Roger Ebert, http://blogs.suntimes.com/... , focuses laser-like on the stunning psychological impact of Sarah's use of the term death panels:
"Death panels" is such an excellent term. You know exactly what it means, and therefore you know you're against them. Debate over...
Of course the term is inspired by a lie... But now we hear "death panel" repeated so often that the term has taken on a sort of eerie reality, as if it really referred to anything...
There's something a little...too perfect...about it. Did it spring into [Sarah's] mind in an instant, while she was typing away on Facebook?
It has the feel of having been coined or crafted.
What’s behind the Palin "death panel" mantra?
Palin’s minions honor the "sting of death" theology and the role of eternal judgment that death metes out . It’s their attempt to protect--preserved, free of science and modern medicine--the old moralistic order.
Detailed discussion below the fold...
The religious right wing will fight hoof and claw to prevent any change to death’s role as the "final test" of morals and character, however medieval. Yet Palin and company have been at the forefront of preventing death by "pulling the plug," adamantly opposing attempts to remove "vegetative" individuals from life support (Terri Schiavo),causing artificially prolonged demise--thereby incurring huge medical expense as a result.
Can the religious right have it both ways?
We thought we were discussing how to keep people healthy and to treat them when they are pregnant, ill or injured. We were hoping to develop some sustainable form of preventive care and education.
How begiled we were!
It’s all about death and dying and playing up to that fear according to Sarah Palin, et. al. The insight here is: Palin and company are, in fact, themselves irrevocably centered on death and dying, not so much because they actually fear so much "the government will kill off Granny," but instead because death is for them the single most signal aspect of earthly life. They want death, as they reverence and respect it, to retain its spiritual power to control the judgment factor at the end of life--irrespective of the medical needs, beliefs or wishes of all others.
* Palin: Playing off the human/innate fear of death:
Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin defended her claim that the Democratic health care proposal would create "death panels" in a statement (8/12/09) slamming President Barack Obama:
"Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system, these ‘unproductive’ members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care," Palin wrote in a note on her Facebook page.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/...
Opposition to health care has grown to include expansion of methods of public influence such as provoking rage and Brown Shirt-style PR. This has led to a point where outright lying about President Obama’s intentions and the legislation that he is trying to pass has viciously targeted him and his proposals, using the ultimate motivation—the fear and dread of death: The label "Death Panel." Death language is, emotive, highly motivational, and explosive.
Calm conservative David Frum stated on Bill Moyers Journal (9/14/09)
his assessment of the hyperbolic use of the "death panel" issue and wild hard right accusations, and crashing of town meetings which accompany it:
I think it's just outrageous. It is dangerous. It's dangerous for the whole constitutional system.
@ http://www.pbs.org/...
*Fear of Death
o Death has historically been exclusively the bailiwick of the Church. The purpose of life was to achieve a "good death." In accord with religious dogma and practice, that meant to face all the pain, the fear, and the uncertainty of approaching death filled with unwavering faith. It meant to give a ringing testimony, to utter final words that commemorated a clear pledge of devotion, a reflection on a life of religious dedication or last minute confession and/or repentance.
o A sudden, quick or aided death, one that avoided or prevented the "final test," was anathema..Nothing "un-natural" should interfere with that moment.
o The Church’s last rites were essential to achieving eternal life. The sacrament and the public ritual/mass and finally bodily burial in consecrated ground were sacrosanct.
o In some ways we continue to live with indelible pictures of Hell--such as portrayed by such artists as Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of vices and the eternal tortures applied to people today.
o Great fear of death is a healthy thing from a religious stance--in the eyes of Sarah Palin--especially if you are morally unprepared. Clearly, she knows this verse: "The Lord rejoices in the death of his saints" (Psalm 116:15) Yet death is bothersome.
o Prepare to meet your God: A quick death was once much feared in ancient and medieval times. It gave no time to confess, repent or rectify the wrongs done in this life.
