With Friends Like These, Who Needs Democrats?

Stop the presses! A Republican judge is defending the Constitution!

Terri Schiavo is dead, and God bless her, whatever form he may take. At the risk of ruining the Radical Right's pity party, however, I think it only appropriate to quote, by way of eulogaic remarks, the words of 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Stanley Birch, a hard-Right Republican and a Bush I appointee. From his supporting opinion declining to accept the Schiavo case for a 23rd time (thanks to Salon's War Room):

"A popular epithet directed by some members of society, including some members of Congress, toward the judiciary involves the denunciation of 'activist judges. Generally, the definition of an 'activist judge' is one who decides the outcome of a controversy before him according to personal conviction, even one sincerely held, as opposed to the dictates of the law as constrained by legal precedent and, ultimately, our Constitution. In resolving the Schiavo controversy, it is my judgment that, despite sincere and altruistic motivation, the legislative and executive branches of our government have acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people -- our Constitution."

Salon goes on:

"While other judges have been content to assume the constitutionality of the emergency legislation enacted by Congress on behalf of Schiavo's parents while rejecting their appeals on other grounds, Birch said that it was time to cease indulging in that assumption. While Congress and the president might have had the constitutional authority to confer jurisdiction over the Schiavo matter on the federal courts, Birch said that they lacked the authority to dictate the way in which the courts exercised that jurisdiction. As Birch explained, the emergency legislation purported to tell the courts that they must apply a 'de novo' standard of review to the case; that they could not consider whether Schiavo's parents claims were previously adjudicated in state courts; that they could not abstain from hearing the case on the grounds that proceedings were already under way in state courts; and that they could not decline the case on the grounds that remedies in state courts had not yet been exhausted. 'Because these provisions constitute legislative dictation of how a federal court should exercise its judicial functions," Birch wrote, the Schiavo legislation "invades the province of the judiciary and violates the separation of powers principle.'"

Birch: "...when the fervor of political passions moves the executive and legislative branches to act in ways inimical to basic constitutional principles, it is the duty of the judiciary to intervene. If sacrifices to the independence of the judiciary are permitted today, precedent is established for the constitutional transgressions of tomorrow. Accordingly, we must conscientiously guard the independence of our judiciary and safeguard the Constitution, even in the face of the unfathomable human tragedy that has befallen Mrs. Schiavo and her family and the recent events related to her plight which have troubled the consciences of many. Realizing this duty, I conclude that the [Schiavo legislation] is an unconstitutional infringement on core tenets underlying our constitutional system."

Salon: "Birch said that the Florida legislature or Congress might re-write the laws governing end of life decisions, but that -- failing to do so -- they could not mandate that the courts change existing laws through judicial fiat. 'Were the courts to change the law, as the petitioners and Congress invite us to do, an 'activist judge' criticism would be valid.'"

In other words: The hypocrisy stops here. Just as we know the Radical Right are for government getting out of people's lives - except when they're not (i.e. when it's intruding in other people's lives), we now see clearly they're totally, 100% against "activist judges" - except when those judges might find for them. These people wouldn't know intellectual consistency if it came up and smacked 'em upside the head with a cricket bat. Fortunately, there are still some Republicans out there who love not just their country but the principles for which it stands. Memo to the other twelve of you: you better do something to take back your party pretty soon, because if you don't... well, let's just say no governmental death-grip lasts forever.

Thank you, Judge Birch. A better memorial for Terri Schiavo would be hard to imagine.

Politics

Southern Comfort

Well, as Sam Gamgee said, I'm back.

I have no explanation for that Burtonesque character with the Victorian diction who apparently succeeded in passing off his deranged ramblings as my own "journal entries" (recovered via time machine from the future!) while I was gone. None. Although I did enjoy reading that Dickey poem.

But I'll tell you this, honest and true: it was nice to go home for a while.

Living in Los Angeles is a wearing experience. You arrive with sparkling eyes, expecting overnight success, and for a time the city seems full of possibility, like the girl at the punch stand at your high school prom who seems a bit out of your league but you'd swear is giving you friendly looks. When the overnight success doesn't come, you adjust. You grow accustomed over time to the superficiality, the rudeness, the Machiavellian careerism, the high school girls with breast implants and the middle-aged men with lifted faces. You learn to tune them out and focus on the weather - although after a few years even a 80-degree sunny day starts to feel oppressive in its own way. Living in LA is perhaps the most pleasant form of auto-anesthesia ever devised by the human mind.

Of course, if you're not careful with the anesthesia, it can become auto-euthanasia.

Don't worry; I am not going to sit here and wax sentimental about the place I was born and grew up in, because it merits no so such treatment. Atlanta is, in the words of a high school friend of mine, The Big Sofa: it's really comfortable, and if you know what's good for you you really need to drag yourself up off it and go outside. It's perhaps as unsouthern as a southern city can be.

But.

Those of you whose experience of the southern United States is limited to "Dukes of Hazzard" may have entrenched assumptions about that part of the country. I will not sully myself with attempting to change them. Ignorance takes many forms, regional self-superiority being one of the more common, and we southerners are used to being whipping boys for the rest of the country. If it makes you feel better about yourself to be able to think, "Well, at least I'm not from THERE," as if poverty, racism, corruption and lack of education don't exist in your little corner of the world, you go right ahead. Like I said, I'm over trying to enlighten the willfully ignorant on this subject.

But I will attest that being southern does most certainly shape the way you see things. There is a connectedness with the land, a sense of history that comes with the birth certificate - not the "We shall rise again" crap, just a tacit understanding that there IS a history to be learned and wrestled with. (Americans as a group don't really "do" history; we prefer looking forward, so as not to have to wrestle with our national history and the holes it would poke in our national mythology. Southerners, on the other hand, have no choice; we got beat, and the ones who beat us have never let us forget it.)

Enlightened southerners, who exist in only slightly smaller proportion than enlightened people in other parts of the world, are thus burdened from the beginning with a rich and mournful knowledge of what casual evil human beings are capable of. It gives us depth in a way I believe people from other parts of America are hard pressed to match. Angelenos are skin-deep.

(By the way, don't mistake anything I'm saying for the faux populism so in vogue among the current beneficiaries of flyover-state ignorance. David Brooks can stuff his bobos up his nose. I'm an overeducated, coastal, blue-state intellectual and proud of it.)

The point is, when I go home - for that is what it always will be - and spend a little time among dogwood trees and people who age normally, it recharges me. It's like putting a live wire to the earth; I feel grounded, put back in touch with the real. LA is a big movie set, and as on any studio backlot, if you look around you'll see the buildings are nothing more than hollow façades. It's a convincing simulacrum of reality, but only from a distance. (Angeleno readers will recognize this as the "Angelyne" principle.)

