On Terri Schiavo
A great deal of press time has been devoted to making appear heroic the long suffering of Terri Schiavo's parents. While I would not wish to belittle their emotional reality, I cannot help but think that the wish for their daughter to "live" is nothing more glamorous than necrophilia--albeit a culturally-sanctioned form.
In virtually every other human culture (now or in the past), save ours, this entire controversy would have been avoided fifteen years ago when Ms. Schiavo would have been permitted to pass in peace. It would not have occurred to anyone to keep alive a human being who was functionally dead, excepting a tragically persistent heartbeat (product of the simian brainstem). Terri Schiavo is a corpse, a zombi, human only in the most nostalgic of senses.
Only in a society as spoiled and deracinated as ours would this distinction somehow become muddled.
I believe it is also impossible to ignore the role that thanatophobia plays in this lunacy. I have no doubt that the congressmen and madmen who have "taken up the cause" for Terri subconsciously hope that, by forcing her corpse to persist, they will somehow postpone their own mortality. How sick are we, that we would force a vegetative woman to be the scapegoat who will eat our deaths and give us immortality?
In virtually every other human culture (now or in the past), save ours, this entire controversy would have been avoided fifteen years ago when Ms. Schiavo would have been permitted to pass in peace. It would not have occurred to anyone to keep alive a human being who was functionally dead, excepting a tragically persistent heartbeat (product of the simian brainstem). Terri Schiavo is a corpse, a zombi, human only in the most nostalgic of senses.
Only in a society as spoiled and deracinated as ours would this distinction somehow become muddled.
I believe it is also impossible to ignore the role that thanatophobia plays in this lunacy. I have no doubt that the congressmen and madmen who have "taken up the cause" for Terri subconsciously hope that, by forcing her corpse to persist, they will somehow postpone their own mortality. How sick are we, that we would force a vegetative woman to be the scapegoat who will eat our deaths and give us immortality?