*
Centuries back wrote, Chicago Theological Seminary’s theologian Bonnie Miller-McLemore in her article, The Sting of Death, http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/...
Persons often awaited death far in advance. Openly, publicly, they carefully prepared for its arrival. They participated in clearly-defined, solemn rituals that included expressions of sorrow, pardon, absolution, a turning from the world to God , and, then, silence until death comes, whether immediate.
With the development of and advances in science and medicine, technology and palliative care, the clergy’s power and control over dying, the church’s monopoly--powerful control--which was so securely in the hands of the Church (and from which the church drew power, influence, and vast revenue) began to wane.
Modern day Fundamentalists and ultra-conservative Catholics rue the present era where the power of the church, in the final hours of a person’s life is diminished and the "test" of ones entire moral life as confronted in the moments leading up to and including unaided death are altered and made less meaningful and powerful for the clergy. They would go back to the dark ages of yore when death sets the true stamp of salvation or eternal damnation upon the events surrounding the last moments of ones mortal life.
The deathbed becomes a battleground between the forces of good and evil in the soul, determining an individual's fate for all eternity. Each person’s biography and manner of dying gains tremendous moral significance--Comments Miller-McLemore
* Un-Aided death? Well, almost:
While regretting the loss of this ultra-test of faith and the historic trial of conscience: When it comes to their own deaths, many strict religious observers do not wish to die a painful, delirious, or tortured soul. They do not want prolonged agony to dominate their passing. When it comes to some form of palliative care, for themselves or their close relatives, they’ll make compromising exceptions.
A shift from traditional religious and moral views of death to more naturalistic understandings has taken place in Western society. This coincides with a shift from fear of judgment to fear of extinction. Prior to the Enlightenment, death appeared as a flaw in human nature due to transgression and involved final judgment before the Creator as well as hope for eternal life. To the modern ear, the traditional orthodox belief that we die because Adam sinned sounds quaint. In mainstream society, churched and unchurched alike tend to dismiss the whole issue of the relation of death, sin, judgment, and grace as antiquated. The original doctrine appears logically and empirically inconsistent with the modern worldview of death as a natural part of life. It seems to hold little relevance for the "living of our days." It does not even seem worth reinterpreting. If the traditional paradigm of death contained any theological and moral truths, they have been subsumed under modern paradigms. Images of grace, judgment, and eternal life are either stereotyped or, in some cases, dropped out of everyday usage altogether. Unfortunately, the more general awareness of death as a spiritual or moral event has also been lost. Source: The Sting of Death, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Theology Today, January 1989
* The "final test of life," a death preparing the human for God’s judgment
Medicine's so-called exhaustive explanation of death in scientific, "morally neutral" terms virtually eliminates appreciation for religious questions of meaning, mystery, and moral imperative. Many persons disregard notions of divine providence that explain death, ideas about grace that resolve guilt, or conceptions of commitment that dictate action. The church struggles for relevance in a world that considers its concerns about guilt, sin, faith, and health to be, at best, secondary, private, subjective, and, at worst, simply fantastical. Lacking adequate resources for dealing with failed responsibilities before illness and cut adrift from cultural definitions of norms which in times past guided the exit from life, persons can no longer prepare for death.
Snip
But in many cases persons with terminal illnesses await death over an extended period of time. They have concerns and questions about their situation and how to live under the heavy restrictions of this limited time. Although a grasp of the idea of five stages of emotions helps, they need ways, now long lost, to talk about deeper realities. ...How do we respond to the deep moral ambiguities that color our final days. Source: The Sting of Death , Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Theology Today,Jan. 1989
* Is it separation from ones loved ones or judgment soon to be faced by the dying person which makes death so psychologically dominate?:
It is significant that the salient feature of death today, the major drama around it, is this separation of loved ones. In L’homme devant la mort, Philippe Ariès has shown that it was not always so. In the late medieval and early modern ages, the great issue was the judgment soon to be faced by the person dying. And before that, the dead were in a sense still in a sort of community with the living. So that Ariès distinguishes the periods under the titles: la mort de nous ("the death of us"), la mort de moi ("the death of me"), and la mort de toi ("the death of you"). Precisely because hell has faded...love relationships are central to the meaning. Charles Taylor, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/... October 12, 2007, The Sting of Death, Why We Yearn for Eternity,
* Palliative care’s "A good death" v. A Moralizer’s Testing Death
The moralizers control over the to end to life--unaided by palliative care--is meant to weigh one’s total accomplishments or failures in a somber religious manner to the moment of ones death, rather than to slip away comforted by powerful drugs or hi-tech medical paraphernalia, thus cheating on the "final test."