Did it change my life, this six-day respite in the land that birthed me? Fix all my problems? Of course not. But one thing I have come to know unshakably about myself is that I yearn always for connection, for intimacy, for truth, for passion, for chances to commune with the real. For six days last week, I did that. Like that Victorian imposter said, it was a balm for my soul. I wish you all a similarly healing experience sometime soon.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress...

Squandering "Political Capital": Priceless.

This just in, courtesy of Naked Singularity reader Jason H. of Los Angeles. It's off the Reuters wire. And I quote:

"BUSH APPROVAL RATING HITS LOW MARK

"WASHINGTON (March 26) - President Bush's job approval slipped into the mid 40s in national polls released this week as he lost some support among men and other groups of core supporters.

"Public approval for Bush slipped from 52 percent in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll over the weekend to 45 percent in that same poll released Thursday. A CBS News poll released earlier in the week found Bush's approval slipping six points to 43 percent.

"The Gallup poll found Bush losing support among men, self-described conservatives and churchgoers while the CBS poll found a drop among men and Republicans.

"The polls come after Congress and the president intervened in the case of Terri Schiavo, a 41-year-old woman whose feeding tube had been removed. The federal intervention was widely unpopular, even with conservatives and evangelicals.

"But Bush's dip in the polls also comes at a time that gas prices have been on the rise and the president is involved in an uphill campaign for changes in Social Security.

"The Gallup poll of 1,001 adults was taken Monday through Wednesday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The CBS News poll of 737 adults was taken Monday and Tuesday and has a 4 percentage point margin of error."

Gee, go figure: you screw the public mercilessly on every single issue for months on end, and eventually they actually start to notice. How about that?

Politics

Seeds of Resistance, Y'all!

We continue today with transcribed entries from a recovered journal recounting Hotspur's adventures on a March 2005 safari back to Atlanta, the village of his birth, deep in the heart of Red State darkness. This entry contains copyrighted material, the unauthorized reproduction here of which probably violates the letter of some law somewhere; given the spirit of the reproduction's purpose, however, we here at Naked Singularity feel certain the author (if not his estate) would approve. Please don't sue us; we're not making a dime off it, and no one will be happier than we if the result is a marked increase in revenues due to the sale of said author's poetry.

March 26: The aforementioned tribal ritual took place, but I was not in attendance, as my traveling companion proved unequal to the rigors of the journey required to witness it; granted, my traveling companion is 82-and-one-half years of age, so I deferred to her wishes with, I hope, adequate equanimity. The mysteries of the chopping tomahawk and the Diamondvision await an expedition of more intrepid explorers.

However, I was pleased instead to accompany my mother on a sojourn to visit the homestead of my brother and his family. They have somehow managed to carve out an existence in the harsh environment of western Dekalb County, and it cheered me to see how they now thrive despite the concomitant hardships. My niece and nephew harvested homegrown carrots and picked wild grasses for Easter baskets - how the niceties of civilization are preserved even here in the suburbs off Lavista! - as we adults tarried in the shade of their lean-to's lanai with a cool drink.

I was dismayed, however, to hear that my brother and his wife have endured significant mistreatment at the hands of anonymous neighbors due, apparently, to their political affiliation. I should note that their minivan still sports a Howard Dean sticker and their front lawn a Kerry/Edwards campaign sign; even so, I fail to see any justification for the dead rat left recently on my sister-in-law's windshield. Even in this relatively Blue city, the hatred inculcated by the sinister Professor Rove is evidently sufficient to snuff out basic southern decency, not to say politesse. Thank goodness, as my sister-in-law noted, that the miscreants in question respected the power of disease enough first to insert the deceased rodent in a Ziploc bag. (Who, we asked rhetorically, is so twisted as to seek out rats, dispatch them to their reward, and stick them in a plastic baggie in preparation for the moment when they might come upon a car with a Democratic sticker on it? The mind fairly reels at the unbalanced nature of such an imagination.)

Nonethless, my sister-in-law, who was to the best of my knowledge the first and most rabid Deaniac in northeast Atlanta, continues to meet with like-minded professional women of her acquaintance who share the goal of becoming the change they wish to see. One idea they have had is to go around to Sunday School classes with a presentation on Jim Wallis's God's Politics, thereby to introduce some of the area's less enlightened Christians to the compatibility of their religion with liberal political philosophy. I think this a capital notion, particularly in this part of the world; any Christian who thinks his religion is best represented by the policies of the Bush administration understands precious little about his religion. My sister-in-law, a lawyer, is also half-seriously entertaining (with some encouragement from her compatriots) the thought of running for the United States Senate from Georgia. Could she win? I haven't the slightest idea, but I think she'd do our home territory proud should she indeed prevail, and I have pledged to provide her what financial support I could should she choose to make her candidacy official. Attention, Georgian Democrats: keep an eye peeled for lawn signs sporting a jaunty ¡Ortega! logo.

I also had further occasion to discuss politics with my stepfather, the wisest man I know, which conversation actually grew out of a dinner table discussion with my mother on poetry. I allowed as how, while I understand and respect poetry as a form, too often I have been left cold by its practioners of the last 65 years or so, whose work I frequently find willfully obscure. (It's as if, having read "The Four Quartets," all most late 20th Century poets got out of the experience was that opacity equals profundity.) I also sense that some of these same poets - and I don't mean the great ones, now, but rather those on the next level down - enjoy the feeling of self-superiority they derive from their audience's befuddlement. If I, as overeducated a rascal as you are likely to find and one with no mean schooling in poetry appreciation, can make no sense of the poet's work, the reason is most likely not my lack of sufficient erudition but the poem's lack of sufficient sense.

In response, my stepfather pulled out a book and read to me, in his Atticus Finch voice:


CHERRYLOG ROAD

Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The '34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
With a seat pulled out to run
Corn whiskey down from the hills,

And then from the other side
Crept into an Essex
With a rumble seat of red leather
And then out again, aboard
A blue Chevrolet, releasing
The rust from its other color,

Reared up on three building blocks.
None had the same body heat;
I changed with them inward, toward
The weedy heart of the junkyard,
For I knew that Doris Holbrook
Would escape from her father at noon

And would come from the farm
To seek parts owned by the sun
Among the abandoned chassis,
Sitting in each in turn
As I did, leaning forward
As in a wild stock-car race

In the parking lot of the dead.
Time after time, I climbed in
And outthe other side, like
An envoy or movie star
Met at the station by crickets.
A radiator cap raised its head,

Become a real toad or a kingsnake
As I neared the hub of the yard,
Passing through many states,
Many lives, to reach
Some grandmother's long Pierce-Arrow
Sending platters of blindness forth

From its nickel hubcaps
And spilling its tender upholstery
On sleepy roaches,
The glass panel in between
Lady and colored driver
Not all the way broken out,

The back-seat phone
Still on its hook.
I got in as though to exclaim,
"Let us go to the orphan asylum,
John; I have some old toys
For children who say their prayers."

