Inappropriate Content: Kakistocracy©

Water cooler talk today centers on Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who's extraordinarily prolonged death has become a national sensation. For those of you reading this in the year 2371, Schiavo is a woman who ten years ago suffered some sort of brain damage that left her in what our primitive medicine refers to as a “vegetative state”—that is, our doctors cannot restore her consciousness, but they can keep her body alive through a an artificial feeding tube.

The debate centers on this question: should the tube be disconnected? Some say this would kill her, others say it would allow her to die. That minor semantic difference hides a subtle and serious moral dilemma. The people in my office are, like most of the people in this country, divided on the subject. We agree only that it is a hard choice, and we feel bad for those who have to make it.

As I said, reasonable, intelligent, moral people are divided on this subject. But good Americans are, by and large, shocked and appalled by the terrible efforts which so many our elected representatives are taking to secure the votes of the stupid and the gullible at the expense of our nation's Constitution and tradition of good government.

Seventy percent deemed the congressional intervention inappropriate, while 67 percent said they believe lawmakers became involved in the Schiavo case for political advantage rather than the principles involved.

Those of us in my office, being government employees in Washington, D.C., are appalled, but not particularly shocked.

Well, there's nothing for it. I have begun to complain about the broken system in this country and, like a train wreck, there is nothing one can do to stop the rant. If you liked that bit about how moral people can disagree, stop here. In fact, just pretend I've written nothing after “...not particularly shocked,” because that's where the good stuff ends.

I will lay off senators and congressmen, who have little else to do since they gave up their power to govern in the middle of the last century, and made the President the King of Democracy.

Let us turn, then, to those who ought to know better: our journalists. They have rightly examined the motives of Shciavo's husband, who appears to want his brain-dead wife to be bodily dead as well so he can marry his long-time girlfriend. This selfish desire to live a happy life is universally condemned as bad because God wants us to suffer, as a test of our devotion to His Commandments, which no man can bend or break, unless he has a television ministry, in which case Commandment Seven* is strictly optional. That said, it's hard to have sympathy for a husband who is clearly a selfish prick.

Meanwhile, Schiavo's parents talk to their daughter every day, and they know, deep in their deeply American, joined in true, one-man-one-woman marriage heart of hearts, that she hears them and that she is trying so hard to talk back. These are people one can feel sympathy for. Unfortunately, rather than expressing this sympathy through a sensitive piece explaining how delusional behavior can be caused by severely traumatic events like the death of a beloved child, this poor couples' psychosis is held up as a shining example of True Christian Love.

The moral of the story is, everyone is stupid and selfish, but not everyone has a good P.R. agent.

In the Catholic and Hebrew Ten Commandments, number seven covers adultery. In the Protestant version, theft. Our televised men of God use whichever version covers whatever they happend to be doing at the time.

On reflection, some of that seems a little bit harsh. I'm gonna leave it up so I can be misquoted later, but also because in this case harshness is necessary. Not harshness against Schiavo, the husband, the parents, or anyone else involved; not Christians, or even those radical right-wing Christians who I make fun of so much. The worst of them are not half as bad as our mainstream media. Forget biases, liberal or conservative; the ability of the media to insult the intelligence of all Americans, to hold the very public they are supposed to protect in the greatest contempt, to force-feed us such spectacular loads of complete and utter bullshit without the slightest twinge of regret is—well, it's been getting to me a little.