* Death can bring out questions of mortal and religious meaning in a most acute form.
o For the Right to Life coalition, controlling death means resisting what they see as the intrusion of a secular philosophy and science into the sacred realm of death and dying, disrupting the work of God. The Secularist is concerned about leaving a legacy and being remembered—issues around a sense of void and annihilation. The strict religious conservative is centered on passing the "final test" of character and behaviors.
This just shows how joy strives for eternity, even if all that is available is a lesser form of it, and even if something is left out that matters to us highly individuated moderns, as the particular things that meant most to us are gradually lost in the general impact we’ve made. And of course, this eternity can’t preserve those who are really forgotten, or those who haven’t left their mark, or those who have been damned, excluded. There is no general resurrection in this "eternity" of grateful posterity. This is what exercised Walter Benjamin, the unfilled need to rescue those who were trampled in history.
Charles Taylor, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/... October 12, The Sting of Death, Why We Yearn for Eternity
o Death can bring out questions of mortal and religious meaning in a most acute form: The connection of death with meaning is reflected in often-discussed features of human life, as we understand it today:
The first is the way in which facing death, seeing one’s life as about to come to an end, can concentrate the issue of what we have lived for. What has it all amounted to? In other words, death can bring out the question of meaning in its most acute form. This is what lies behind Heidegger’s claim that an authentic existence involves a stance of Sein-zum-tode, being-toward-death. Charles Taylor, The Sting of Death, Why We Yearn for Eternity, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/... 10/12/07,
* Do you own your own body? Who owns your body?
o It all comes down to one question: Does God own your body and does the church, as God’s viceroy, have the genuine claim on your life and remains?
o Does the government own your body, and if so, how does it handle its responsibilities and obligations to you as a tenant of your own body?
"We should pause to note some of the heavy costs of technological progress in medicine: the dehumanization of the end of life, both for those who die and for those who live on; and the befogging of the minds of intelligent and moral men with respect to the most important human matters"...
has become a modern quandary, so Miller McLemore wants a balance between a "good death" by palliative care and a meaningful death by means centered in Christian faith and practice.
* The Rightists’ Model for death and dying:
The Church must rule the end of life affairs, rather than surrendering the end of life concerns to modern medical practice--supervised and attended by secularized scientific medicine and hi-tech intervention.
* The touchstone scripture: "The Sting of Death"
o "Now sin is the sting of death, and sin derives its power from the Law," 1 Corinthians 15:56 Weymouth New Testament.
o John Calvin viewed death in terms of the first and second deaths: "The death of the body and the second death--fraught with fear of annihilation and judgment, dread of guilt, or unfinished business, the problem of moral and spiritual"--disruption and desolation.
* Annihilation and void--the secular view of death:
o Secularists may center on the end of life and death as the end of it all. Their interest may lie in the effect that death has on the living and what, if any heritage or positive memory will remain of those who pass on to return to the earth form wench they came.
