Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh, Florida, Florida, Florida. What is your problem.

I mean for one thing there’s this winner.

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities…According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.
Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

Is that a clever idea? I mean…what if students believe ‘God’ made the earth a few years before their parents were born? What if they believe 11 plus 2 equals 957,853? What if they believe Napoleon invented the automobile and Hitler was a Notre Dame football star?

What do students go to university for at all, if it’s not to have their beliefs not respected? They go there to find out that some of the things they believe are wrong. Dang – they even go there to find out that beliefs aren’t about ‘respect’. Well, except in Florida, maybe. (And, if Horowitz has his way, in Ohio and a few other states and pretty soon all fifty and I have to go pack my trunk now.)

And then there’s the Jebster.

Mr Bush’s brother, Jeb, meanwhile, has suggested doctors might have misdiagnosed Mrs Schiavo’s condition, which he says might be one of minimal consciousness rather than vegetative.
According to the Associated Press news agency, the governor and the state’s social services agency say they have filed a petition with a Pinellas County trial court seeking to take custody of Mrs Schiavo.

Mr Bush’s brother suggested that based on what, exactly? His own medical knowledge and familiarity with the case and personal examination of the patient? Intuition? Something he saw on tv? A fairy whispering in his ear? Hmm. I wonder if I can do that. [closes eyes, thinks hard] Okay, let’s see. There’s a car in the shop in Wichita, Kansas, that the mechanics have said has transmission problems, but I, sitting at my desk here in Seattle, suggest that the mechanics might have misdiagnosed that car’s condition, and actually what it has is ugly upholstery. I mean, my opinion is as good as theirs, right? It’s disrespecting my beliefs to say it’s not. It’s hell’s own arrogant for those stupid doctors to think they know more about Terri Schiavo’s condition than Jeb Bush does, just because they’ve examined her and he hasn’t and they know how a brain works and he, to put it mildly, doesn’t.

Well, great. What the hell. Let’s let legislators decide what college teachers should teach, and let’s let governors decide when doctors have made boo-boos. Peachy. Three cheers for minimal government. Not only micromanaging hospital care and university teaching, but also claiming universal competence. Brilliant.

Whatever. Maybe when Jeb gets custody of Schiavo he’ll have his parents move in so they can babysit for her and give him some time off. That would be sweet. Family values kind of thing.

This is a dispiriting read. They win. Bullying wins, death threats win, force wins, violence wins, pushing people around and beating them up and killing them wins. Interesting situation, isn’t it. People who have some capacity for moral reflection and awareness make some effort not to oppress and dominate and bully other people; people who don’t, don’t; so the people with some capacity lose to the people who have none. Familiar paradox. People who don’t give a rat’s ass about the freedom and rights of anyone but themselves are, of course, at a similar sort of advantage over people who do. People who think, like Callicles in the Gorgias, that people who can win because they’re stronger should go right ahead and do just that, often get their way. (Would he have thought so if he’d been small and puny and weak and sickly? Probably not. Hence the use of the Veil of Ignorance. But of course the Callicleses of the world don’t mess around with any old veils of ignorance, because they’re not small and puny and weak and sickly, so why should they.)

The decision by Wilders and Hirsi Ali to reveal their secret lives, one in a jail cell, the other on a naval base, has raised a question that is troubling many Dutch: is it acceptable for legislators in a Western democracy to be forced to go into hiding, to live like fugitives on the run in their own land?
Abram de Swaan, a prominent sociologist, said: “Of course this is an outrage. It’s not bearable. The government must come up with better solutions, like putting them in protected homes. That’s the way it happens in other countries.” The NRC Handelsblad, a leading daily newspaper, ran an editorial recently headlined “Unacceptable”. A situation in which legislators are “hampered in carrying out their tasks puts democracy in question and makes terror successful…”

Is it acceptable? That’s an easy question to answer. No, it’s not.