I popped with sweat as I thought
I heard Doris Holbrook scrape
Like a mouse in the southern-state sun
That was eating the paint in blisters
>>From a hundred car tops and hoods.
She was tapping like code,

Loosening the screws,
Carrying off headlights,
Sparkplugs, bumpers,
Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs,
Getting ready, already,
To go back with something to show

Other than her lips' new trembling
I would hold to me soon, soon
Where I sat in the ripped back seat
Talking over the interphone,
Praying for Doris Holbrook
To come from her father's farm

And to get back there
With no trace of me on her face
To be seen by her red-haired father
Who would change, in the squalling barn,
Her back's pale skin with a strop,
Then lay for me

In a bootlegger's roasting car
With a sting-triggered 12-guage shotgun
To blast the breath from the air.
Not cut by the jagged windshields,
Through the acres of wrecks she came
With a wrench in her hand,

Through dust where the blacksnake dies
Of boredom, and the beetle knows
The compost has no more life.
Someone's outside would have seen
The oldest car's door inexplicably
Close from within:

I held her and held her and held her,
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,
So the blacksnake, stiff
With inaction, curved back
Into life, and hunted the mouse

With deadly overexcitement,
The beetles reclaimed their field
As we clung, glued together
With the hooks of the seat springs
Working through to catch us red-handed
Amidst the gray breathless batting

That burst from the seat at our backs.
We left by separate doors
Into the changed, other bodies
Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard

Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.


The poet was Atlanta's James Dickey, and the poem was simply smashing, as well as the antithesis of all I had previously decried: not oblique but crystalline, not pretentious but earthy, not elitist but democratic (with a small "d") - and if at all intellectual, its intellectualism was of a sort any reasonably intelligent English-speaker could access. I was overcome; the unexpected bliss of exquisite art - particularly art with such a strong southern tang, as I recuperated here in the heart of my homeland - was a balm for my soul.

It also occurred to me instantly that in this exchange my parents and I had put our collective finger on a principle whose relevance to current American politics was direct and urgent. Where Red Staters recoil in mistrust from the liberals so ably demonized by conservative media gurus, it is often in reaction against the self-superior intellectualism they have been trained to see in every word and deed profferred by anyone on the Left - and while this accusation is frequently empty, it is not exclusively so. The Democratic Party in America, I suddenly saw with the clarion force of revelation, must make as one of its main goals the redress of this hateful characterization - and must seek to ensure it is a mischaracterization. We became the great political power in America for forty years because of our identification with the problems, causes, heartaches and unflagging strength of ordinary working people. We must remember that eloquent truth is not the exclusive province of the intelligentsia. Great poetry need not be incomprehensible, and great politics need not be inaccessible.

There is in simplicity, in directness, the possibility for true connection, for clarity. Artifice is the enemy of art.

Oh, the joy of sudden insight! What a profitable trip this is turning out to be!

Hell Freezes Over

THIS JUST IN: The Duke Blue Devils have been defeated by Michigan State in the NCAA Tournament.

I chose Duke to win the championship this year in every bracket I submitted, figuring that either way, I'd win. But their ouster so early in the proceedings now has me questioning my most cherished assumptions. Over the last five years I have become so very used to Pure Evil triumphing in all circumstances: Bush, Jim Hahn, Schwarzeneggar, Bush again... It just became a knee-jerk assumption, like knowing every live-action Disney release would suck.

But now that Duke has lost, Pure Evil's string of unbroken triumphs has been broken. And I am left here on the floor, shattered, depleted, bereft. How to put back together the shards of my fractured world-view? How to make sense of a universe in which Pure Evil can actually be defeated?

Poor Coach K and his orphanage full of hard-luck tykes. Who will they play dirty ball against now?

Like Paper in Fire

The story so far: Hotspur has ventured into the wilds of deepest, darkest Red America to visit his ancestral village, known as Atlanta. In a twist of archaeological fortune involving a bottle of Southern Comfort and a time machine, the remnants of his safari journal have been/will be discovered in the year 2075 in the smoldering ruins of a barbecue restaurant fire of suspicious origin. Herewith are presented excerpts from this historic trek.

March 25: I am pleased to note that the quality of Chinese cuisine in Atlanta, which I have found to be inexplicably unmatched anywhere else in America I've visited, is entirely undiminished. May God and Lao-Tsu save and protect the good proprietors of the House of Chan!

Time to respond to reader inquiries. A Mrs. Juana McCorkindale of Eugene, OR, asks, "If you find the time, dearest Mr. Hotspur, could you provide elucidation as to the condition of local media coverage deep in the continent?"

Madame, I can and I will. In regards to the largest print daily, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution - or, as it is more familiarly known to the natives, the "fish-wrapper" - I can report that it remains the most astonishingly poor excuse for a big-city newspaper to be found anywhere outside Texas. As evidence I submit two notable features of today's edition:

1. Four and one-half complete front-section pages (including the front page, above the fold) devoted entirely to the Terri Schiavo situation, notwithstanding the fact that the Supreme Court has refused to take the case and Jeb Bush has rejected calls to take Ms. Schiavo's essentially lifeless body "into protective custody," and

2. A large ad on Page A2 teasing the incipient arrival in Saturday's edition of the weekly "Faith & Values" section. This week: "Born Again: The Southern Baptist Convention has a goal of 1 million baptisms this year. We tell the stories of three people baptized recently!"

This is news?

As for Atlanta's broadcast media, I can only aver it continues to be as mind-numbing an embarrassment as ever. (Needless to say, it is nonetheless light years better than that of Los Angeles.)

Tomorrow I hope to attend, weather permitting, a local tribal ritual. The largest HDTV screen in the world is to be unveiled at the home arena of the town's most dominant gladiatorial organization. Apparently three-story, full-color tomahawks will be seen to chop in glorious "Diamondvision"; what, exactly, they may chop is still a bit murky, but undoubtedly all will be made clear on the morrow. What a smashing opportunity for anthropological science!

I drift to sleep to the dulcet tones of Green Day's "American Idiot" - a lullaby tailored especially for my needs by my ingenious iPod Shuffle - followed by Lyle Lovett and his Large Band, singing the wondrous "Church." Now that's a religion worth devoting the space of an entire newspaper.

Until tomorrow!

Stop the InsHannity!

