Terri Schiavo, Hunter Thompson, and the Right to Die

In the world of the ancient Greeks, hubris was the sin of defying the gods. Salman Rushdie talk of this in an commencement address to Bard's College, a brave little school that offered him a position during the dark days of the fatwa (the speech is anthologized in Step Across This Line, a fine collection of his essays and speeches). He talks of the gods coming across poorly, punishing, say, Prometheus for stealing fire, something many of us would call progress these days. Rushdie urges more of this.

"...the myriad deities of money and power, of convention and custom, that will seek to limit and control your thoughts and lives. Defy them; that's my advice to you. Thumb your noses. For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity."

To me, this seems an appropriate way to discuss what happened with Hunter S. Thompson this week and what is continuing to happen- or not to happen- to Terri Schiavo. Rushdie's speech, and his elegant formulation of humanity, is key to this discussion, spurred by this site's brief debate on suicide earlier.

During that debate I quoted lyrics from a song by the Buffalo-based songwriter Johnny Dowd, a weird and depressing but very talented man (think a combination of Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Hank Williams, all at their darkest). The desolate "Ballad of Lonnie Wolf," is the name of the song, a cheery one about a man paralyzed from a failed suicide attempt (sample cheerful lyric: "blink an eye, squeeze a hand/life stretches out like the desert sand"). The salient lyric, for our discussion, was this one: "Now he's in a VA hospital/a victim of life's ancient riddle/tried to die, but he's condemned to live/death's a gift, only god can give."

Haunting, creepy, bleak, and if Rushdie had taught us anything, false. It is our hubris, in the best, most liberating sense of the word, that renders the notion of death being god's gift so laughably wrong.

Let's look at both meanings of "gift" here, both in the traditional religious sense and in the way that Johnny Dowd intended. For the religious, death is a gift, a chance to be with the maker (provided you follow all the rules, of course. Don't sway too far though, Chuckles: this gift ain't returnable). Because of that, death is something we are supposed to which we are supposed to look forward, all the while walking a thin line dictated to us by ancient manuscripts.

Johnny Dowd's meaning is slightly different and even contradictory. As much as you are supposed to look forward to death, it can only come when the Man himself decides it is your time. You can't take it unto yourself to leave this mortal coil. If it isn't your time it isn't your times. To do otherwise would be to take god's will into your own hands- and it is a sin. But why, we ask? What if you are just really eager to meet the lord? Shouldn't that be ok?

No. Indeed, it is the worst sin of them all, the one that undermines what all the clergy stand for: it is hubris. It says to the invented gods "Thanks, but we can take it from here."
That is why the religious right and all the social conservatives have rallied around the Terry Schiavo case. Schiavo, has been basically a vegetable since 1990, following severe health problems. She is tragically young, alive only because of a feeding tube, and has no chance of recovery. Her husband, Michael, wants to pull the plug, saying it is her wish, and has been fighting in court for years. Her parents want to keep her alive, and have fought Michael in court (one imagines they don't spend the holidays together). The most recent turn in the case was yesterday, when a Florida court stayed an order to remove the tube.

Now, this case has been getting a lot of media attention, but it is far from a typical case, and it is not at all cut and dry. Her parents have set up a touching website detailing why she should be kept alive, and I don't mean that sarcastically. It is touching; she is their daughter, and not only do they hold out hope of recovery, they don't want to see their daughter go. Who would?

The reason this case is so difficult, and kind of a sideshow, is that Terri herself has no legal record of her intentions. Her husband claims she would like to die, her parents say she wouldn't, so the case is basically one of deciding whose claim means more.

But that is not why the religious right is flocking (and I use that verb very literally) to this case. They don't really care about the husband/parents continuum. After all, the Bible says that one has to grow up and leave their parents and turn to their spouse. It might be hypocritical for the religious right to address it if those are the terms, and we all know they shun away from such behavior.

They want to squash the notion that any human can decide when a life should end (not counting the death penalty of course, though this is one of the few areas where the Catholic Church has been morally consistent, in their own peculiar way). They want to take away the ability of humans to have a say in the most important decision of their lives. Again, this isn't the issue in the Terri Schiavo case, but it is being spun as a matter of protecting life or embracing a culture of hedonistic death-worship.

This is where the right is at their best: spinning everything, twisting the issue around so that it is very hard to disagree with them, framing it in such a way that it seems godless and un-American to think any other way. Indeed, the very idea that they can lump "godless" and "un-American" into the same thought is a remarkable negation of history (for a full discussion on this, read Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers." Absolutely worth the time and money).

But here is the rub: euthanasia, and its less medically sanctioned counterpart, your garden-variety suicide, is godless. Even if the religious do it, it is a way of taking back from god the most important decision of your life: when it should end. What can be more hubris-filled than that?

The legal arguments against euthanasia, or just pulling the plug, are all based in a very narrow, shallow morality. It is ostensibly pro-life, but it is really just pro-religion. It is a closed-minded definition of life to say that someone should have to suffer enormously, barely actually living, in order to satisfy someone else's idea of god's will. An actual appreciation of life would be to allow someone to decide how they want to go. To decide when exactly they have had enough of life.

Now don't get me wrong: I am not an advocate of suicide. Suicides are generally sudden, a momentary decision, leaving many mourners shocked and sad and angry and scarred, confused and adrift. It is a selfish decision in many ways (unless of course the person consults with others first, which is basically euthanasia).

This is not a culture of death; it is a true culture of life. I knew a man, a good friend, who suffered from ALS. It is a horrible, nasty disease- the body stops working but the brain is alive to watch the thousand humiliations and degradations that come daily to someone who can't do anything for themselves. I don't know if he ever seriously contemplated suicide, but if he had, who could blame him? That he never did was enormously inspiring and brave. He worked until shortly before he died, and his friends and family were richer for his courage and humor. I hope I can go out with half as much dignity. But this is exactly the point: he stayed on because he choose to do so.

And Hunter choose not to. It was probably selfish, he was recently married and had a son and grandson. He was suffering, but others suffered more. But so what? Is it for any of us to say what he should do with himself. Yes, we feel he owes us artistically, and that it is a waste and a shame that he is gone, and can feel vicarious anger for those he actually hurt, but it is not our call. I feel the same way about Kurt Cobain and Elliot Smith, perhaps more so because they were both still vital artists (surprising myself: Smith probably more so). So yes, there is anger, but can any of us say they are cowards? No.

Because we as humans shouldn't arrogate unto ourselves that right over the emotions and fundamental rights of others. We should reject the religious mentality that speaks of some vengeful cloud-demon fulminating and hurling lightning bolts because we take something from him. Enough of that, then. The right to die is key issue in whether or not America remains a secular country, the way it was meant to be.

I'll end where I began, with Rushdie, in the same book, at an address delivered in King's College Chapel, on the anniversary of his death sentence (let's be honest: Rushdie has as much right as nearly anyone to despise the over-bearing effects of religion, and its will to impose morality on others. The fatwa wanted Rushdie to die, and the religious want the suffering to live, but it the same coin. It is imposition and control). Here is his conclusion.

"I had to understand not just what I am fighting against- in this situation, that's not very hard- but also what I am fighting for, what is worth fighting for with one's life. Religious fanaticism's scorn for secularism and for unbelief has led me to my answer. It is that values and morals are independent of religious faith, that good and evil come before religion: that- if I may be permitted to say this in the house of God- it is perfectly possible, and for many of us even necessary, to construct our ideas of the good without taking refuge in faith. That is where our freedom lies, and it is that freedom, among many others, which the fatwa threatens, and which it cannot be allowed to destroy."