March Madness

Illustration by Mr. Fish

—Barney Frank

In Hong Kong last week, I found myself reading the local edition of the China Daily, a newspaper so deep in the pocket of Beijing’s party bosses that it appears to be printed on lint. The merest glance at its eerily upbeat headlines — “Hero Worker Helps Change Attitudes,” “Migrant Workers Face Less Prejudice,” “Army Marches on Satisfied Stomach” — provided a useful reminder of what it means not to have a free press. The paper was so soul-numbingly dull (no Michael Jackson!) that I began to yearn for the crass hysteria of the American media.

Be careful what you wish for. I arrived home to the latest installment of March Madness. No, not the NCAA tournament (although those Illini really were fightin’), but full-court-press coverage of Terri Schiavo on her deathbed in Pinellas Park, Florida. The Asian media had been following the case, too, but there the whole saga took on an aura of dignity. Not so here in the United States, whose new capital of lunacy is surely the Gatorade State. Spend just a few minutes watching the protesters, the families (on Larry King, of course), or Governor Jeb Bush’s moral agony over which action would cost him the most votes in 2008, and you begin to appreciate that Carl Hiaasen is actually a realist.

All good satire contains at its core something profoundly serious. Here we had the thin body of Schiavo, a pitiably vulnerable creature stripped of consciousness, given no hope of recovery, and kept alive by tubes. One imagines that a gifted playwright could turn the fight over her fate into the stuff of tragedy, a conflict between two honorable intentions — providing a loved one a death with dignity after 15 years versus keeping a brain-damaged woman alive in case of a medical miracle. Instead, what might have been an occasion for reflection on how the generalities of science and law must grapple with the subtleties of soul and morality — the great riddle of existence — turned into an Easter-time black comedy dominated by fools, charlatans and scoundrels.

Although the Schiavo case had been going on for years, the story reached the public eye only because of an acrimonious family squabble. Unfazed by the personal complications, and delighted by the easy publicity, right-wing Christian leaders seized on L’Affaire Schiavo to promote their “Culture of Life” agenda. They were quickly placated by Republican politicians. Drawing on his experience as a doctor, presidential hopeful Bill “Cat Killer” Frist looked at carefully culled videotapes and declared, preposterously, that the specialists who’d actually examined her in the flesh were wrong about her condition. (And you thought your doctor was cavalier in his diagnoses.) Tom “Insect Killer” DeLay saw the chance to distract the world from his own corruption charges: A secret tape caught him telling a right-wing group that his old buddy God had given them the Schiavo case to help stop attacks against conservatives like, well, Tom DeLay. And then there was George W. “Convict Killer” Bush, a man who couldn’t be roused for days to comment on the deadly Asian tsunami and would sooner die than be photographed near the coffin of a fallen U.S. soldier. The president hopped out of his PJs and made a midnight trip to D.C. to sign an emergency law applying only to Terri Schiavo, declaring that one “ought to err on the side of life.” No doubt he thought he was being sincere, but it’s an error he ought to make more often.

Of course, Schiavo was the ideal beneficiary for all this ideologically driven concern. As a woman, she feeds the right’s paternalistic sense — even clearer in the abortion debate — that her fate should be in their hands. (It wasn’t only fear of subtitles that led the “Culture of Life” movement to attack Million Dollar Baby, which isn’t really about euthanasia though it kills off its heroine, but completely ignore the Oscar-winning The Sea Inside, which is, yet has a male hero.) Then, too, Schiavo is white and middle-class. Do you think Bush would’ve left Crawford to save a poor African-American? (Despite a flurry of coverage over the case of baby Sun Hudson, whose breathing tube was removed over the objections of his mother — thanks to a Bush-signed Texas law allowing hospitals to decide when to discontinue life-sustaining care — there have been no nationally televised vigils for his African-American mother.)

Above all, Schiavo is as helpless as a fetus. And while the right’s leadership is all about wielding power — be it Bush, Frist or our would-be Christian mullahs — ordinary members of the pro-life movement identify themselves, touchingly and sincerely, with the absolutely powerless. They wear the word “Life” taped over their mouths.

Naturally, the networks milked the story like a platoon of demented dairy farmers, prompting Jon Stewart to joke that the Schiavo feed tube should be removed from the cable news networks. When they weren’t interviewing gaudy-shirted Rick Warren, author of the religious self-help book The Purpose-Driven Life (known around my house as God’s OK — You’re OK), they were replaying those misleading tapes of an apparently beaming Terri Schiavo. To accurately capture the truth of her life, you’d have to enter Warhol territory, broadcasting a 15-year-long tape of non-responsiveness. But truth mattered less than keeping the story hot.