From Hotspur's Safari Journal, recently discovered in a late-Seventies "Electrowoman & Dynagirl" lunchbox found in the smoldering ruins of Sonny's Barbecue in Marietta, GA, and sold by Christie's at auction for $3.59:

March 24: Day One of my foray into deepest, darkest Red America has brought me little insight into this bewildering land.  It is hard to believe I was born here, raised here, became a man on these mean streets.  It is all so familiar, and yet so foreign. Thank God for the Chipotle newly established on Hwy. 41 at Akers Mill next to the Chick-fil-A, on premises formerly occupied by Longhorn Steaks.  (How hard it is not to read a political portent in that turn of events, though I shall do my best to keep my native optimism in check.)

But the opportunity to commune with my beloved family provides welcome cheer.  A hardier clan of southern Democrats it is difficult to imagine.  "Keep hope alive," indeed.

My stepfather, the wisest man I know, is pleased with Howard Dean's ascension to the top of the party and hopeful that Dean's grass-roots fundraising prowess and focus on putting the power in the party back into the hands of those on the state and local levels will bring about the progressive renaissance for which we all fervently pray.  He also believes it is essential that the Dems run a non-Beltway type in 2008, preferably a midwestern or western governor.  He has mentioned Brad Henry, of Oklahoma.  I can see his point, though I myself tend more toward the notion of nominating somehow with a modicum of charisma. How can we get John Edwards a better resumé?

Driving the Atlantan veldt in my borrowed Infiniti Land Cruiser this afternoon, I searched in vain for a local AM radio affiliate with the intestinal fortitude to broadcast Air America, thinking I had heard it was available here.  Perhaps I was misinformed.  In any case, I did stumble across Sean Hannity's show, where could be heard the Blow-Dried Irishman and his devotées carping to the heavens over the gall - the gall! - of that untrustworthy (Republican-majority) Florida legislature, that scoundrel (Republican) governor Jeb Bush, and, worst of all, that despicable (Republican-nominated majority) United States Supreme Court, none of whom had the courage to step in and protect Terri Schiavo's right to be shamelessly exploited by Tom DeLay and the Fundamentalist Fringe.  (Jeb they were mostly mad at because he has thus far refused to order the Florida State Patrol to enter the hospital and forcibly take Mrs. Schiavo from it.  Yes, you heard me; they want him to use state police to abduct her.)

The Righties were apoplectic; Hannity himself decried the unfairness of an unelected judiciary taking away the power from "our elected officials."  Conveniently ignoring, of course, the apparent lack of representation in the current Congress for the 65% of Americans who think what DeLay did was unconscionable.  I thought poor Sean might have an aneurism on the spot.

All in all, a salutary first day!

Politics

Red Lenses

April Fool's Day is coming - and what better way to mark it than with a foray into Red America? (By the way, are you like me? Is it impossible for you to get used to painting the conservative states with a color that is indelibly linked in our national consciousness to Commies and liberals? Do you find yourself inadvertently switching the Red and Blue appellations?)

That's right: starting tomorrow, I'll be going on safari into deepest, darkest Georgia. Well, okay, not so deep and dark. Atlanta. Which is itself a pretty blue city. But still.

I'll be sending dispatches from the heart of the Democratic southern resistance all week. If you've got questions for the natives, by all means post them in the comments and I'll do my best to find answers. The indigenous fauna spook pretty easily, but I think I can coax them out a bit.

'Til my next post from the interior...

You Don't Really Love Me, You Just Keep Me Hanging On

Oh, what a tragic state of affairs.

I will not take up the defense of Michael Schiavo. He has no need of my defense. I am on record in this very space as being in favor of the right-to-die, which nearly thirty judges - including, now, a federal judge who only received the case because Congress altered the law to allow such a thing to happen - have upheld is a right which, as far as anyone knows, Terri Schiavo would have wanted to exercise. (And just so you know exactly where I'm coming from, I have made clear to my wife that, were I in a similar position, I would wish to be allowed to die if, and only if, my brain should have no meaningful higher function at all. If my mind's intact inside my head, even if I can't communicate, I want to live, dammit.)

Michael Schiavo's wife has been dead for all practical purposes for fifteen years, according to the only meaningful metric which exists for such a question. This is fact. Wishful thinking will not unmake it. Her brain is damaged beyond hope of any real recovery, according to the doctors who have actually bothered to examine her at a range measured in feet rather than hundreds of miles.

Michael and Terri Schiavo's marriage was not perfect (whose is?); they were in the early stages of separating when Terri's heart stopped due to a lack of potassium brought about by her bulimia, and the brain damage was exacerbated by other mishaps having to do with the EMTs who attended her. That some see vague responsiveness in her face and voice, where they so long to see it, is understandable but certainly a mirage, a trick of the mind, and cannot qualify as actionable evidence. We always hope against hope that our loved ones will come back to us. Sooner or later, every single one of them fails to do so.

In the intervening fifteen years, Michael Schiavo has done what, I think, only the most insensitive soul would begrudge him: knowing his wife is essentially dead, he has gone on with his life. He has a new life partner, and children by her. Were my spouse in his place, I pray fervently she would do the same.

Neither will I condemn Terri Schiavo's family. They love her; they miss her. Every flutter of a lash, every gutteral sound that emanates from her throat, suggests to their eyes and ears against all reason that hope, Emily Dickinson's "thing with feathers," is not lost. Who cannot imagine their desperation, their need? Who cannot feel for their pain?

So I will not enter the arena of attacking or supporting one or the other of Terri Schiavo's family members, who have all been through more than I hope any of us ever has to. Their experience has been harrowing, excruciating, and not one of us who has not lived it has earned the right to scorn any of them.

No, let's reserve our scorn for those who have truly earned it by exploiting this sorrowful situation for their own political gain. For the radical religious zealots who have used and misused Terri Schiavo's parents and siblings. For Jeb Bush and Bill Frist and the other politicians who have abused this family's tragedy as a way to score political points. Most especially for Tom DeLay, who has grabbed onto this situation as a way of detracting attention from his own impending indictment. "One thing that God has brought to us," DeLay told a Family Research Council conference a couple of days ago, "is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America. This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others."

According to the New York Times, "DeLay complained that 'the other side' had figured out how 'to defeat the conservative movement,' by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that 'the whole syndicate' was 'a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.'"

It's about him, you see. It'a about the huge liberal forces arrayed to destroy him and his kind. Not about Terri Schiavo. The man's narcissism and paranoia are breathtaking.

"The whole syndicate." What does he mean?

Surely not the 65% of Americans who every poll taken has indicated support Michael Schiavo's wish to allow his wife to die with dignity.

Surely not the 87% of Americans who an ABC News/WPost poll last week indicated would want their spouse to allow them to die, were they so unfortunate as to be in that state.

Surely not the mainstream media, who have essentially ignored the public's feelings on the issue.

Surely not the Democrats in the federal government, who are out of power in every branch.

