Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Terri Schiavo

Senate Passes Bill on Schiavo (washingtonpost.com)

If you were expecting some brilliantly thought-out conclusions about what the best thing for Terri Schiavo is, I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. I just plain don’t know what’s best. Every time I think I’m leaning in one direction on the issue of whether her feeding tube should be left in place, I think of a reason to lean in the other direction.

Here’s how it generally goes…

There’s definitely something grotesque about keeping a body alive if there’s absolutely no brain activity left.

Terri Schiavo is breathing on her own, though, and has been for 15 years. And her parents believe there’s some limited consciousness.

All the doctors mentioned in news articles seem to agree, though, that there’s no chance of her ever improving and that there’s no “cognitive activity”. What do they mean by that, exactly? Would they consider…say…a normal healthy housecat as possessing “cognitive activity”?

Starving to death has to be painful. Is Terri capable of feeling pain on some level? The idea of inflicting any sort of pain on her is pretty terrible, too. I wouldn’t intentionally inflict pain on any living creature unless it was necessary to help them. But that’s just me…

On the other hand, neither would I keep an animal alive if there was no chance for any sort of pleasurable life left for it. Euthanasia can be a great kindness. But we’re not really talking about active euthanasia with Terrie Schiavo, are we? No one would be injecting her with anything to help the process along. They’d just be starving/dehydrating her to death.

Is Terri capable of feeling any kind of pleasure? It does matter. “Cognitive activity” isn’t necessarily the definition of meaningful life.

Her husband has been involved with someone else for quite a while and has a couple of kids with the other woman. Why didn’t he just divorce Terri and completely move on with his life, letting her parents do what they want to do?

Presumably, it’s because he cares/cared enough about her to want to be sure her wishes were carried out. That’s what he says, at least. And I have to believe him…why else would he bother? (I know there’s supposed to be some million-dollar malpractice money but, all things considered, a million bucks really isn’t a huge gigantic fortune any more. Certainly not worth dragging things out this long. Though, people have done terrible things for far less.)

If she’s truly completely brain dead — unable to feel anything, pain OR pleasure — then what harm is there in letting her parents keep her body alive, if it gives them comfort?

Well… there’s the expense. And the resources (skilled care and machinery) that might be better used to help people who have a chance of recovering. And, as I said earlier, keeping a body alive under those circumstances does strike me as grotesque.

But…

And so it goes. Round and round and round.

The one thing I do feel quite certain of is that a bunch of POLITICIANS have no place in deciding what should become of her.

This Land is My Land, This Land is Your Land

The New York Review of Books: Welcome to Doomsday: “You can understand why people in the grip of such [fundamentalist "Left Behind" type] fantasies cannot be expected to worry about the environment. As Glenn Scherer writes in his report for the on-line environmental magazine Grist, why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? Why bother to convert to alternative sources of energy and reduce dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East? Anyway, until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.”

Read this essay by always brilliant Bill Moyers. If you have difficulty connecting to the New York Review web site, the essay has also been published on The Smirking Chimp.

Man-oh-man. This is really well-written. I wish I could put a copy of it in front of every adult in the United States and make them read it — and, somehow, make them understand it.

Though I have no doubt that religious fundamentalism is part of the reason environmentalism is getting such short shrift these days, I think there’s probably more to it than that.

Maybe, when the ecological disasters warned against in the 1960s and 70s didn’t come to pass, people just decided there’s really nothing to worry about. Never mind, of course, that one of the biggest reasons those predictions didn’t come true is because of the environmental protection laws that were put in place.

Maybe the whole idea of humans literally destroying our own world is so scary that people simply refuse to hear it. Fingers plugging their ears, ‘LA-LA-LA-LA! I DON’T HEAR YOU!’

Truly, though, the single most important thing we can do is to behave responsibly towards our planet.

Our Earth.

Our home.

Consider: If we quit polluting our air with fossil fuel emissions, we’d stop being dependent upon foreign energy sources, and we’d no longer have any reason for most of the military actions we’re currently involved in. And that’s just one example. Think of all the other ways in which things would just get so much better if we improved our treatment of Earth.

