Terry Crusade

I read someone describe the ongoing drama of Terry Schiavo as a thing of DeLilloesque absurdity, and I think that's about right.

Like every human tragedy/spectacle of the week, it is a perfect showcase for virtuosic foolishness of American culture, in particular its vulturelike press. There is something darkly funny about the pandering, cynicism, and abstraction of human drama on the part of the Randall Terry-and-Tom DeLay contingent here (in the adoption of near total abstraction by some of the world's more literalminded people, etc.), but mostly it's just sad.

I agree with the Christianists that Schiavo is a human being, and that's exactly why it's so sick that she's being treated primarily as a political device to manipulate prolifers. I think the humane thing would be to let this essentially braindead woman, whose cerebral cortex has been replaced with spinal fluid, to die a peaceful and natural death, instead of lingering on for eternity, an occasional football for the Christian Right.

Of all the horrible things about this ongoing spectacle, beyond tortured attempts by prolifers to characterize Schiavo as disabled, worse than televised protests featuring signs characterizing Terry's husband as "Little Hitler," is the repulsively insincere, cynical, and ghoulish involvement of the Republican congress. Beyond being very constitutionally dubious, and embodying the very opposite of the hostility-to-federal-power conservatives are supposed to stand for, it just smacks of opportunism and a pathetic pandering to prolife absolutists.

I can't help thinking, watching these red-faced politicians intone seriously about the moral outrage of letting this woman die, raising their voices in holy righteousness, that it's all an act. These people don't care about Terry Schiavo- they don't care about any of this. It's the satisfaction of play-acting outrage and moral superiority that gives this spectacle its juice. The woman at the center disappears, just a placeholder for their pious rage.

As I said, Sad.