In a time when we have seen crass and craven politics of the most disgusting sort, I would venture to say this beats all. This may be the most despicable political exploitation of human suffering we have yet seen in America this century, which, in only five short years, has racked up an impressive list of moral affronts.

And so this I say to you, the ordinary Americans: What kind of people are we if we allow this to go on? What kind of country are we if we let our elected representatives pervert the federal government and the Constitution and exacerbate this family's unimaginable torment? What kind of people are we if we patronize a media who allows these crimes against human decency to go entirely unquestioned?

Who are we? What has happened to us?

Good For What Ailes You

Apoplectic over the pseudo-journalistic outrage that is Fox News? Just don't know how to quantify your intuition for use by the water cooler when that jerkoff CSUN grad who works in Operations starts spouting off about how much sense Bill O'Reilly makes? Wondering what ever happened to actual NEWS?

Howard Kurtz's most recent Media Notes column in the WPost contains some of the most damning information, via the Project for Excellence in Journalism, about the state of broadcast news in general and the Fox News Channel yet seen. Naturally, the rest of the media world has yawned in response.

Rather than summarizing, let me quote:

"In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.

"By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views."

Huh? Are you freakin' KIDDING me? The Clinton News Network only scored 2% on the Editorializ-o-meter? Oh, imagine the Free Republic bulletin board about now...

"The project defines opinion as views that are not attributed to others."

You want examples?

"Last March, Fox reporter Todd Connor said that 'Iraq has a new interim constitution and is well on its way to democracy.'

"'Let's pray it works out,' said anchor David Asman.

"Another time, after hearing that Iraqis helped capture a Saddam Hussein henchman, Asman said: 'Boy, that's good news if true, the Iraqis in the lead.'

"Fox legal editor Stan Goldman challenged the hiring of attorney Gloria Allred to represent Amber Frey (Scott Peterson's mistress), saying: 'If you want to keep a low profile, Gloria is not the lawyer to represent you.'"

"The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington-based research group, offers a three-part breakdown of cable journalists voicing their opinions. From 11 a.m. to noon, this happened on 52 percent of the stories on Fox, 50 percent on MSNBC and 2.3 percent on CNN. Among news-oriented evening shows, journalist opinions were voiced on 70 percent of the stories on Fox's 'Special Report With Brit Hume,' due in part to its regular analysts panel at the show's end; 9 percent on MSNBC's 'Countdown With Keith Olbermann'; and 9 percent on CNN's 'NewsNight With Aaron Brown.'"

Let me repeat that: opinions voiced on 9% of Olbermann and Brown's shows, versus 70% on Hume's.

"As for the most popular prime-time shows, nearly every story -- 97 percent -- contained opinion on Fox's 'O'Reilly Factor'; 24 percent on MSNBC's 'Hardball With Chris Matthews'; and 0.9 percent on CNN's 'Larry King Live.'"

"The project describes cable news reporting as pretty thin compared with the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts. Only a quarter of the cable stories examined contained two or more identifiable sources, compared with 49 percent of network evening news stories and 81 percent of newspaper front-page stories."

In other words, friends and neighbors, the distinction between the pseudo-journalism done by Fox and the actual journalism done by the other cable news nets and the broadcast nets is, by any objective standard, cavernous. Not to mention loud.

Clip 'n' Save!

Politics

It's Only a Day Away

It's Monday, and that means a new and brilliant "This Modern World." In today's edition, Tom Tomorrow flips the channel to the Bush News Network. Sweetheart that I am, I'm pushing the buttons on your remote, too. Enjoy.

No Pulp

First off, sorry for the unexpected layoff, folks. Knowing full well that it's bad business to stop blogging just when people are starting to read you, I promise there will be no more nine-day layoffs between posts. (Partly, I just didn't have much to add to the ever-more-irrational world. Also, I strive in this space to provide not moment-by-moment commentary in the manner of some blogs, but rather thoughtful analysis with some perspective - and sometimes perspective takes a little time to set in. Anyway, I'm back. And nationwide. Worldwide, even.)

That being said, I'll begin this post the way I began the last one: with a link to a piece in today's Salon. (By the way, if you're not familiar with Salon, rundon'twalk to the link over there on the right side of this page and avail yourself of the wonderous wisdom of the best news/analysis publication on the Worldddd Widdddde Webbbb.) Kevin Berger's article on yesterday's Congressional Oversight Committee steroid hearings is easily the best collection of thoughts on that ridiculous circus I've seen. Berger wastes no time in calling out the pontificating politicians for their grandstanding while ignoring baseball's true travesty, the sport's can-you-believe-they're still-doing-that antitrust exemption (not to mention stuff that really matters, like, oh, say, the Bush administration's falsification of evidence for the war in Iraq).

Where Berger really shines, though, is in the way he identifies José Canseco, the man whose self-glorifying tell-all book started this latest round of navel-gazing, neither as crusading savior or damnable liar but rather, in all his messy, charming glory, as The Accidental Hero: a man whose inability to control his human failings has forced the issue out into the open. Canseco, Berger writes, slowly unraveled before the committee, his eyes growing bloodshot, his tie loosening, his answers becoming ever more self-contradictory - in contrast to the smooth, rehearsed, politician-like performances of Mark McGuire, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, and Curt Schilling. Canseco can't cover up his humanity like they can; he doesn't have the discipline (which is why he needed steroids). He's an X-factor, a free radical; he's the wild mustang they couldn't tame, who bashes himself bloody but breaks down the fence in the process and lets the other horses out.

The fact is, this whole issue is a farce. Athletes have been doing whatever they could to give themselves advantages, fair or not, since the beginning of athletic competition. The disctinction between shooting up with steroids and getting laser eye surgery - another scientific enhancement the advantages of which on pitching and hitting are well-documented - is really no distinction at all. It's an arbitrary line. This is a smoke-screen issue that the Powers That Be, both Congressional and in Major League Baseball, are happy to allow to divert the public from the serious stuff. And Berger nails them for it. Check it out.

Captain Walker Didn't Come Home

There’s a thought-provoking article by Alessandro Camon in today’s Salon that discusses the modern mafia-lit/show genre as one long deconstruction of patriarchy, in both the political and personal senses. Camon traces the path from “The Godfather” through “The Sopranos” and finally the reality show “Growing Up Gotti”; he charts how the father’s traditional role as the protector of family in this genre slowly erodes (sometimes causing the very destruction of the family the father sought to protect), and makes some astute observations about the relationship between this through-line and the mafia genre’s enduring popularity (especially in the modern-day gangsta subculture).

