Vegetative States of America

  Like many of you, I’ve tried my best to stay out of the whole Terri Schiavo thing. But also like many of you, the sheer nastiness and stupidity of the fundamentalist lynch mob has angered me in a deeply visceral way that I haven’t quite got a handle on yet.

What exactly am I so enraged at? What about the Schiavo story has me so thoroughly embarrassed to be an American at this point in time?

Is it the shameful spectacle of the U.S. Congress in “emergency session” — at great taxpayer expense — to concoct a one-off “law” applying to a single politically charged situation, overruling years of court rulings on the same situation?

Is it the incredible hypocrisy of conservatives who just a few months ago were foaming at the mouth about “the sanctity of marriage” now doing their best to completely destroy one marriage’s sanctity?

Is it the sorry example of a president who refuses to cut a single hour of his vacation when there’s a warning of an imminent Bin Laden attack in the U.S. or for a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands, but gladly rushes back to D.C. to sign a law allowing the most egregious possible invasion of one family’s personal life by the federal government?

Is it the jaw-dropping hubris of a narrow band of radical right-wing extremists in Congress who are so arrogant, so scornful of public opinion that they would defy the overwhelming poll results against their actions? And do you get the idea that they really, really like defying overwhelming poll results against their actions?

Is it the cheap viciousness of politicians in front of the CSPAN cameras systematically insulting and attacking a private American citizen, Michael Schiavo?

Think how you’d feel if the Congress of the United States of America held a special session to denounce your character and integrity for hours on end on national TV. They pass trillion-dollar budgets, they can declare war, they have their own bomb-proof bunkers in case of nuclear holocaust — and now they’re coming after you!

What chance would you have? What chance would anyone have?

I can imagine few things more un-American than an entire government focusing its energies on the personal destruction of one of its own citizens — a citizen that almost two dozen judges have previously said is right in this case, by the way — yet that kind of petty cruelty is what now characterizes our nation, both abroad, and thanks to the Schiavo case, now at home.

Then it dawned on me why the Schiavo thing makes me so damn mad: It’s the face of tyranny.

When Congress feels so bold as to defy years of court precedent to insert itself into the personal life of a single American family, employing its vast power to destroy one of that family’s members — that means the effective end of rule of law in this country.

If Tom DeLay & company prevail in the Schiavo case, it means the end of any guarantee you may have once had that you and your loved ones would be safe from humiliation and devastatation by your own elected government — the end of any guarantee that an aggrieved citizen can seek redress through the courts.

As I write this, a federal appeals court in Atlanta — the last step before the U.S. Supreme Court — has turned down Schiavo’s parents plea for a reinsertion of the feeding tube.

There’s a word for a place where federal judges fear for their lives. Where they must rule on controversial cases wearing body armor and accompanied by massive security, as the judges in the Schiavo case have.

That word is “Colombia.”

That’s just about where we live now. In Colombia. Except with less beautiful women.

Should the Supreme Court take the case and rule in favor of Schiavo’s parents, they will not only be defying their own precedent. They will be active participants in their own demise, and in the demise of the rule of law in the United States of America — a once-great nation that becomes more like a banana republic every day.

Or would that be Banana Republican?

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