Guardians Of Liberty

Let’s be honest. Most of us were pretty darned scared when terrorists flew those jets into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. I live in the Washington DC area and — believe me!! — I was scared! Like a lot of people, my knee-jerk reaction was ‘Let’s just find all these bad guys who want to hurt us and get rid of them and I don’t care WHAT it takes to do it!’ But it was a knee-jerk reaction. Time has given us a chance to calm down and think about it more rationally and, ultimately, it seems to come down to this:

What is it about the United States that makes it such a really good place to live? (And it IS a really good place to live, have no doubt about that.) Of course, it’s our FREEDOM that makes our country great. It’s our FREEDOM to say and write what we want. It’s our FREEDOM to feel secure in our own homes. It’s things like due process under the law. Things like knowing you can check out whatever books you want from the library and no one but the librarian is keeping a list somewhere. It’s knowing that your private thoughts are just that — private.

Before 9/11, I took an awful lot for granted. I guess I never thought anything bad could ever happen to the United States. I thought we were always going to be safe. And then, the jets. And now I know we’re not necessarily safe and I value all the good things about this country more than ever.

That’s why I oppose the USA Patriot Act. The Patriot Act threatens the very things that make the United States good. The Patriot Act permits the government to search your home without telling you. It permits the government to find out what books you’re reading. Under the Patriot Act, the government could be entangling you in expensive and intrusive investigations and you’d be prohibited from talking about the situation with anyone, thus effectively eliminating your ability to get help with your legal problems.

The Patriot Act is up for renewal this year and President Bush wants to make parts of it permanent. We don’t need this intrusive law. We already have plenty of laws on the books that adequately address any real threats to the United States. (If the Patriot Act had already been in place prior to 9/11 it wouldn’t have made a single bit of difference in what happened.)

As some of you may recall, I’m a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I think a lot of you have aways assumed that the ACLU is pretty much just a bunch of radical young people and aging hippies. Well, I’m here to tell you: regular people belong to the ACLU, too! People like me. Plain old normal people. (I’m a housewife, for Pete’s sake! How radical is that??!) The ACLU is on the front lines fighting against the USA Patriot Act and they need our help. If you’re not yet a member, click here to become one. If you’re already a member, join Mark and me in upgrading your membership to the Guardians of Liberty level. It’s easy and it doesn’t cost very much.

Help keep the United States free.

Become a card-carrying member of the ACLU!

Going, Going, Gone?

Senate Votes to Open Alaska Wildlife Refuge to Drilling (washingtonpost.com): “With the price of crude oil reaching an all-time high, the U.S. Senate narrowly voted today to open a wildlife refuge in Alaska to oil drilling, an approval long sought by President Bush as part of his energy policy.”

The Washington Post writer accidentally left some adjectives out of this report. It should read:

“…an approval long sought by idiotic and grossly immoral President Bush as part of his short-sighted and ill-informed energy policy.”

Glad to be of help.

Mark and I both wrote to our congress-critters asking that they vote NO to this proposal. They both voted YES. Guess who won’t be getting our votes next time they’re up for reelection.

Thank goodness, the issue isn’t yet completely settled and it may still be eliminated as the language of the legislation is formalized. Please contact your own congress-critters, whoever they are. SaveOurEnvironment.org can help you figure out whom you should contact and what you should say.

Pretty much everyone who knows me realizes that I’m especially interested in animal welfare. Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is more than an assault on the animals who live there, though. It’s also a huge waste of money– money that would be MUCH better spent researching renewable energy sources and expanding the renewable sources we’ve already got.

President Bush gave lip service to the idea of conserving energy and expanding renewable sources but, obviously, if he really gave a crap about it, he wouldn’t be pushing for this irresponsible drilling in Alaska.

In the words of John Kerry: “It’s a sad day when the voices of the American people are ignored and the Senate sells off America’s public lands to the highest bidder.”

Spring!

Don’t be alarmed! You are in the right place!

The daffodils and hyacinths are coming up in northern Virginia and the REBECCA HARTONG site has put on its spring colors!

Postmodernism and Truth

I received the following email from Georgiana Preskar, author of “Seeds of Deception: Planting Destruction of America’s Children” and she’s graciously given permission for me to re-post her letter here.

Thus wrote Georgiana:

Dear Rebecca,
 
The comments of course that you made are not in line with what is on my site.  If you read the content under each menu item you will see that it gives much detail as to First Amendment Rights, especially the most recent ones that are included in the letters to the Secretary of Education and our Congressmen. 
 
Of course I talk about the Book.  Why would I not?  You talk about it like I am NOT supposed to promote the content of it.  It has all the answers to all of your comments.  The Book has over 400 footnotes in it to back the information.  The one thing that I forgot to mention in my last letter is that postmodern people do not care about truth, for they make their own.
 
Thanks for your time.
 