* Medical Professionals are taught to respect belief:
Death is a test of one's faith; therefore, it must be faced with courage and a willingness to accept pain and suffering... Understanding human behavior: a guide for health care providers, Mary Elizabeth Milliken, 2004
* The high cost of projecting dogmatic religion into a national debate on health care:
Cessation of life-prolonging treatments precedes death in an increasing number of cases, but little attention has been accorded to the quality of dying... asserts a leading medical journal, http://archinte.ama-assn.org/...
o The case of Terri Schiavo should be instructive to the public if one wants to see what the religious right and the conservative hard right attempted to do in relationship to health care and end of life issues...Terri’s case became a spectacular last minute legislative endeavor to preserve her lingering life (a midnight Congressional crisis) and illustrates a huge and alarming projection of how motivated and determined the powers of the strict morals/politically activated religious rightists can attempt to have their dogmatic homogeny (over these health and dying matters) win out.
The (Schiavo) case is viewed as an important case in clinical ethics. Some deplore it as a case that went against decades of progress that has enabled individuals the freedom to control and limit medical interventions performed on them.[6] Terri Schiavo Case, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/...
o Health care administrated or under the umbrella of government puts fear and loathing into these pro-life activists. Freedom, for them, was in the Schiavo case was to extend life--insist on medical care services and procedures-- irregardless of cost or efficacy. Terri’s case was that of a "death panel" in their perception. They will fight for "life issues," as they define them, without relenting. You can trust this to be the case.
* The Right to Lifers face a paradox:.
o Dying well--with its end of life affirmations or confessions—unaided--or keeping people alive long past viability in a "vegetative/comatose state" such as Schiavo’s--where, following her death, it was found a great portion of Terri's brain was simply missing. High order functioning was impossible.
* Catholic Teaching on Extraordinary Means:
The natural law and the Fifth Commandment requires that all ordinary means be used to preserve life, such as food, water, exercise, and medical care. Since the middle ages, however, Catholic theologians have recognized that human beings are not morally obligated to undergo every possible medical treatment to save their lives.
Treatments that are unduly burdensome or sorrowful, such as amputation, or beyond the economic means of the person, or which only prolong the suffering of a dying person, are morally extraordinary, meaning they are not obligatory.
The many advances in medicine during recent decades, however, has complicated the decision whether to undergo or fore go medical treatment, since medicine can now save many people who would simply have been allowed to die in the past.
Further, having saved them, many people continue to live for long periods in comatose or semi-conscious states, unable to live without technological assistance of one kind or another.
http://www.ewtn.com/...
o The archetype of a "good death" from a medical professional point of view:
(In)...the literature on a ‘good death’ ...a step towards assisting hospice patients to achieve what they regard as an acceptable death... (t)he starting point is to define more clearly what it means to die a good death. The relationship between hospice care and achieving a good death... Promoting a Good Death an agenda for outcomes research - a review of the literature, June Mui Hing Mak University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, mhjmak@hkusua.hku.hk Michael Clinton
* The link between anti-abortion and opposition to national health care:
o No one will convince the religious right that national health care won’t aid and abet abortion on demand., Pro-lifers are so set in their opposition that if abortion rights is not problem in proposed legislation they will make sure it is--a social, religious and political conflict ad infinitum.
* Assisted death and suicide, unresolved quandaries:
o Is refusal to accept heroic or extraordinary measures to extend life tantamount to suicide? Do you have a right to refuse treatment in order to shorten your suffering and avert a costly, even bankrupting, medically/technically prolonged demise? May a person be allowed to accelerate ones own death? Even by some form of suicide, assisted death?
* When exactly is the end of life?
No matter how long we prolong it–one of today’s focal bioethical dilemmas—we must admit that we cannot bring about its consummation in any completely satisfactory way. This problem tests the limits of human power for solution and points us toward our need for a transcending power greater than the constrictions of finitude. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, The Sting of Death, Theology Today
* A Dangerous Dilemma:.
The interjection of death and end of life issues into health care under any form of national health care raises the kind of hard issues that are volatile and potentially nationally divisive. This is all part of Pat Buchanan’s declared religious and cultural war amongst Americans enjoined back in Houston, 1992.
