Daily Blague

While I was washing up after breakfast yesterday, I noticed that the kitchen sink wasn't draining. Then I saw that it was draining - into my bathroom sink, which filled up with gross black sludge. I couldn't do anything about it with a plunger, the handyman couldn't do anything with a plunger and a short snake, and by the time the plumber arrived, shortly before eight (on a Sunday night!), I was set for really bad news, or in any case for no quick fixes. And in fact the plumber had to snake both sinks. But, pretty soon, he was done, and all I had was a lot of mess. Kathleen heroically sponged and toweled the pool of Tartarean dreck from the warped floor of the cabinet under the kitchen sink (for there was a little leak, too!). We let it dry, and went out for dinner. I was a wreck while all this was hanging overhead, but Kathleen quite blithely strung her beads, creating one summer necklace and restringing another, made of Venetian glass. Then, and for about five hours, she embarked on a pair of matching earrings. She quoted the Glen Baxter cartoon, "There was still much to learn about Szechuan cuisine."

The top stories in the current issue of The New York Review of Books are by Mark Danner, on the Downing Street Memorandum, and Joan Didion, on the Schiavo case. I recommend both - in fact, I recommend the issue itself with unusual enthusiasm, having gone from one piece to the next with unflagging interest. But "The Case of Theresa Schiavo" is a must, and, as you can see, it's online. As one would expect from Ms Didion, her essay is about the way the case was handled, or mishandled, in public discourse, and the compression of extremely fragmentary facts and hearsay into red hot factoids. Just to give an example, it is not known what caused Schiavo to suffer cardiac arrest on 25 February 1990. It was not a heart attack. It may have been a potassium deficiency - we know that the woman was severely short of potassium. But potassium deficiencies have several causes, and there was no good reason to fix one of them, bulimia, as the culprit. Bulimia corrupts the teeth in visible ways, no such confirmation was ever made. (I hereby acknowledge that I rely entirely on Ms Didion's account.)

Nor was there any reason to believe that Schiavo had in any meaningful way attested to a wish not to be kept alive with feeding tubes, should the need ever arise. Various members of the widower's family remembered her having made offhand remarks to that effect, but Ms Didion deals with these quite coolly.

(Imagine it. You are in your early twenties. You are watching a movie, say on Lifetime, in which somebody has a feeding tube. You pick up the empty chip bowl. "No tubes for me," you say as you get up to fill it. What are the chances you have given this even a passing thought?)

Indeed, the burden of Ms Didion's report is that so many of us went straight for passing thought to vehement conviction in no time at all. We were forced, by the sheer force of the current, to take positions. I recall being outraged about the political exploitation of the case, but there was nothing in the immediate family tragedy to make me comfortable enough to have an opinion. Michael Schiavo did not strike me as behaving appropriately; he seemed pretty clearly to want to "move on" from his wife's state of mind, and to marry the mother of his two children. I thought that, other things being equal, he ought to have ceded guardianship to his in-laws. But other things weren't equal. Other things were screamingly antagonistic. I didn't have the energy to insulate what I thought about Mr Schiavo as a guardian from suggesting an alliance with the in-laws' legionary supporters. And I wasn't interested enough in the Terri Schiavo's health to bone up on what few facts there were. Where would I have been sure of finding them? If I trust Joan Didion now, it's because it no longer matters whether anyone has accounted for everything; it is clear that the "issues" over which so many strangers fought were unsupported by medical reality.

And why did no one point out, when the feeding tubes were removed shortly before Easter, that the actual removal of feeding tubes until a patient completely recovers or dies is unusual? There is no need to remove tubes. You just stop filling them. In retrospect, pulling the tubes out seems barbarically pointless. It had to be painful on some level for the victim. But it seems that Terri Schiavo died a living symbol and nothing more, at least to her husband and his entourage.

There is more to Joan Didion's piece than a critique of what she refers to only in brackets as the "circus" that set up shop at Schiavo's bedside. Ms Didion also identifies the issue that nobody talked about, that, to some extent, the political frenzy was a means of avoiding. 

The question began with the different ways in which we define a life worth living, but it did not stop there. The question had ultimately to do with whether or not there could be occasions when the broad economic and ethical interests of the society at large should outweigh any individual claim to either the most advanced medical attention (which Theresa Schiavo, outside the one procedure at UCSF in 1990, did not have) or indefinite care. This was the question no one on any side of the debate wanted to hear. This was the question conveniently muffled by talk about "right-to-die" and "murderers" and "mullahs," about the "freak show," the "circus."

On the day Theresa Schiavo finally died it seemed clear that the unthinkable question could for the time being remain unthought. Freed of the need to avoid confronting the presence of an actual moral dilemma, all sides could reassume their usual fencing positions. All sides could imagine that by exposing the errors of the opposition, they had advanced the public dialogue. "This is going to be an all-out culture war," someone said enthusiastically on MSNBC that evening.

"Enthusiastically" - in the days of the Enlightenment, "enthusiasm" was a failing, a surrender to irrationality. Enthusiastic talk of war - of any kind of war - is certainly that.

If I was a wreck about yesterday's plumbing problem, that was because I was wracked with guilt. I've been very cavalier, lately, about what goes down the drain - and let's leave the confession there. I will try to mend my ways.