Society

(James already posted on this topic. My comment to his post has grown into a post in itself.)

It’s unfortunate that this issue has become politicized, as there seems to be no political or legal solution to the dilemma. It comes down to the opinions of a few judges in resolving an improbable dispute between family members. The judges might have decided differently, the interests of the contending family members might (in a different family) be reversed, etc. And it’s easy to foresee future problems as a result of Congressional involvement.

The dilemma is irresolvable as Ms. Schiavo’s wishes cannot be known. It would have been better if she had made a living will when she could, but since she didn’t, someone else gets to decide whether to believe her husband or her parents. I’m inclined to believe the parents — that is, I’m inclined to think that she should be allowed to live, absent proof that she wants to die.

The thing that I don’t understand is why this is being called a “right to die” case. That’s not what it is. Ms. Schiavo is helpless but very much alive. There is controversy about her thinking ability, but it’s not as though she were being kept alive via heroic measures. (This fact appears to be a problem for her husband.)

The question, rather, is whether she should be killed by starvation because or her debilitated condition, and without our knowing what she would have wanted. If she awakened one day and announced that she wished to die, and if she persisted with that wish over a reasonable period, then I would accept that she should be accommodated (though by a method more gentle than starvation, which strikes me as terribly cruel). I might also accept her premature death if she had made a living will that declared her wish to die if she became incapacitated — though I would be hesitant due to the possibility that she had changed her mind in the meantime. But to kill her without a strong indication of her wishes, and over her parents’ and siblings’ vehement objections, strikes me as presumptuous and reckless. I don’t think anyone has moral standing to do it.

If you grew up in the 1960’s or watched television in the 1970’s, then you’ve seen them. Nature documentaries that depicted wild creatures as benign, gentle, loving souls. Many times these docs would end with the narrator pointing out, voice quivering with barely repressed scorn, that the natural world was free of all of the ills that plagued the more “advanced” human societies that were destroying it. Rape, war, murder, greed. All of these were absent in the breast of our wild-yet-more-noble cousins.

Except, of course, for insects because they made war on one another. But that was ignored in order to avoid spoiling the point.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time wandering through the wild places, watching what was going on around me. It’s with great confidence I can say that those documentaries were trying to pull a fast one.

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James, Captain Mojo and Lex have weighed in with eloquent posts about the late Hunter Thompson. I encourage you to read them if you haven’t. Lex is particularly insightful about where Thompson fit in the big social and political picture of the 1960s.

I confess to reading one of Thompson’s books and maybe a few articles, and to having read quite a bit about him over the years. He was brilliantly insightful in his day but didn’t seem to change much subsequently. I found him personally unattractive (and I seem not to be alone). It’s too bad he died but the muted burst of ’60s nostalgia that accompanied his passing got under my skin. ’60s nostalgia is a bit like humidity: frequently present, usually cloying and we’d be better off without it. It comes with qualifiers — yes, the war was bad, but the music was good; yes, the riots were bad, but people really got in touch with each other; yes, the drug culture was destructive, but there was real freedom of speech without today’s stifling political correctness. And so on. I always thought that most of this talk was either after-the-fact rationalization or coded nostalgia for high and licentious times. I think it was generally a lousy period. Many people disagree.

Lex and I were going back and forth on this topic by email. He announced that “it is time for post-revisionsism on the 60s,” and asserted that it was an age of “glorious music, terrific economic performance, beautiful automobiles, heroic achievements (space, civil rights) disastrous public policy, riots, our worst war.” This got me riled up and I responded that the ’60s were

More negative than positive. The music and pop culture were crap (sorry), the economy that boomed in the early 60s ended in a major and prolonged recession, stock market crash and inflation. The cars were stylish but far inferior to modern ones. The clothes and other fashions were ugly. Moral confusion was epidemic. The seeds of today’s academic anti-intellectualism were sown. The hippie drug culture was a shadow of earlier youth cults. I can’t fucking stand hippies, or for that matter anybody who would rather dope up and look in the mirror than learn about the world. The 60s were full of that kind of thing. The hubris of the hippies was at least as bad as that of the technocrats and generals. I think you are excessively nostalgic for that which you almost experienced. I am a few years closer to having experienced it, or at least to having seen some of it, and I think it mainly sucked.

There were some pretty bad wars too, not just Vietnam: India and Pakistan, the Nigerian civil war. Not to mention the Soviet suppression of the Czechs. And as I mentioned in a comment on the blog, most of the civil-rights progress was made before the 60s. During the 60s the civil-rights organizations started their long march to the leftist fringe, having achieved most of what could be achieved by govt.

[Tom] Wolfe was being kind to his old friend — de mortuis etc. Thompson was washed-up long ago and only stayed in the public eye because of boomer nostalgia and his outlandish behavior, not his ideas, which were tired and foolish.

Lex was apparently still in ’60s mode when he read this, because he responded that it was “raw and vital” and that I should post it on the blog. OK. That was a couple of days ago, and as I reread my email it seems a bit overdone, but only a bit. The 1960s were not as destructive as the 1930s, but they were a period during which the nation lost ground in many ways. We are still repairing some of the damage. (Would Saddam Hussein have invaded Kuwait in 1990 if we had not abandoned Vietnam in 1975 after mishandling the war in the 1960s?) Most people don’t think of cars and music first when they think of the 1930s. Part of the problem with some people’s opinions about the ’60s is that their nostalgia for the funky lightweight stuff overrides more-serious appraisal of the period.

That’s what Gary Becker suggests. I think he makes a good case.

Ann Althouse disapproves of a politician who made a big public show of his marriage ceremony. “No word on how the wife liked having her private feelings turned into a giant political display.” That’s one way to look at it.

I never understood why women put up with men who put them on the spot by proposing marriage in front of large audiences. I assume that the men, by making their intentions public, and risking public rejection, think that they are declaring their love in a profound and courageous way, and they may have a point. But there is also something tactless and manipulative about such proposals, which are usually made in private for the same reasons that sensitive proposals of all kinds are usually made in private. Or maybe the women in these cases have already agreed privately, and are going along with the public show because it furthers their men’s (and hence, as partners, their) agendas.

I once saw a plane at the beach, pulling a banner that read something like:

“SUE, WILL YOU MARRY ME? – MIKE”

and followed an hour or two later by another plane (or maybe the same one) whose banner read:

“MIKE, LEAVE ME ALONE – SUE”