Mark Steyn: Public execution

The Spectator ^ | April 2, 2005 | Mark Steyn

[kenvelshi]

Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.

Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn’t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert — the Robert of the mid-1990s — might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert — the pre-1993 Robert — would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland’s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which — despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path — the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down. He has since died of pneumonia, which is sad: the disabled often fall victim to some opportunist illness they’d have shrugged off in earlier times, as Christopher Reeve did. But that’s still a better fate than to be starved to death by order of the state.

Six and a half years later, the Terri Schiavo case is almost identical to Robert Wendland’s — parents who wish to care for a disabled daughter, a spouse who wants her dead, a legal system determined to see her off. The only difference is that this time the system is likely to win — it may already have done so by the time you read this — and that Mrs Schiavo’s death is being played out round the clock coast to coast, with full supporting cast. It is easy to mock the attendant ‘circus’, the cheapest laugh of the self-identified sophisticate. A 12-year-old boy has been arrested for attempting to offer Mrs Schiavo a glass of water. Ha-ha.

On the other hand, if one accepts the official version that the court is merely bringing to an end (after 15 years) the artificial prolongation of Mrs Schiavo’s life, since when has a glass of water been deemed medical treatment? In the public areas of Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, the waiting journalists grab a Coke or a coffee or even a glass of water every half hour or so without anyone considering it ‘medical treatment’. That it is, uniquely, a crime to serve Mrs Schiavo a beverage underlines the court’s intent — not to cease the artificial prolongation of life but actively to cause her death.

When poor Terri Schiavo broke on to the front pages, several commentators said the case was another Elian Gonzalez — the Cuban boy whose mother died trying to bring him to freedom in America. That’s to say, it was one of those stories where all sorts of turbulent questions of law, morality and politics collide. Two weeks on, if it’s Clintonian analogies we’re after, it seems to me the public regard it as something closer to the whole Paula/Monica/Juanita production line culminating in impeachment: if you recall, a large number of people were outraged by the President, a smaller number of people were determined to defend him to the end, and a huge number of people just didn’t want to hear about it; and the more Republicans went on about the DNA analysis of the dress stain and Mr Clinton lying about whether his enumerated parts had been in contact with her enumerated parts and the DNA analysis of the dress stain, the more they stuck their hands over their ears and said, ‘La-la-la, can’t hear you.’

That seems to be what’s happening here. Whether or not there’s anything in the various dubious polls claiming to show people opposed to Congressional efforts to reinsert Mrs Schiavo’s feeding tube, it seems clear that many of us would rather she’d been like Robert Wendland — a faraway local story of which they know little. A lot of Americans have paced hospital corridors while gran’ma’s medical taxi-meter goes ticking upward and, if my mailbag’s anything to go by, they’d rather this sort of stuff stayed in the shadows. Nobody likes to see how the sausage is made, or in this case the vegetable, if that indeed is what Terri Schiavo is. Many people seem to be unusually anxious to pretend that this judicial murder is merely a very belated equivalent of a discreet doctor putting a hopeless case out of her misery, or to take refuge in the idea that some magisterial disinterested ‘due process’ is being played out — or as a reader wrote to me the other day: ‘Why are you fundamentalists so clueless? It’s the law, dickbrain. Michael Schiavo isn’t acting for himself; he’s been legally recognised as the person qualified to act for Terri in expressing her wishes based on her own oral declarations.’

Which sounds fine and dandy, until you uncover your ears and a lot of the genteel euphemisms and legalisms and medicalisms — ‘right to die’, ‘guardian ad litem’, ‘PVS’ — start to sound downright Orwellian. PVS means ‘persistent vegetative state’, and because it’s a grand official-sounding term it’s been accepted mostly without question by the mainstream media, even though the probate judge declared Mrs Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state without troubling to visit her and without requiring any of the routine tests, such as an MRI scan. Indeed, her husband hasn’t permitted her to be tested for anything since 1993. Think about that: this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

La-la-la, we don’t want to hear how the vegetable’s made....