Georgiana

Ah! Postmodernism! Let’s talk about that for a while!

What is it exactly? “Postmodern” is one of those squishy words that seems to mean something different for everyone who uses it. We’ve got to start somewhere. Here are quotes from a couple of internet resources with my comments.

From the Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia:

“According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an “incredulity toward metanarratives”, meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have rejected the grand, supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories. Furthermore, it promotes the idea that all such metanarratives and paradigms are stable only while they fit the available evidence, and can potentially be overturned when phenomena occur that the paradigm cannot account for, and a better explanatory model (itself subject to the same fate) is found.”

Hm. Okay, I guess I can get behind that. It’s certainly true that I’m drawn to philosophies that are both internally consistent and in line with observable reality and I’m not afraid to change or abandon a philosophy that doesn’t conform to those standards. I suppose in that sense I might be considered a postmodernist.

“The term postmodernism…is also sometimes used to describe social changes which are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality, particularly by evangelical Christians.”

This is probably the sense in which Georgiana is using the term.

From Pagewise:

“One of the main characteristics of postmodern thinking is that the world is seen as a much more complex and uncertain place. Reality is no longer fixed or determined. All truth within a postmodern context is relative to one’s viewpoint or stance.”

While physical reality may be fluid on extremely small (sub-atomic) and extremely large (inter-galactic) scales, it is predictable and objectively verifiable on the level of every-day existence for human beings so, a belief that “all truth…is relative to one’s viewpoint or stance” is just silly in my opinion. It’s foolish (and potentially fatal) to extend the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to an oncoming freight train!

“The world is a representation. In other words, it is a fiction created from a specific point of view only, and not a final truth.”

Perhaps. But it’s a point of view for which we are biologically and culturally programmed. Ultimately, the only practical way of approaching life is to accept as “true” the Newtonian physical laws and the social constructs that “work” for us on a day-to-day basis.

While it is mentally stimulating, much of postmodernist thought seems immature to me. I’m reminded of how most bright teenagers dabble in solipsism at some point. (Well, I did!)

Anyway, getting (finally) to Georgiana’s letter. She writes:

“The one thing that I forgot to mention in my last letter is that postmodern people do not care about truth, for they make their own.”

You may have meant this is as only a throw-away sort of comment, Georgiana, but I thank you for it because it really got me thinking!

I have to disagree with you. Not on the part about postmodernists making their own truth– I see where you’re coming from on that and, in a sense, I agree. Where we disagree is on the idea of postmodernists not caring about truth. I think people who’d call themselves postmodernists care very deeply about truth and that’s why they’ve spent enough time thinking about it to have concluded that it must be entirely subjective.

Hmm… truth. What is that? What do we mean by that? Let’s be fair. Most people wouldn’t argue with us about “the truth” of every-day experiential reality. What we’re really talking about here is Truth (with a capital “T”.)

How’s this for a definition of Truth: It’s unchanging reality with moral content.

I like that. I think that works.

Okay, so… Here’s where I personally am coming from on that. If there is any ultimate reality with moral content, it MUST be beyond the capacity of human reason. You see, I’m an old-fashioned modernist in terms of my trust in reason and the scientific method. I believe reason is the best tool we’ve got for understanding the universe and reason simply doesn’t point towards the existence of any moral reality. A religious person such as yourself might say this is where faith enters the picture. What is faith, though? Here’s what I think it is.

Faith is just subjectivity with a veneer of cultural justification.

Faith really isn’t all that different from the subjectivity employed by postmodernists. Only, instead of cultural justification, postmodernists employ personal justification. Now, ME, I don’t trust subjectivity all that much. I certainly don’t trust subjectivity to tell me anything meaningful about the nature of reality or Truth. I say this because I understand some things about human psychology. I understand how we lie to ourselves–how we see what we want to see–how our understanding of what is real and what is true can be profoundly influenced by culture and situation.

What is real is real whether I believe in it or not. That sounds just like something a religious person such as Georgiana might say. Here, though, is the critical difference: Anyone — believer or unbeliever — can confirm for herself the existence of the real using the incomparable tools of REASON and OBJECTIVITY.

(For those of you with an understanding of some of the difficulties encountered in quantum physics, understand that by “real” I am also referring to potentiality. One of the reasons postmodernists distrust reason is because they don’t believe it adequately addresses problems involving uncertainty and potentiality, but I think that’s premature and an over-reaction. Reason is a fine tool. We just aren’t smart enough yet to know how to use it on these problems. At any rate, there’s little practical advantage to be gained by bringing ideas about potentiality and uncertainty into philosophies concerned with how people live their lives.)

