The Last installment of my Schiavo Diaries. The first four have stood well on their own legs, and I believe this one is just as enjoyable though it is a conclusion to what has snowballed into a 15,000 word essay on the subject. Enjoy.
As dusk was settling on Good Friday, a new cast of characters were taking center stage. And with the antics of the Palm Sunday Compromise aside and Washington Pols already beginning to register the damage rendered unto Caesar for flying back early to participate in this Orgy of Shamelessness and Depravity, George W. Bush was talking about Minnesota and Jeb was desperately explaining that he had done everything within his power as Governor to help the Schindlers. Every GOP bigwig who had hitched there horse around this watering hole was suddenly absent and silent on the issue. And it was evident that the die-hard believers, those encamped around Terri Schiavo's hospice window in Pinnellas Park, had moved to the forefront.
Tom Delay took a risky gamble by latching onto the Schiavo Affair and dragging his party's leadership into the slop. But the whole thing was out of control by Wednesday, and by Thursday, it was Randall Terry's Party. And the perspiration forming on Jeb Bush's brow was quite possibly a result of the excruciating pressure Terry was currently applying to the Governor's scrotum as a result of his incredibly firm grip on the Political Family Jewels. This is the risk one takes when they sell-out; especially, when it is to the genuine Loonies of the Republican Party and Religious Right. Having so completely sold the Heart & Soul of the GOP to these people and seeing the consequences of falling short of their expectations, only the most simpleminded Republican would ever make this kind of Faustian pact with the Anti-Abortion Crowd again. Because right now, the Republican Party sits between a rock and a viper pit - appease the Apostles of Mel Gibson and alienate more than half the country, or abandoned them and send the Party wandering through the desert for another Forty Years.
Even now, threats of political retribution could rip the GOP apart in the South, and all because of a concerted effort by their leadership to manipulate the Schiavo Case in an effort to salvage a sinking Presidency and his pitiful Social Security Plan and redeem the stained House Majority Leader. Without these people, their "base," whose rabid ferocity propelled Bush to a Second Term, it's conceivable that even more extreme Republicans will move-in or that the possibility of their support being thrown behind a third party do-gooder who will do their bidding might undermine Republican support.
Some people have argued, however, that this is neither a Republican or Democratic issue. But they are just plain fucking wrong. This would not have become a circus if not for the federalization of this issue by National Republicans. Period. The Democrats have at least shown the decency to stay out of this issue. They have made the morally correct decision. However, the moment the Republicans began pushing this legislation before Congress and called a Special Session, they made it a Republican issue. Their very involvement and collusion in this effort is an indictment to their complicity in exploiting this tragedy on the National Stage. These were the building blocks for the next wedge issue. But it backfired. And any ammunition they hoped to use from this against Democrats is as useless as Bush's infamous carrier landing, which, consequently, was just slightly more useless than tits on a bull and a bit less effective than Shock & Awe.
Some people probably still believe this is about Terri Schiavo. It was about the Republican Party exploiting a private tragedy; but has instead shifted its focus toward the gratification of the attention hogs gathered outside her window, the grandstanding of sorry, miserable losers like Randall Terry and his ilk who have perpetuated a fraud upon Bob & Mary Schindler and the personal destruction of Michael Schiavo pursuant to the directives issuing forth from Conservaitve Shit-mongers attesting to hints & allegations concerning fictional abuse. They were full-bore, hog wild in the Pinnellas Park mud, frothing and grunting and afflicted with a severe case of Mass Religious Psychosis. And before long more than a few among the ranks of Florida's Law Enforcement personnel would wonder when this vicious gang of savages would drop all pretense of humanity and start tearing the flesh from their bones in a cannibalistic orgy of Pentecostal insanity.
The most bizarre week of the year was increasingly more grotesque, sinister and twisted, like staring into a Funhouse Mirror which contorts and bends shapes into unrecognizable, disfugured creatures who carry the presumption of despicable personal histories and mark the Earth with carnage. It was like watching a Giant Ferris Wheel tear wildly off its axis and rip a path of destruction through the Midway, through Cotton Candy stands and Funnel Cake and the Tunnel of Love. Over Clowns and Ringmasters and Smoke 'n Mirror Shows.
The Schiavo Nightmare seared straight through the heart of American Society, raising hell on a whole range of issues - medicine, religion, separation of powers, living wills, exploitation, law, extremism, bearing false witness, privacy. Who couldn't see the pain of Michael Schiavo? Who couldn't see the anguish of Terri's parents, Bob & Mary? Who hasn't thought about Terri Schiavo these last seven days?
And now...judges are ransomed on the internet...crazies are taking a more pro-active response...reports are using too many words like weapons and suspicious packages. This is goddamn domestic terrorism...get their fucking names you dumb shits, get these people on a list with profiles...call Robert Mueller at the FBI...get Negreponte on top of this...Hazah!...ship these squirrelly mother fuckers off to GITMO...up, up and away in that son-of-bitch CIA jet, where Albert Gonzalez personally attaches the jumper cables before laying into 'em with a heavy interrogation...or off to some third-rate, backwater dictatorship we've established, strange limbos between Reality & Them where things like the Geneva Conventions and International Law are temporarily suspended...off to the Afghan Poppy Fields to harvest the World's Heroine Crop, which has exploded under the government of Hamid Karzai...