* Hyperbolizing the Debate
When Sarah Palin takes the ideas and fears of a religious meaning to life and death in a literalistic, fundamentalistic way, her hyperbolizing the prospect of "death panels" makes her a valuable motivator/spokesperson for the people of "blind faith." The committed core of social conservatives see nothing coming out of Washington DC which they can support or endorse. Distrust of government is endemic in their mindset. Palin coincidentally (or not) also becomes a most useful point person representing those who oppose national health care for the economic reasons spun by K Street lobbyists.
* Death and Political theatrics
o Taking up the Death Panel concept, Rep.Virginia Foxx-R, hectored from the floor of the House of Representatives:
Republicans have a better solution that won't put the government in charge of people's health care that will make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans. And that ensures affordable access for all Americans, and is pro life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.
o A measure of the hullabaloo around town hall meetings concerning national health care has seen Ross Perot-types, Ron Paul-Types, and Limbaugh/Savage-types who are more intent upon disruption and forcing their opinion on the discussion (as radical Libertarians) than they are in contributing to any rational understanding of the issues.
o Sarah Palin waltzed into this area as a drama queen. She has a following which is devoted to her because of her elevation to the McCain/Palin ticket (as a last minute concession to the Council for National Policy and James Dobson, et al. ) Palin’s area of expertise is to be a provocateur and a raconteur pushing an anti-health care effort for the political steam it can put beneath her aspiring wings. Palin is thus a very useful tool to those corporate interests and K Street lobbyists who have agenda to promote and legislation to stop which would not be beneficial to their financial bottomlines.
* Conflict within the ranks of the "righteous right" over available medical techniques:
Controversial topics such as: In vitro fertilization, contraception and birth control, transplants, condom distribution, sex education, stem cell research and therapies, and "old fashioned" and even "medieval" concepts of moral order and dying an un-comforted death are still with us. The current health care debate naturally brings it all to the surface.
* NATURAL LAW: The natural law tradition inherited from medieval Christianity:
o "Natural law theory" is a label that has been applied to theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality.
o The wages of sin is death. If one is wicked, sinful sexually, given to vices and becomes ill or threatened with death as a direct consequence, shouldn’t the natural law of God supersede and preside over the outcomes.
o Was AID/HIV a natural consequence of wrong behaviors?
o Recall the harsh history of how the Religious Right had viewed AIDS/HIV early on, they spurned costly care and a speedy search for a cure.
o There is a vast discussion as to what should be considered "the goods" implied and endorsed under natural Law, but find among them one finds: the "avoidance of pain" and "physical and mental health":
* The huge shadow cast by Catholic doctrines concerning life and health:
o Humanae Vitae provides for a integral harmony to exist between science and nature, life and death, illness and health as well as a mutual coexistence between the human and the divine. http://verbumcarofactumest.blogspot....
o Again:
The natural law and the Fifth Commandment (The 5th Commandment, 6th in the Protestant listing, says "Thou shalt not kill.") The implicit corollary is that one must save life, one's own and others by reasonable care not driving too fast, not taking drugs, seeing a doctor if home care cannot effect a cure of sickness, etc..) requires that all ordinary means be used to preserve life, such as food, water, exercise, and medical care. Since the middle ages, however, Catholic theologians have recognized that human beings are not morally obligated to undergo every possible medical treatment to save their lives.
http://www.ewtn.com/...
o The huge interest of the economics and ideology involved in Catholic run hospitals and other medical care facilities run by Catholic or various religious organizations is a major factor in the national health care debate.
There is presently no way, given the hype and the velocity of hurled accusations, to reconcile the issues Sarah Palin so blithely has raised for Charles Taylor has written:
Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief. Although many individuals do so, and more still seem to on the outside, the unrest continues to surface. Could it ever be otherwise?
Charles Taylor, The Sting of Death, Why We Yearn for Eternity, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/...
For this reason religion alone cannot be allowed to dominate the dialogue and outcome of our national health care reform.