Oh my! Georgiana, I’m afraid I’ve gone off on a tangent!

Oh… one last thing I did want to clarify, though. When I originally wrote about how the Stopseed.
com web site is connected to your book, it honestly wasn’t meant as a criticism. I was simply trying to clarify the relationship between yourself and the site. You’re certainly entitled (and smart!) to create a web site that promotes your book and there’s nothing wrong at all in you referring people to your site. I just wanted any readers to understand that the website is, in fact, your own and not the creation of some unrelated third party.

Anyway. This has been some kind of big fun, hey boys and girls?!! There’s nothing quite as energizing first thing in the morning as thinking about reality, Truth, and the postmodern dilemma!

Thanks again for your letter, Georgiana!

Passover Food!

It’s the Passover season again and you know what that means!!

That’s right! It means those extraordinarily yummy Manischewitz Almond Macaroons go on sale at the grocery store! This year, Safeway has them for 99 cents per container. Do I even need to tell you that I bought two containers? I’m a lucky woman. My husband hates coconut. They’re all mine!!!

Also on sale during Passover: the always delicious Kedem Grape Juice. I’m telling you right now. Kedem sells the best-tasting grape juice I’ve ever had. Maybe, like me, as you’ve grown older you’ve kind of lost your enthusiasm for plain old un-fermented grape juice. Try this Kedem stuff. It will completely re-awaken your taste for the juice.

(Actually, besides just having acquired a taste for the fermented grape, I also have very bad grape juice memories from childhood. Once in a while when I was a kid my mother would try to mix some god-awful oily crap—cod liver oil? some sadistic constipation remedy? who knows—into my grape juice. Hey! Guess what! Oil and grape juice don’t mix. So I’d have a glass full of grape juice in front of me with about an inch-high layer of this repulsive oil floating on top and I was expected to drink it.)

Uuuuuuuugggggggghhghghaahghghaggghh!

And people wonder why I am the way I am.

Ew. Okay…let’s think about something else. Passover foods! Do check them out–you can get some really good deals on stuff that’s quite yummy. Actual Jewishness is not a requirement. (It’s not like they make you show a special Jew Membership Card at the grocery check-out counter or anything!)

Don’t buy the gigantic carton of matzos, though. I still have most of the matzos I bought last year left over. Every once in a while I’ll grind some of them up for use in Not-Meatloaf or to put in latkes. Speaking of which, here’s a recipe:

Latkes For One

Ingredients
1 medium sized potato
1 egg from an uncaged hen
1 big matzo
salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon canola oil or ghee (ghee is clarified butter)

Scrub the potato and coarsely grate it.
Squeeze as much of the liquid out of the potato as you can, using paper towels to help dry the potato shreds.
Bust up the matzo and toss it into a blender or food processor. Pulverize it until it’s somewhat finely ground–sort of the consistency of cracked wheat flour.

Heat the oil or ghee in a medium sized frying pan over medium heat.
Stir all the other ingredients together in a bowl.
Once the oil is hot, use a big tablespoon to put spoonfuls of the potato mixture into the oil. As each spoonful begins to fry on the bottom, flatten it out with the back of your spoon into a pancake shape. Once each latke has fried to a nice crusty brown color on the bottom, carefully use a spatula to turn it over. Fry the other side.

Hint! Make sure the oil is good and hot, otherwise your latkes will turn out greasy. Yuck!

Enjoy with maybe a little blob of sour cream on the side!

To Whom Are We Answerable?

U.S. Quits Pact Used in Capital Cases (washingtonpost.com): “‘The International Court of Justice has interpreted the Vienna Consular Convention in ways that we had not anticipated that involved state criminal prosecutions and the death penalty, effectively asking the court to supervise our domestic criminal system,’ State Department spokeswoman Darla Jordan said yesterday.”

This brings me back to my post about capital punishment and the murder of Judge Lefkow’s husband and 89-year-old mother.

This time, let’s pretend the murderer turns out to be a Mexican national. The Mexicans don’t favor capital punishment and they’d undoubtedly do whatever they could to prevent the execution of their citizen. (We’ll put aside for the moment whatever other agreements we might have with the Mexicans and just assume the ICJ is their sole avenue for addressing the situation.) Certainly, any reasonable and moral person would agree that these murders were heinous and deserving of a very severe punishment. Assuming there are no extenuating circumstances, my vengeful side is completely comfortable with the idea of execution in this case. I do understand, though, that others feel differently.