Fortunately, if you want to execute someone who hasn’t committed a crime, you don’t need to worry with any of this ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ stuff. If an al-Qa’eda guy got shot up resisting capture in Afghanistan and required a feeding tube and the guards at Guantanamo yanked it out, you’d never hear the end of it from the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International and all the rest. Even given the litigious nature of American society, it still strikes me as remarkable that someone can be literally sued to death, and at the hands of a probate judge. Unlike other condemned prisoners, there’s no hope of a last-minute reprieve from the governor. That’s to say, he did reprieve her, and so did the legislature, and the US Congress and President — and the Florida courts have declared them all irrelevant. So, unlike Death Row, there’s no call from the governor, and no quick painless lethal injection or electrocution or swift clean broken neck from the hangman’s noose, and certainly no last meal. On Tuesday, getting a little impatient with the longest slow-motion public execution in American history, CBS News accidentally posted Mrs Schiavo’s obit on their website complete with vivid details that have yet to occur — the parents at her bedside in the final moments, etc. In this, they seem to be in tune with their viewers: sad business, personal tragedy, no easy answers, prayers are with her family, yada yada, is it over yet?

Just to underline the Clinton comparison, the Sunday Times’s Andrew Sullivan has dusted off his impeachment act and damned those of us opposed to Mrs Schiavo’s judicial murder as dogmatic extremist fundamentalist religious-right theocrats. If he’d stop his shrill bleating for a couple of minutes, he might notice that the ‘theocrats’ who want Terri Schiavo to live include Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who’s not just a Democrat but a gay one.

True, the TV networks — as they often do with what they see as socially conservative issues — prefer to train their cameras on some of Mrs Schiavo’s more obviously loopy defenders. But, for all that, it seems far weirder to me to be quite so enthusiastic about ending her life. I’ve received innumerable emails along the lines of, ‘If Terri Schiavo didn’t want this to happen to her, all she had to do under Florida law was make a “living will”’ — one of those documents that says in the event of a severe disability I do/do not want to be kept alive (delete as applicable). Well, OK, I haven’t received ‘innumerable’ emails, but I’ve received enough that I now send back a form response politely inquiring whether the correspondent has himself made a living will. I’ve yet to receive any answers. But I can’t see why, in a free society, healthy persons in their twenties should be expected to file legal documents in order to pre-empt a court order mandating their death a decade or two hence.

Even if you believe in living wills, it’s hard to argue that Michael Schiavo’s wildly inconsistent statements of his wife’s casual remarks about living on a tube should have the force of one. I’d be irked to find I was being deported to Pyongyang on the grounds that, while watching a TV documentary late one night in 1987, I’d been heard to say, ‘Wow, you know it’d be kinda cool to go to North Korea, don’t you think?’ But the Florida legal system’s position remains — as a reader, Adrienne Follmer, paraphrased it to me the other day — ‘We don’t know for sure if this woman wanted to live so let’s starve her to death.’

La-la-la, still can’t hear you....

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one. Until a year or two back, I spent a lot of my summer Saturdays manning the historical society booth at the flea markets on the town common, and I passed many a pleasant quarter-hour or so chit-chatting with elderly ladies leading some now middle-aged simpleton child around. Both parties seemed to enjoy the occasion. The child is no doubt a ‘burden’: he was born because he just was; there was no ‘choice’ about it in those days. Having done away with those kinds of ‘burdens’ at birth, we’re less inclined to tolerate them when they strike in adulthood, as they did in Terri Schiavo’s case.

In that sense, the Schiavo debate provides a glimpse of the Western world the day after tomorrow — a world of nonagenarian baby boomers who’ve conquered most of the common-or-garden diseases and instead get stricken by freaky protracted colossally expensive chronic illnesses; a world of more and more dependants, with fewer and fewer people to depend on. In Europe, where demographic reality means that in a generation or so all the dependants will be elderly European Christians and most of the fellows they’re dependent on will be young North African or Arab Muslims, the social consensus for government health care is unlikely to survive. Terri Schiavo failed to demonstrate conclusively why she should be permitted by the state to continue living. As Western nations evolve rapidly into the oldest societies in human history, many more of us will be found similarly wanting.

Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, is a leading light of the so-called ‘right-to-die’ movement, and his book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice, makes interesting reading. On page 240 Mr Felos writes, ‘The Jewish people, long ago in their collective consciousness, agreed to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter was necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. Their sacrifice saved humanity at the brink of extinction and propelled us into a new age.... If our minds can conceive of an uplifting Holocaust, can it be so difficult to look another way at the slights and injuries and abuses we perceive were inflicted upon us?’