He also connects that popularity to the general cultural phenomenon of emotional or actual fatherlessness in America. I can’t help thinking that phenomenon began with the Baby-Boomers and their emotionally distant fathers, returned from World War II or Korea with psychic scars that could never heal. The men in my family who served were fortunate enough to be spared serious combat experiences and the concomitant trauma (with one significant exception, about whom more in a bit). Of course, that’s just what they’ve told me. I know people whose fathers and grandfathers refuse to this day to discuss with anyone except their fellow soldiers what they experienced and how it affected them. That’s how they keep their heads screwed on semi-straight, and when you watch a particularly well-made documentary on the subject or a movie like “Band of Brothers,” you can understand why. It’s no self-contradiction for a liberal like me to appreciate how much of their sanity our fathers left on those battlefields, or to feel grateful and lucky to have been myself spared that particular trauma.

But of course that’s not the whole story. What about those fathers’ sons?

Having been kowtowed to by Madison Avenue as they aged from childhood through adolescence, the male Baby-Boomers took out their hurt by rebelling against everything their fathers’ generation represented. In some ways this was a good thing: mainstream America in the Fifties was a bland, deferential place where no one questioned authority – and the Sixties were spent showing just how wrongheaded authority could be. The Boomers blew the lid off that self-satisfied patriarchy, which is why conservatives today still loathe everything about the Sixties: they perceive it rightly as an affront to the culture of their fathers. (They are willfully blind to the flaws of that culture, and of the fathers who created it; acknowledging those flaws would mean acknowledging their own, and that ain’t gonna happen.)

But then the Seventies came along, and slowly, surely, the male boomers screwed it up. (The women didn’t; they figured out after a while that “free love” just meant the boys expected them to put out on demand, and they started rethinking just what being truly liberated meant.) The men forgot the good that came out of the Sixties; they spent the Seventies gratifying themselves, with little or no thought of how it impacted others in their lives. How better to refute the self-enslavement of their fathers to obligation, to responsibility, than by eschewing responsibility and obligation? Which was all well and good, except… the sex was good, man, see? The grass and blow were primo! It was the freakin’ “Me” Decade, for cryin’ out loud! What was a self-indulgent Boomer man to do?

Well, apparently he couldn’t muster the self-restraint not to have families. Instead, he got married and had kids – and only THEN realized the responsibility was less fun than the partying had been. And realizing that, the Boomer men left. In droves. They reacted to their fathers’ emotional inaccessibility by becoming a generation of crappy fathers. (A decade or so down the line, having finally grown up a little or partied themselves weary, many of them went back in for second or third marriages and families, and now, finally sober, they became they most anxious parents imaginable - which is why the children of the Baby Boomlet now find their lives scheduled and structured to within an inch of their sanity; the Boomer dads are damned if they’re gonna screw this up again. Oh, and of course now they belatedly lionize their fathers as the “Greatest Generation”; how like the Baby-Boomers to take something of profound substance and reduce it to a marketing slogan.)

If I sound like I take this stuff personally, it’s because I do. This is the story of my life – or, more properly, of my father’s life. Born in 1943, he was at the very leading edge of the Baby Boom. He reacted to his distant father and withholding mother at first by trying to be the Best Boy He Could Be; got great grades, turned down a partial scholarship to Harvard because his parents couldn’t afford the other half, took a full scholarship to Emory instead, became a doctor, married the high school sweetheart who shared his birthday, had a couple of kids…

And then went to Vietnam.

Well, okay, not actually Vietnam. Thailand. An army doctor.

Started drinking. A lot. Maybe drugs; who knows?

And when he came back, he was… different.

The screws had come loose.

He left his family, moved hundreds of miles away so he wouldn’t have to see the people who knew him witnessing what he’d become. Practically disappeared from his kids’ lives. Moved from place to place as job after job turned sour. Who wants a doctor, even a good one, who’s a drunk? His mind was messed up; on several occasions he told me about experiences he had in Thailand during the war… experiences I only years later realized were subplots from “M*A*S*H." He had lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal.

Every once in a while I track him down to see if he’s still alive. Last time I talked to him, seven years ago or so, he was harboring an ex-girlfriend, a nurse about my age, and her two-year-old toddler by another man. And he waxed on happily about how great it was to watch her son growing up, how it reminded him of me.

Unbelievable.

Now, I dredge all this up not simply for the thrill of putting my personal life on display for the world to see, an unseemly compulsion I hope I have managed over time to expunge from my soul as a baker squeezes air bubbles out of dough with a rolling pin. I’m doing it just to give some specifics: a case study, if you will. Because while my father is certainly unique, there are millions of other similarly unique (!) stories out there. A lot of Boomer fathers just couldn’t take the responsibility, and left. Some didn’t, but a lot did. (And for entirely different reasons, some Gen-Yers are doing the same now, except they’re skipping the whole “start the family” part to begin with. They’re just planting seeds they have no intention of cultivating; they’d rather be “my baby’s daddy.” We Gen-Xers, the original latchkey generation, seem a little more committed to making these family situations work, probably because so many of us remember what it was like to be a kid without a father around.)

And all that is to say: This is a thorny, complex area, this whole issue, in 2005, of fathers. The father is receding in our culture; his importance is on the wane. We all have fathers, somewhere. But so often today, the somewhere isn’t here. What happens to a society whose fathers disappear? What’s the impact down the road? Men are abdicating their roles; what are we becoming as a result? I don’t know the answer, but the question seems urgent. I’ve always looked forward to the day when I might become a father and have a chance to experience a healthy father-son relationship, albeit from the other side. But what kind of father will I, whose father was absent, be to my child? Will I be complete? Or will there necessarily be something missing, some vital key ingredient that I simply won’t be able to supply because my father never gave it to me?

I wonder.

One final thought: Camon frames the phenomenon as, at least partially, a response to the emergent empowerment of women in American society over the last forty years. And I guess that may be true, but I must say I can’t relate to it. Because while my father was out in the world losing his mind, I was being raised by strong women – learning to love and respect and value them (and, eventually, to marry one). I was raised by my glorious mother and grandmother… and by my grandfather, and later my stepfather, both WWII vets, both better fathers to me than my own ever tried to be.

How about that?

That Sinking Feeling

What's a president to do when he spends a month trying to rally public support for the GOP's 40-year old dream scheme to gut Social Security - and instead sees the public turn AGAINST him as, mirabile dictu, it occurs to them that a decrease in benefits doesn't really sound like such a great deal after all?

But the real piñata de la dia is Alan Greenspan, the Artist Formerly Known as the Fed Chairman Who Could Do No Wrong, whose cheerful impaling of his own reputation over the past five years seems finally to be breaking the skin. First Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid calls Greenspan "one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington" while speaking live on CNN, and now the heroic Paul Krugman, having abandoned his book sabbatical to come back and do battle with the president's faith-based economic brain trust, calls out Mr. Andrea Mitchell for his rank hypocrisy in the service of fealty to America's Finest Political Family Dynasty®. Feels good to land a few whacks, don't it? And who knows what candy may lurk inside...

