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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

GREETINGS, HARRIERS. I won't pretend to know, as so many presently do, what Terri Schiavo would want done about her feeding tube. Whether the courts have to be involved or not, this strikes me as a private family matter that should be resolved without the voyeuristic pontificating of every blowhard in the nation who has nothing better to do with his time. What I will pretend to know is that Mrs. Schiavo would NOT want photographs and video clips of herself as she now is being broadcast continuously on television and the Internet. The basis for my position is that no woman of my acquaintance would want to be filmed or watched by strangers in such circumstances.

Seem a trivial point? Well, if you followed the commentary on the case, I bet you'd discover a lot of rhetoric about human dignity. So be as morally pugnacious and certain as you like about your own views (pun intended) of this woman's plight, but I daresay not one of you can deny that whatever the outcome, all human dignity has been robbed from Mrs. Schiavo by everyone who has employed or sought out these images -- including both sides of her loving family, the press, the television networks, politicians, and bloggers. Yes, I know that an endangered woman may choose to be dragged out of a burning building naked and feet first in front of thousands of onlookers, but Terri Schiavo did not choose to be displayed like a pinned butterfly to every schlump with a TV. And who among you will claim on her behalf that continued subsistence of such a pitiful order is worth the kind of immortality that has been irrevocably forced upon her? Think about this question in particular, all you Christians who presume to know the difference between decency and indecency and all you liberals who make a sacred principle of privacy. Then turn your heads away in shame.

Object, fume, and fulminate all you like. Even the highest minded of you remind me of a vulture circling over a dying doe.

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