Does my desire for vengence outweigh your desire for mercy? I’m honestly not sure. It does seem reasonable, though, that if a line must be drawn (and it certainly must), my authority to execute murderers must be limited to only individuals who are citizens of my own country.

Understand, this isn’t because I necessarily feel mericiful. It’s because the greater good is served by limiting myself to mutually agreed upon punishments for citizens of other countries.

Take Back God!

Salon.com News | What would Falwell do?: “…there was a time — not so very long ago — when the religious left was a powerful institution in American society and politics, when the term ‘religious’ was not immediately assumed to connote ‘conservative.’ Moral giants with names like Reinhold Niebuhr and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr. led intellectual and social justice movements. It’s nearly impossible to page through American history without coming across political causes that were driven either partly or entirely by progressive people of faith — abolition, women’s suffrage, labor reforms of the progressive era, civil rights, and any number of antiwar movements. Just a few decades ago, venerable organizations like the National Council of Churches (NCC) made pronouncements that carried not only moral weight but political influence as well. In short, the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Ralph Reed have not always dominated American politics; indeed, in the span of American history, the last three decades are an anomaly.”

YES!

YES, Yes, yes! This is something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now.

(Oh, and by the way, as usual, if you want to read the entire salon.com article—and I highly recommend it—you’ll need to view an ad first if you’re not already a salon premium member.)

One of the reasons I wrote my “Exclusive Interview with The Almighty” is that I’m sick and tired of mean-spirited bigots acting as the arbiters of what constitutes godliness. I never appointed these people. Did you? To hell with them! If there is a God, then I’m just as capable of determining what It’s all about as anyone else. More capable, maybe, since my mind doesn’t appear to be as narrow as those of most evangelical right-wingers.

I say, if there’s a God then It’s truly a God of love for all creation. I say all those nasty people who want to deny legal rights to homosexuals are minions of The Evil One. Ha! What do you think of that?! I say protecting the environment is a moral issue. I say drilling for oil in the arctic wilderness is SINFUL. (Which reminds me… We’d written to our congressman or senator–I don’t remember which–expressing our concerns about this drilling plan and his response was, in essence, “Well, we need to be sure we’ve got enough oil so we can defend ourselves from terrorists and such.” So–it’s apparently like this–we need to destroy the arctic wilderness in order to get oil so we can engage in wars with people who hate us because we’re always trying to grab their oil. Here’s my question: How far can a person stick his head up his own ass before he literally turns himself inside out?)

Anyway. Back to the subject at hand. Who in the hell gave these right-wing nutjobs the right to decide for all the rest of us what constitutes Good? It sure wasn’t me.

Some of you may remember the liberal Catholic movements that sprang up in the 1960s and 70s after Vatican II. It was really something. There was a genuine resurgence of interest in spirituality as a guiding social force. Where did that go? What the hell happened? Did Roe v Wade so upset Catholics that they all just decided to go home and watch television? Screw the poor. Unfortunately, the Catholics left the door open and in marched the evangelical right-wingers who, from all indications, pretty much don’t give a shit about the poor.

Refuse to allow assholes and bigots to define what’s right and what’s wrong!! You know what’s right! Justice is right. Protecting the environment is right. Freedom is right. Whenever someone tries to tell you that gay marriage is an important moral issue, laugh in their face! Tell them God doesn’t care about gay or straight. Tell them God cares about keeping the planet whole and healthy. Tell them God cares about people treating each other with love and compassion.

Let’s take back God, people!

American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments

TomDispatch – Tomgram: William Dowell on George Bush’s Wahabbis: “The current debate, of course, has little to do with genuine religion. What it is really about is an effort to assert a cultural point of view. It is part of a reaction against social change, an American counter-reformation of sorts against the way our society has been evolving, and ultimately against the negative fallout that is inevitable when change comes too rapidly.”

The TomDispatch site has reproduced an interesting essay written by William Thatcher Dowell. The question that comes to my mind after reading it is: What’s the usual historical outcome when religious fundamentalists take power? I’m afraid I’m not a good enough historian to have an answer for that right off the top of my head. I find it difficult to believe, though, that universal peace and happiness generally follow.

Whenever I think of American fundamentalists in power, I’m always reminded of Margaret Atwood’s fantastic book, The Handmaid’s Tale. Do read it if you can. The movie is…adequate. The book, though, is VERY good.