Politics

Can't Help Lovin' That Bush o' Mine

This just in: According to a new New York Times/CBS poll, more Americans disagree with the president on more issues than at any time since before 9/11/01 - especially on turning Social Security into a big Roulette wheel. And yet your burgeoning sense of wonder at the irrepressible, essential wisdom of the American voter will be stomped back into the mud by the codicil adding that Bush's personal approval rating remains steady at 49%.

My favorite quote:

"'There are so many other things that seem to me to be more critical and immediate: I think the national debt is absolutely an immediate thing to address,' said Irv Packer, 66, a Missouri Republican. He added, 'Another one that I'd really like to see people working on is the environment.'"

And that, naturally, is why he voted for Bush. Hey, the logic is unassailable.

Politics

When in Doubt, Rip 'em Out

Not satisfied with attempting the wholesale demolition of the social safety net built 70 years ago by Franklin Roosevelt to protect future Americans from disasters like the (Republican-created) Great Depression, the Bush administration has now clearly set out to destroy the Fourth Estate. No matter that the United States Constitution goes out of its way to proclaim the essential need for the existence and protection of a vital, challenging press. No, the little buggers are itching the Bushies like crabs, so eradicated they must be.

First, it was "no press conferences"; the Bush White House made clear from the start it mistrusts journalists completely, and thus this president held in his first term the fewest press conferences of any in the modern era. Then it was fake news: the video propaganda pieces featuring "reporter" Karen Ryan, trumpeting administration policies, sent out to local TV news editors across the country and played over the air, no doubt inadvertently, as if they were locally produced coverage on the evening news. Then live fake reporters - like the gay-escort-turned-Talon "News" correspondent Jeff Gannon - er, James Guckert - who was allowed into the White House daily briefings every day for two years on a one-day pass despite having no journalistic credentials, using a fake name, and working for a web news site that is literally nothing more than a front for a Republican PAC. And of course, let's not forget the so-called "real" reporters, the Armstrong Williams types who accepted money from the administration to plug its policies in their newspaper and magazine columns.

But as Eric Boehlert's new piece in Salon and Frank Rich's new column in the New York Times make clear, the real agenda of this White House is more far-reaching, and more lethal to the health of our democracy, than even those sinister tactics would indicate. The forces behind Bush aim to undermine the very institution of the press - to reduce it in the public's mind to nothing more than a jumble of voices whose veracity is unconfirmable in the media din - and thus, having removed the notion of "facts" from the public lexicon, to be free to say whatever lies they want, secure in the knowledge that their word cannot be challenged.

It would be easier to retain some faith in the ability of the vital, challenging American press to withstand such a fundamental and apocalyptic attack if one were, in fact, convinced that such a press still existed. The ease with which the Bush administration has controlled, manipulated and rendered impotent the Washington press corps and the rest of the mainstream media, however, suggests that, like a cancer spreading silently under the skin, the threat may have already metastasized and potentially fatal damage been done. Those of us living in the reality-based world should grab our Fun-Savers and take a few snapshots; this may well be what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like.

Mo Cuishle Bréagach

Well, it happened. Early on, “The Aviator” swept up every “technical” award around (and I loved the guy who pointed out the inanity of that all-purpose term, as if editors don’t make aesthetic choices), but as my friend Joe (who had seen none of the nominees) tried to convince me the signs were presaging it as Marty’s night, a nagging ache in the pit of my stomach told me the Academy voters were just giving him consolation prizes. Man, do I hate being right.

So “The Aviator,” easily the best of the five nominees, had, according to the AMPAS, the best photography, the best editing, the best art direction, the best costume design, and one of the four best performances… but it wasn’t the best-made movie. (1+1+1+1+1=0, evidently. Ah, Hollywood logic.) Which puts Martin Scorsese in the august company of Hitchcock, Altman, Kubrick, and Welles, none of whom ever won a Best Director Oscar – and excludes him from the ranks of Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and Clint Eastwood, the last three directors to whom Scorsese has lost. (At least his other two losses were to Barry Levinson and Roman Polanski, who are actually primarily directors. Did I mention that actors comprise over a third of the Academy’s voting population?)

(And that is not to slam the aforementioned movie-star-cum-helmsmen. I like “Ordinary People” and “Dances with Wolves,” and I liked ¾ of “Million Dollar Baby.” And all three films were well directed, and all three actor-directors have done enough good work since their first Directing wins to prove they were no mere pan-flashes. But ranking Kevin Costner over Martin Scorsese as a director is like ranking Sydney Pollack over Ian McKellen as an actor.)

After the show, Scorsese was reportedly heard to respond: “I get the message” – the message apparently being that Hollywood respects him enough to acknowledge him but doesn’t love him enough to actually put its little bald gold guy where its mouth is. At this moment, I can’t help being reminded of the recent decision by a majority of the Golden State’s infinitely engaged and informed voters to throw the results of a fair election out the window because they thought it would be totally cool to have the Terminator as their governor. Which is to say – and I’ve been one for ten years, so I can say it – Californians are shallow flakes. Basically good people, but shallow flakes. It logically follows that the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, being predominantly Californian, are likewise shallow and flaky. Naturally, they chose their tall, handsome movie-star friend over the short, obsessive-compulsive, motor-mouthed, more talented auteur from the Lower East Side.

Like I said before, Marty: it’s a compliment.

What’s even worse to me, though, is the scuttlebutt that what gave “Million Dollar Baby” its momentum over “The Aviator,” the early favorite, was a liberal backlash against a conservative backlash.

STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN “MILLION DOLLAR BABY” AND DON’T WANT TO HAVE THE PLOT SPOILED FOR YOU.

It seems that conservative anti-euthanasia groups have gotten into a tizzie over “MDB’s” out-of-nowhere plot twist. Hillary Swank (who, by the way, needs to get Chad to hire some serious bodyguard action, because Annette Bening is certain at this point to put out a hit on her) plays Maggie, a lovable, gritty, dirt-poor, none-too-young, up-by-her-bootstraps refugee from an Ozark trailer park who gets Clint Eastwood’s Frankie to train her as a boxer. In the climactic match, her opponent, a dirty fighter, takes a swipe at Maggie after the bell; Maggie goes down, breaks her neck on her stool, and ends up a quadriplegic on a respirator. Before long, she decides she’d rather be dead than live as a quadriplegic and asks Frankie to euthanize her, and, after some soul-searching, he does so. Many tears are shed by Maggie, by Frankie, and of course by the audience, which is one reason why “MDB” won the hearts of the Academy.

