MATTERS OF LIFE: Terri Shaivo as Metaphor

[Guest guest]

This is, hands down, the *best* analysis I have read of the whole

Terri Shaivo mess that is currently gripping the United States. While

it's a bit off-topic, I know a lot of members have been following and

debating the case, and thought they might find this interesting. It's

wrtten by Hendrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker, who is in my opinion

the most brilliant political analyst writing in the U.S. today:

 

MATTERS OF LIFE

 

by Hendrik Hertzberg

Issue of 2005-04-04

Posted 2005-03-28

 

Last week, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo, known to cable-news

viewers and talk-radio listeners as Terri, was as ubiquitous as Elián

González and Laci Peterson once were. Yet she was also hidden,

obscured behind layers of political and religious posturing, legal

maneuvering, emotional projection, and media exploitation that

swaddled her like strips of linen around a mummy.

 

Terri Schiavo was born on December 3, 1963, near Philadelphia, the

first of three children of Robert and Mary Schindler. As a teen-ager,

she was obese — at eighteen, she weighed two hundred and fifty

pounds — but with diligence she lost a hundred pounds, and by the

time she married Michael Schiavo, in 1984, she was an attractive and

vivacious young woman. By the end of the decade, she had moved with

her husband to Florida, was undergoing fertility treatments, and had

slimmed down further, to a hundred and ten pounds. On February 25,

1990, Terri suffered cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage.

The cause was a drastically reduced level of potassium in her

bloodstream, a condition frequently associated with bulimia. Her

death that day was forestalled by heroic measures, including a

tracheotomy and ventilation.

 

But when, after a few weeks, she emerged from a coma, it was only to

enter a "persistent vegetative state," with no evidence or hope of

improvement — a diagnosis that, in the fifteen years since, has been

confirmed, with something close to unanimity, by many neurologists on

many occasions on behalf of many courts. The principal internal

organs of Terri's body, including her brain stem, which controls such

involuntary actions as heartbeat, digestion, respiration, and the

bodily sleep cycle, continued to function as long as liquid

nourishment was provided through a tube threaded into her stomach

through a hole in her abdomen. The exception was her cerebral cortex,

which is the seat of language, of the processing of sense

impressions, of thought, of awareness of one's surroundings and one's

inner state—in short, of consciousness. Her EKG flatlined. The body

lived; the mind died. "At this point," the Florida Supreme Court

wrote six months ago, "much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and

has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this

condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her

brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state."

 

Terri Schiavo's life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient

organs, ended fifteen years ago. But that did not prevent her from

becoming the star of an unusually morbid kind of reality TV show. The

show was made possible by two factors. The first was a bitter

struggle between Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted to

allow her body to die in accordance with what he said, and what an

unbroken series of court decisions has affirmed, was her own

expressed wish, and her parents and siblings, who wanted to keep her

body alive at all costs.

 

The second factor was a set of video snippets, provided by the

Schindler family and broadcast incessantly by the three cable news

networks — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — which are themselves entangled

in a desperate struggle for dominance. Sometimes the snippets are

identified by the year of their taping (2001 and 2002); sometimes

they are not. Sometimes they are accompanied by inflammatory captions

(fighting for her life); sometimes the captions are merely dramatic

(schiavo saga). They show Terri's blinking eyes seeming to follow a

balloon waved in front of her; or her mouth agape in a rictus that

could be interpreted as a smile; or her face turned toward her

mother's, with her head thrown back, Pietà-like.

 

As neurologists who have examined her have explained, the snippets

are profoundly misleading. A few seconds of maximum suggestiveness

culled from many hours of tape, they are more in the nature of

special effects than of a documentary record. Without them, there

would have been no show — and, most likely, no televised vigils

outside her hospice, no cries of "murder" from Tom DeLay, the

egregious House Majority Leader; no midnight special sessions of the

House and Senate; no calling Dr. Frist for a snap video diagnosis; no

visuals of President Bush returning from Texas to land on the White

House south lawn, striding dramatically across the grass as if it

were the deck of an aircraft carrier.

 

To read through the documents generated by the years of legal

wrangling over Terri Schiavo is to be impressed by the thoroughness

and conscientiousness with which the courts, especially the Florida

courts, approached her case. On legal, substantive, and

constitutional grounds, they seemed to have reason and justice on

their side. Yet it was a cold sort of reason and justice. On a human

level, it was hard to see what concrete harm there could be in

indulging her family's desire to keep her body alive, its care

presumably underwritten by the hospice and the family's supporters.

