« I'm Gonna Cry... | Main | In Wednesday's Issue of the Pulse »
March 29, 2005
"The Sheer Indecency of the Thing"
Christopher Hitchens offers some strong words on the Terri Schiavo case. I still haven't settled my thoughts on the matter (Paul Jaussen, a University of Washington graduate student and an old friend, has offered an insightful contrary view) but, like Hitch, I am increasingly struck by the ghoulish morbidity of Schiavo's life-supporters. And I sympathize with his rejection of the macabre fascination:
Meanwhile, the rest of us also have lives to live. And I hope and believe that we shall say, as politely and compassionately as we can, that we do not intend to pass our remaining days listening to any hysteria from the morbid and the superstitious. It is an abuse of our courts and our Constitution to have judges and congressmen and governors bullied by those who believe in resurrection but not in physical death.
What I simply can't understand about this case is how my fellow Christians can spend so much time leering over a deathbed, fighting against an event that our creeds assure us is not victorious. My intuition is that our ethics have been eclipsed by the science of preserving physical endurance, the end-of-life technology that draws out death like some magic ring. (I wouldn't mind Ryan Davidson's thoughts on this.) We treat death like an assignation to be postponed, rather than an evil to be boldly confronted.
I was looking at some T. S. Eliot this morning, and ran across these lines from "The Journey of the Magi":
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Should we all not be glad of another death -- especially when the only alternative is to linger, immortal but insensible, like some awful modern vampire?
| By mesh | 12:40 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/19712
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference "The Sheer Indecency of the Thing":