It’s also one of two reasons I think a great injustice was perpetrated at the Kodak Theatre. (Okay, “great injustice” may be a little strong, but I’m a film industry professional; these things matter to me.) A greater hankie-factor was almost certainly the reason Redford’s “Ordinary People” beat Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” in 1980, and it was almost certainly the reason Costner’s “Dances with Wolves” beat Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” in 1990. In other words, Marty’s emotionally and morally ambivalent pictures keep getting clocked by movies that are more straightforwardly cathartic – which does not necessarily mean they’re better.

More importantly, the twist of Maggie’s injury derails Eastwood’s train and transforms a beautifully observed, minimalist character study into a manipulative piece of melodrama, a far lesser genre. It also strikes me as a wholesale betrayal of the character of Maggie, who has been, up to this moment, defined by her dogged willingness to fight on far past the point where lesser mortals would throw in the towel. Are we to believe that this young woman, who against every possible odd has made herself into the best female boxer in the world at an age when most people can’t even muster the drive to go to the gym regularly, just gives up when faced with an admittedly daunting disability? I don’t buy it, and I think it ruins the movie. Of course, that's an aesthetic opinion, differences of which you and I and the members of the Academy are all entitled to have. But just so we’re clear, my first issue is with the artistic choice, which I find catastrophic for the film.

My second issue is with the social and political ramifications of that choice. Now, I care not one whit for the protestations of the right-wing anti-euthanasia lobby, the sort who bill themselves as “pro-life,” but who tend to, for instance, throw all their energy into fighting for the rights of a fetus but none whatsoever into fighting for the welfare of the child it becomes (not to speak of the mother). I don’t know where these people get off telling an adult human being what he or she can and can’t do with his or her own body and life when it’s not concretely impacting anyone else. So I find the aforementioned conservative backlash utterly without merit.

It disturbs me to think, however, that some knee-jerk Hollywood liberals voted for Clint and “MDB” even partly because they thought they were sticking it to the Religious Right – that they thought they were standing up for the right-to-die. Don’t get me wrong; I love liberals – I just prefer the type who think. And as a liberal myself wholly in favor of the right-to-die, I have to say that if that’s why any of these people voted the way they did, the Botox has gone to their brains. They’ve missed the point entirely. Having the RIGHT to die is not to be confused with having a good REASON to die.

Thus I was mightily offended as I watched the end of "Million Dollar Baby," not by the fact that Frankie kills Maggie at her request - in this I have nothing in common with conservative opponents of euthanasia - but by the fact that the movie seems to endorse her view that, having become a quadriplegic, she has every legitimate reason to request it. Her life, as she sees it, is over - certainly not worth continuing in her state. This strikes me as a macho, literary romanticization of a decidedly unromantic real-life situation; in the tradition of Dickens, Faulkner and Hemingway - yes, and Shakespeare - the writers and filmmakers are more concerned with disability as a poetical symbol than as an actual circumstance under which millions of people live, struggle and prosper.

I understand the symbolic value of the choice; as the immortal Joe Elliott once put it, it’s better to burn out than fade away, and none of us relishes the prospect of having someday to live with the certain knowledge that we’re on the downside of our lives. But that’s just the point: though Maggie’s life as a boxer is obviously over, her life as a fighter is not. In fact, she’s just been introduced to her most fearsome opponent yet. But the melancholy machismo of Eastwood’s vision precludes her from choosing to engage it.

Eastwood says he had no intention of endorsing Maggie’s wish to die, and I take him at his word; Frankie does suggest that Maggie go to college and get on with her life… but he doesn’t try very hard, and the decision to euthanize her is one he reaches speedily, if at clear cost to his own inner peace. (I should note also that Eastwood made enemies of the disability rights community a few years back when he tried to fight legislative requirements that his ranch resort in Carmel conform to ADA standards for disabled accessiblility. He is thus not helped in this matter by what is construed by many as a history of callousness toward the disabled community. It would be easy to infer that the same callousness blinded him to the potential message “MDB” could be perceived as sending; as I am not a mind reader, however, I will not traffic in such speculations.)

Maureen Dowd, who has been eager to champion the liberal counter-backlash, wrote in a column on the controversy that to ascribe to “Million Dollar Baby” any social or political agenda at all is to see ghosts where none exist; "the purpose of art,” she wrote, “is not always to send messages." But this view is naïve; art always sends messages, whether that is its conscious purpose or not. And the message "Million Dollar Baby" sends, in my view, is that, having once been a great athlete, Maggie now would be better off dead than consigned to breathing through a tracheal tube and taking her marvelous mind to college in a motorized, mouth-operated wheelchair. Certainly Maggie thinks so, and by the end so does Frankie. How pleased quadriplegic viewers of the movie must be to see their lives depicted as so horrible that any sane person would sooner choose death.

Dowd goes on to make an analogy to "Romeo and Juliet”: should we condemn Shakespeare’s play, she asks, because it could perhaps be read as an endorsement of teenaged suicide as a response to forbidden loves? But the analogy is inapt. There is virtually no chance that teenagers in love will see Shakespeare's play and become offended that he did not provide his lovers a happy ending; the frustrated longing of Romeo and Juliet mirrors that of real-life teenagers, and their mutual suicide seems a romantic protest against a world which will not accommodate their love. There may well be a chance, however, that a newly disabled person, struggling with the life changes that disability brings, might see "Million Dollar Baby" and decide that if somebody as cool as Clint Eastwood thinks it's better to die than be a quadriplegic, he must be right. How insurmountable that person's struggle will suddenly seem - how futile any attempt to live a full and rewarding life. Nonetheless, somehow millions of disabled people can and do. But how will this viewer know that? All he knows is what he sees at the movies.

Choosing to end one’s life before the pain or dementia of a terminal illness destroys one’s mind is a right no human being should ever be denied – but choosing to end one’s life because it has suddenly become more challenging, even supremely so, is a choice born of despair. That choice, so irrevocable, should not be applauded, understandable though the feeling it represents may be. And a movie that seems to suggest that choice is an appropriate response to such an injury certainly should not be rewarded for doing so. And yet it has been – at the expense, frankly, of a superior work of art.

Let no one misunderstand me: unlike knee-jerkers (or the Religious Right), I support Eastwood’s right to make the movie he wanted to make. I, by the same token, have the right to respond to it, sincerely, as I see fit. If it made you cry and pushed all your buttons in a pleasing way, so be it; I’m glad you felt your ten bucks were well spent. But to me, the pulse of this movie’s heart beats a false rhythm; its tragedy is cheap and unearned, and shows a saddening lack of sensitivity. Ten years from now, “Million Dollar Baby” will be seen for what it was: a weak winner in a generally weak field. “The Aviator,” on the other hand, will be remembered as perhaps the last chance Hollywood had to properly honor one of the great directors in the history of cinema… a chance that Hollywood blew.

Oh, Marty, mo cuishle.

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