It was Hirsi Ali, though, who first decided to go public with her own and Wilders’ hiding places, out of frustration at the government’s seeming foot-dragging over finding appropriate housing. Her own proposals were regularly rejected as unsafe, she said.
Her bodyguards, she said, have deposited her on many weeknights on a naval base in Amsterdam, or hustled her off to sleep in different hotels. “They are keeping me alive, but I cannot concentrate on my work,” she said. “I need a place where I have my desk, my books, my papers, a home where I can meet with people.”…Hirsi Ali concedes she is struggling with the question of how long she can continue in politics, denouncing what she regards as the excesses of Islam. In the past she has shown she is not easily cowed, but she said a deep fatigue was setting in. “I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but I don’t know if I can live like this for a lot longer.” She put her inexorable quandary this way, “The real problem is, I cannot stop because that will only serve and stimulate the terrorists.”

I find that dispiriting because I can imagine it so well – I can imagine going stark raving mad being forced to live in hotel rooms or on a naval base all the time, away from my desk, books, papers, own living space. Hirsi Ali is tired of it. She doesn’t want to live that way. And why the hell should she? How could she? So they’ve already won – even if she does persist. They’ve won by spoiling her life and making her work impossible. The mindless sexist bullying thugs who can’t stand to see women who are not under the thumb of a man, get to win. It makes me crazy.

And another thing.

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

I didn’t know that until I read it on a blog. It doesn’t surprise me – of course Bush would sign a law like that. What else would he do, support ‘socialized medicine’? That would take away the whole point of being rich, talentless, lazy, and well-connected. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disgust me that little bit more. All that sanctimony – that crap about the presumption in favour of life. What did he do, whisper so softly that the mikes didn’t pick it up ‘if you have the money, that is‘? Mark Kleiman has more.

I know. Why’s she so quiet all of a sudden? you’ve been thinking. What’s the deal? Did something very heavy sit on her or what? Has she gone prancing off on a trip again? Is she at the mall shopping for new spring outfits? Getting her hair done? Training for a marathon? In prison? What?

Since it’s not as if I fall silent in the normal course of things, is it. No. No, it’s none of those, just a death struggle with my computer. So I finally shot it (I had to) and got a new one. Which means I have to go from three meals of cat food a day to two, for the rest of my life – either that or get an actual paying job, and we wouldn’t want me to do that, now would we.

So I’m not going to say a lot about it, because I gather the right-wing talking heads have pretty much talked themselves into puddles of exhausted steam doing so. But I do want to say just one thing. It’s this business of ‘only God can decide.’

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, on Monday condemned the withdrawal of the feeding tube, saying only God can decide whether a person should live or die. “Who can judge the dignity and sacredness of the life of a human being, made in the image and likeness of God? Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out-of-order household appliance?” the paper said in a commentary. A year ago, Pope John Paul II said that feeding and hydrating a patient in a persistive vegetative state was “morally obligatory” and called withdrawal of feeding tubes “euthanasia by omission.”

Thus illustrating yet again why one doesn’t turn to god-botherers for clarity of thought. I mean…if only ‘God’ can decide whether a person should live or die, then Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago, remember? As did a great, great many of the rest of us and our parents and grandparents and so on. If only God can decide then we’re not supposed to do anything, right? Somebody has a fever, an infected cut, TB, cholera, tetanus, whatever – we’re supposed to just let God do what it will. Or else we’re not – but then the Vatican doesn’t get to pick arbitrary points where we’re obliged to let the deity do the deciding. Either humans intervene all along the way or they don’t.

This business about the appliance. The Vatican newspaper seems to think this God of theirs issued Schiavo with a feeding tube – a special feeding tube, apparently, that materialized only after she’d had the brain damage. But it must have looked to bystanders as if humans were involved with the appearance of the feeding tube. So why couldn’t it work the other way? This God of theirs dematerializes the feeding tube, and to bystanders it looks as if humans are involved in the process but in fact it’s the deity doing it all. That makes just as much sense as the other version, in which humans are perfectly entitled to perform medical interventions, they’re just not permitted to decide to end them when (actually, long after) it’s clear that the upper cortex has been destroyed.

And what is all this crap about compassion. (Oh look, I said I would only say one thing. But – oh well, two then.) Compassion. Is it. Is that why sane people are so filled with dread? Is that why we’re all imagining ourselves lying around like department store mannequins, bodies without minds, propped up like dolls, dead but still kept hanging around? Right to life my ass. It’s not right to life, it’s no right to death.

I try to be reasonable (sometimes) but this country looks like such a loony bin these days. It scares me.