Seriously...the amount of land used for growing poppy plants in 2004 was 206,700 hectares. That is three times the amount i 2003 and the total production of opioum - 4,950 metric tons - is seventeen times higher than second place Myanmar. This shit just happens, though Karzai says that the government is simply unable to enforce counter-narcotics programs with the dangerous security situation in Afghanistan. Yet our government tells us everything is fine...hunkey-dorey...Just sit back and chase the dragon...
The story is reminiscent of how Western capitalists moved into the recently collapsed Soviet Union and took everyone for a ride. The greatest mistake we made was screwing up the situation with Russia. You don't fight a Cold War, pointing countless nuclear weapons at each other, just so a former KGB pig can begin peeling back the democratic reforms and reinstitute authoritarian control.
Of course, a U.S. President, whose support and defense of Civil Liberties is equally unimpressive and severly lacking, has no clout when he lectures his Good Friend Vladimir upon the finer points of Western Democracy.
THESE are strange, wild tangents, however, and it is becoming increasingly evident that the Schiavo case is coming to a close. The Schindlers will not speak with the press and they have been going around thanking the Mob gathered outside their daughter's hospice window. The legal options have been exhausted. The people who first attempted to exploit this terrible tragedy - the Republican Leadership and chohorts, i.e. Delay, Jeb Bush, Bill Frist, Randall Terry, George W. Bush, countless Rightwing Schlock Jocks on AM Radio, Warren and his idiotic book "The Purpose Driven Life," the fraud William Hammesfahr and the many people gathered around Pinellas Park, who should ask themselve if Jesus would not be tending to the millions of other suffering people in this World when there is little good standing around holding a candle, carrying a sign asking to call in the National Guard, getting arrested trying to take her water or robbing a gun store so you could free Terri...that doesn't feed the countless homeless or comfort the veterans returning home this Easter without an arm or leg or half his head blown off...it doesn't help the millions of Africans being eradicated by AIDS and genocide...it doesn't stop the car bombs from exploding in Baghdad or the soldier who opens fire on a crowd of unsuspected unfriendlies because he's been given orders to shoot what moves...
Perhaps beyond the obvious political shame at the attempt made to use this issue to change the focus on the National Stage, is the more important question as to where all these people - so full of God & compassion & burning with Spirit - are on a full range of other issues...health care, public education, Social Security, taxation.
The story also reveals how the Right Wing behaves, particularly in the sense of character assassination. The attempt to destroy Michael Schiavo, which eventually generated Internet ransoms, is one of the most scandalous, shameless endeavors undtaken by a gang of vicious hominids who run about promoting themselves as Human Beings. Political leaders of our country were casting aspersion having never met the man nor let alone providing a single bit of evidence to back up their outlandish claims. GOP Doctors, elected to the House, were offering diagnoses without examination, a shameful and unforgivable sin in the world of medicine. And all of this to raise doubt about Michael Schiavo, raise suspicion about our Medicine & Science, and more importantly raise questions about our Judicial System.
I've wondered why the Right seems to purposefully create so much doubt surrounding the institutions of our country. We couldn't prevent 9/11 because our intelligence was flawed. And we didn't find NBC because our intelligence was wrong. And our schools are wrong because you can't pray and there's no display of the Ten Commandments. Our doctors & judges are killers. Terri Schiavo is not PVS because the EEGs and CATscans arer wrong...maybe these fuckers really are trying to establish an Old Dominionist kinda world, were the only thing you should have faith in is a non-existent entity that exists somewhere out there in the Universe, beyond the stars and planets...How many honestly still believe that a being called God, with arms & legs & and eyes, is presently sitting somewhere in Heaven on a Throne waiting for all of us to die so we can sing praises to him for all eternity? Not only is that bum deal on Heaven, the notion that God is out there is pre-historic...
As Joseph Campbell often said, he's most famous expression of "God" was the statement that wherever you look, I am there - if you lift a rock, I am there. If you roll over a log, I am there...I am nearer to you than you are to your own self - Christian words which seem strangely familiar to the Buddhist sentiment that all things are Buddha nature.
It took me awhile before I began to grasp Buddhism. I'm not a practitioner, just someone who likes new ideas and who isn't afraid of people who are simply different from me. One of the hardest concepts is the notion of No God, which leaves many people to conclude that Buddhists are atheists. And many are in a way, and many aren't in a completely different way, for as they say, there is no God when everything is God...Hazah!
Afterall, aren't we all children of God; wasn't that the message of Christ - you carrying your Human Divinity within you and we are all Holy? I suppose that might be classified under Gnosticism - personal knowledge of God, which seems to me would have to be the case if any of that religios boo-gee boo-gee was to make any sense...ah, Meister Eckhart, who gave the Catholic Church fits but was to popular for them to control...The collections of words attributed to Eckhart are mysterious and provocative, and contain a considerable amount of Christian thought that they've been discarding since Constantine called the Council of Nicea...
Nonetheless, it seems this story is about over. All that is left is the natural fulfullment of the last few steps of the Journey Terri Schiavo began some forty years ago. Death is not terrible; it is simply the other side of the coin...
And I've definitely contributed far more than my two cents on this matter. What the hell...here's two more for the Ferryman...Godspeed...Fare Thee Well...Rest in peace...
Amen.