluid. We may dismiss these facts with a wave of the hand, or a sound bite on CNN.

Congress knows all. The federal government knows all. The strutting Tom DeLay and the unctuous Bill Frist know more than all the judges and doctors combined.

--- Howard Trexler, "With All Laws Flattened, Where Will We Hide?" St. Petersburg Times, March 22, 2005.

...

The Florida Legislature saw a half-dozen video snippets of Terri Schiavo in 2003 and hastily passed an unconstitutional law that kept her alive for more than a year.

Last week, Bill Frist, majority leader of the U.S. Senate and a doctor, reviewed the video images, pronounced her conscious and decried her "starvation." Then, he and his congressional colleagues also passed a "save Terri" law.

Through it all, well-meaning people all over the country have called Schiavo's husband a murderer and compared Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer to Adolf Hitler. (....)

In late 2003, I reviewed all four hours of videotape from Terri Schiavo's court-ordered medical evaluations, not just the four minutes and 20 seconds that are posted on the "terrisfight" Web site, and wrote a story about it. The complete videos -- the latest ones ---- are part of the court file. ... The video is poignant and, at times, painful. Mary Schindler bends to her daughter's face to chat and coo. On two occasions, Schiavo's eyes seem to focus and her mouth seems to broaden. Could that be a smile? (....)

(M)ore often than not, the parents' and doctors' ministrations elicit no apparent reaction --- at least not to someone unfamiliar with the nuances of her expressions. She mostly lies in bed with stiff limbs, loose jaw and unfocused eyes --- no matter how hard her parents try.

--- Stephen Nohlgren, "Videotape: Beyond the Snippets," St. Petersburg Times, March 22, 2005.

...

Q.: As a priest, how do you resolve questions in which the "sanctity of life" is involved?

A.: The sanctity of life? This has nothing to do with the sanctity of life. The Roman Catholic Church has a consistent 400-year-old tradition that I'm sure you are familiar with. It says nobody is obliged to undergo extraordinary means to preserve life.

This is Holy Week, this is when the Catholic community is saying, "We understand that life is not an absolute good and death is not an absolute defeat." The whole story of Easter is about the triumph of eternal life over death. Catholics have never believed that biological life is an end in and of itself. We've been created as a gift from God and are ultimately destined to go back to God. And we've been destined in this life to be involved in relationships. And when the capacity for that life is exhausted, there is no obligation to make officious efforts to sustain it.

This is not new doctrine. Back in 1950, Gerald Kelly, the leading Catholic moral theologian at the time, wrote a marvelous article on the obligation to use artificial means to sustain life. He published it in Theological Studies, the leading Catholic journal. He wrote, "I'm often asked whether you have to use IV feeding to sustain somebody who is in a terminal coma." And he said, "Not only do I believe there is no obligation to do it, I believe that imposing those treatments on that class of patients is wrong. There is no benefit to the patient, there is great expense to the community, and there is enormous tension on the family."

--- Interview with Rev. John Paris, the Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College, in Salon, March 22, 2005.

...

What are the two Americas? If you read the Washington Post, you read about a woman who had a heart attack and suffered brain damage in the process. In (MSNBC's) "Scarborough Country," you hear something else. You meet an impressive Nobel nominee --- and he makes "explosive allegations." He tells you she had no such heart attack. Instead, he suggests she was strangled by her husband.

These two Americas have existed for years. If you live in cable America, you routinely hear whole sets of things that never appear in the Washington Post, things that the Washington Post rarely attempts to discuss, describe or debate. Cable viewers live in one world; newspaper readers exist in another. Newspaper readers rarely hear what's being said in the other America. And for that reason, people who live in the cable America sometimes get played for plain fools.

Like last night, for example. Consider the impressive Hammesfahr, the brilliant Nobel Prize nominee. Here's what we found when we ran a search: Three years ago, David Sommer of the St. Petersburg Times reported that Hammesfahr "advertises himself as a nominee for a Nobel Prize based on a letter his congressman wrote to the Nobel committee." Yes, Hammesfahr was "nominated" for the Nobel Prize by his Republican congressman, Peter Bilirakis, back in 1999! And uh-oh! In 2003, William Levesque of the St. Peterburg Times described more of Hammesfahr's brilliance:

LEVESQUE (10/25/03): In a 2002 order by Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer ruling that Mrs. Schiavo could not recover, Greer labeled Hammesfahr a "self-promoter." The judge noted that Hammesfahr testified that he had treated patients worse off than Mrs. Schiavo yet "offered no names, no case studies, no videos and no test results to support his claim."

--- Bob Somersby, "The Two Americas! In Scarborough Country, Viewers Got Worked By a Brilliant 'Nobel Nominee'," The Daily Howler, March 22, 2005.