 

Meanwhile, the language of the debate over her fate, pitting a "right

to die" against a "right to life," turned rancid in its abstraction.

Terri Schiavo, the person, had no further use for a right to die,

because Terri Schiavo, the person, had long since exercised that

right. Did it really matter if she had told her husband, when she was

young and healthy, that she would not wish to live "that way"? Her

body notwithstanding, she was not living "that way," or any other

way. By the same token, she had no use for a right to life, because

her ability to benefit from such a right had long ago been rendered

as moot as the legal pleadings on her alleged behalf would soon

become.

 

As the week progressed, it was harder and harder to deny that the

fervor of Terri's Christianist "supporters" was motivated by dogmas

unrelated to her or her rights. If she truly had a "right to life,"

if removing her feeding tube was truly tantamount to murder, then

neither the disapproval nor the approval of her family (or anyone

else) could make the slightest moral difference. If her parents had

agreed with her husband that the tube should be removed, would their

acquiescence have somehow transubstantiated murder into mercy? And,

with or without their acquiescence, if Michael Schiavo had spent the

last ten years adhering strictly to the orthodox code of family

values — if he had remained faithfully celibate, if he had not taken

a mistress and had children with her—then might not some of those now

accusing him of murder be demanding that his Biblically ordained

husbandly authority be respected?

 

Terri Schiavo has become a metaphor in the religio-cultural struggle

over abortion. This — along with the advantages of demonizing the

judiciary in preparation for the coming battle over Supreme Court

nominees — explains the eagerness of Republican politicians to

embrace her parents' cause. Her lack of awareness actually increased

her metaphoric usefulness. Like a sixty-four-cell blastocyst, she was

without consciousness. Unlike the blastocyst, she was without

potential. If letting her body die is murder, goes the logic, then

thwarting the development of the blastocyst can surely be nothing

less.

 

Last weekend, as Good Friday gave way to Holy Saturday and Holy

Saturday to Easter Sunday, Florida's made-for-TV passion play neared

its climax. The death of Terri Schiavo's body will only enhance her

symbolic value, elevating her to her destined place as another martyr

in this dismal age of martyrs.

 

SOURCE: The New Yorker

URL:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050404ta_talk_hertzberg

[Guest guest]

I have to reply to this post with great care. Let me first state I can say very

little of what I know as facts, reason being there was a point in time that the

young lady you are speaking of was in the care of my place of employmet prior to

being moved to hospice. I do want to say thank you for this post, it is factual

as it can be, her husband a very caring husband I must say.

 

For many years he was there 5 out 7 days a week, making sure her care was at

it's best standard. The law suit that rendered the large sum of money in the

beginning came from his law suit against to pharmco. company that manafactored

the drugs she was self taken at the time of her cardiac arrest. I must also add

that she is now located 4 blocks from my home, it takes a great deal of time for

me and many others to pass the area to and from our job. All due to the

protestors that jump infront of your car. People that have no clue of her true

conditon, never seen her ect...This is all very sad for the Pt. her husband, and

her parents.

 

However what is taken place is no longer about the Pt. It brings to mind the

scenes on may see outside a abortion clinic. The right to live and the right to

die can not be dictated by politics, none of this is about Mrs. Shaivo. I wish I

could tell you what she looked like a few years back, and how with her decending

condition what she looks like now.

 

What you are seeing on TV is not the truth. Her husband and her caregivers are

not the monsters they are made out to be. All that we learn from this is that at

birth, arrangements about our death need to be in place. ..

[Guest guest]

I read this article today morning : Terri Schiavo Dies but Feud

Continues, and this statement caught my attention : Gov. Jeb Bush

said that millions of people around the world will be "deeply grieved"

by her death but that the debate over her fate could help others

grapple with end-of-life issues.

 

 

Had a good laugh over this. I remembered a joke somebody told me once

: "The British still thinks they rule the world, and The Americans

think they are the world" [ this is my edition ] and they think the

whole world revolve around them !

[Guest guest]

She's with God now and that's the important thing. Let her soul rest

in peace. May Mother Bless Her Soul .

 

Jai Maha Kali Shakti.

 

-Lawrence