Torturing Terri Schiavo

CW FISHER There's a difference between allowing someone to die and causing someone to die. One's a type of mercy, the other is murder. Of murder there are two types: quick and slow. When a living person is allowed to die in the slowest, most painful way possible, such as when they're denied food and water, it's torture. Cruel and unusual punishment is unconstitutional. Punish the judge; send Terri Schiavo home with her parents. Who's holding Terri Schiavo at the hospital, and why? And why does it literally take an act of Congress in emergency session, plus an in-person appearance by the President of the United States of America, who flew in from Texas when he could have faxed it in--who then ran, yes, ran, they've got it on tape, because there was no time to spare: a life was on the line and he had to get across town to sign this historic--whatever it was--in the nick of time or else! Why was this case allowed to grow to such a disproportionate size? Why can't President Bush simply phone in an executive order to give this woman a drink of water? Does any of this have anything to do with the GOP memo that encouraged lawmakers to see the event as a platform opportunity? Was it planned? Are the Bush brothers, Jeb and George, involved in some way? You betcha. Barbara too! And that old shoe of a sidekick of hers, and her little dog Checkers. It's a picture that seems to say: maybe it's time for all American families to sit down and have a frank discussion about, you know, the 'd' word, and what we'd want if we fell into a 'c.' I think we'd all want a drink of water and a taxicab out of that hospital NOW! Why is this woman in the clutch of a hospital? If her parents are willing to take her home, why can't they? We wouldn't do this to a dog. If Terri Schiavo were a dog, this nation would line up to adopt her, even if she were an old dog with a brain tumor the size of an eggplant and she was in terrific pain--we'd put her down quick. Everybody knows that anything less is cruelty. If your intent is to kill, kill quickly! But if you're going to take your time and discuss the matter while you purposely starve this person to death, then you need to be stopped, even if you're a judge, for you have judged wrong, idiot. Why would a judge rule that she be tortured and slowly killed? What has she done wrong that she would be treated so differently from a common born-again killer like Tanya Faye Tucker who killed a guy with an ax and got a painless passage. Why not Terri? If this is about what Terri would want, let me take a stab at it. Water! Yet these nitwits persist: discussing consciousness as if it were the subject. Good god damn grief. Experts say she may as well be dead, that there's nothing there, her frontal lobes were "liquified." Hey, I went to college. Whose haven't? The experts say that those smiles when her parents come are just involuntary facial movements, the way infants fool us into thinking they're smiling when they're really just passing gas and they're smiling because it's funny--no indication of consciousness, only humor. When experts pass gas they don't make faces, and if we notice we don't say anything. We accept and even reward the expert's ability to produce methane, but farts aren't proof of life since even the dead fart. Why are we killing this woman who isn't dead? This is no one's right. There is no justification for it. She isn't dead. She's alive. She isn't brain dead; her brain is what's been keeping her body alive. She's not hooked up to anything complicated; she's got a feeding tube. Lots of people do. An expert is not required here. The woman goes home, she takes her feeding tube and her pouches of liquified food, the chair she sits on, she goes home--just as soon as now. Some people say she's merely responding to stimuli the way a plant responds to sunlight, that the person once known as Terri Schiavo isn't there anymore, she's left the planet and is perched on the edge of heaven, begging us to just let her go back to God. I've felt this way myself, but nobody killed me over it. As we down here make up our minds whether it's better to go into the light or to run away from the light, would somebody please get this poor woman a glass of water? While we down here argue about the nature of the light--toward? or away? --the poor thing needs water. While quiet demonstrations of good looking, photogenic young Americans who could have been cast by Karl Rove himself, Tanya Faye Tucker I mean Terri Schindler-Schiavo is dying. Morons, murderers, rehydrate this woman! Who wrote this unlikely scenario? Why are we keeping our fingers crossed, hoping against hope that the president's action works and somehow breaks this awful deadlock? With whom is the U.S. deadlocked? Obviously someone far more powerful than... the constitution, the president and both houses of congress, the desires of the woman's parents, the will of the people. Yet on she dies. I have a saying that I like to say and I say it often because I find it useful in getting down to the root of a thing, especially after several thousand words have passed and I still haven't drawn a conclusion, and the saying is this: "Bullshit's bullshit." Bullshit's bullshit. If you can't see the bullshit of a thing just keep on walking and you'll smell it on your own shoes soon enough. Something is happening here and I don't know what it is. We're all involved in some sort of national drama, but we're being played--what the mystics call "being danced." And we kind of love it. It's 24 meets American Idol. Everybody gets to have an opinion about the most profoundly personal aspect of an individual's life, which is their death. When everybody does it, anything's okay. Except that whatever they do to Terri, they can also do to us. Why kill her when we can send her to Disneyland, or put her on tour with Aerosmith? Or toss her into a volcano for good luck, or send her to Iraq to be rescued by U.S. soldiers with night vision. Why not a cameo on Desperate Houseflies --a walk on. The real problem is the fact that she's smiling. If she weren't smiling there'd be no story. Sure, we know it's not real. Most smiles aren't. The saddest thing is that Terri Schaivo's case isn't all that uncommon, and neither is the response of the courts. George, you want to impress me? Pick up the phone and issue an executive order. Oh, and bloggers? Can anybody see what's going on behind that curtain?