Mr Felos feels it is now Terri Schiavo’s turn to ‘agree’ to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter is necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. As I read Felos’s words, I heard a radio bulletin announce that the Pope may now require a feeding tube. Fortunately for him, his life is ultimately in the hands of God and not a Florida probate judge.

[Fenris6]

this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

[Desdemona]

As usual, Steyn hits the nail on the head.

[Fenris6]

I’d be irked to find I was being deported to Pyongyang on the grounds that, while watching a TV documentary late one night in 1987, I’d been heard to say, ‘Wow, you know it’d be kinda cool to go to North Korea, don’t you think?’

Damn he's good.

[KoRn]

We have just witnessed judicially imposed euthanasia. No legislation passed, no constitutional application, and no citizen voting for it. This case is now precedent for euthanasia. If you are elderly or young but mentally retarded look out. You could be next.

The real concern I have now is; who in the hell runs this country?!? It seems the Judicial branch can rule over the Executive and Legislative branches with no problem.

Are the courts gonna have their own military service anytime soon?

[AHerald]

This is exactly the sort of intolerant, ignorant right wing fundamentalist garbage that's turning off the mainstream public and forcing the rational, commonsensical "True Federalist" FReepers to leave FreeRepublic.

/sarcasm

[Fledermaus]

If most of the idiots out there, including those on the right (all lefties are idiots) would bother to actually read the facts from day one, they'd be appalled and suspicious at what has been transpiring.

Michael Schiavo, his doctors, the nurses, the hospice, his lawyer Felos, Judge Greer, etc. are ALL members of the same society of death cultists and ALL are associated with the hospice. Mark Levin was going through it the other night and I believe he said they even own most of it and others.

But the lazy left wing press will never report the facts any longer. They are too f'ing busy indoctrinating those still bothering to read or watch them with the IQ's of dogs or are elitist pigs that want to rule the world via Marx and Hillary.

Oh, but I'm supposed to be civil. I'm supposed to have respect for democracy with these monsters in our midst.

Well sue me if I refuse. Call me names if I get in their faces. Kill me when I suggest death would be too good for these hideous minions of Satan.

My conscious will always be clear.

[Fenris6]

Did you notice that Steyn's audience is international and not primarily Christian - he made a point not to lapse into scripture or villify people as evil. Hmmmm, wonder why?

[Fenris6]

See? I was ready to lock & load until you started saying things like "hideous minions of Satan."

[maine-iac7]

Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland?

Yes, as a matter of fact.

His wife was not successful in starving him to death because of a Judge - who happens to be a man I know well, and know to be a brilliant, compassionate, fair, honest and probably the personification of what we grew up thinking a judge would be. We could use someone like him on the Supreme Court.

He is now Presiding Judge at the San Joaquin County Superior Court.

This is from THE RECORD newspaper, Wednesday, December 10, 1997:

Judge rejects plea to end Stockton man's life support By Kimi Yoshino Record Staff Writer

Robert Wendland should not be allowed to die by disconnecting the feeding tube that has kept him alive for four years, San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Bob McNatt declared Tuesday.

The surprise ruling cut short a high-profile trial monitored by medical and legal scholars across the country.

Judge McNatt said: ""If I must err, I am going to err on the side of caution. It is necessary that I choose life. ... I don't know at this point whether here today I am preserving Robert's life or whether I am sentencing him to life."

"I feel that this is the absolutely wrong decision for all the right reasons," McNatt said. "I entertain a strong suspicion that Robert would have wanted to die." But McNatt said a strong suspicion is not enough evidence to end the 45-year-old Stockton man's life as requested by Wendland's wife, Rose Wendland,...and his court-appointed attorney, Deputy Public Defender Doran Berg. They did not -- and could not -- meet their clear and convincing burden of proof under California law, McNatt said."

If McNatt had allowed Wendland's life-sustaining feeding tube to be removed, it would have been a first for a California court. No judge has endorsed withdrawing life support from a person in Wendland's condition, conscious but unable to communicate because of serious brain damage from a 1993 car crash. Wendland's mother, Florence Wendland, and sister Rebekah Vinson, who fought since July 1995 to keep him alive, met McNatt's decision with relieved tears. "We are on top of the world," Vinson said. "We are going to relax for the first time in 2 1/2 years." Rose Wendland, who testified that her husband did not have a living will but had told her he would not want to live without being a "father, husband and provider," sat in stunned silence and quickly left the Stockton courtroom without comment. McNatt described Rose Wendland as one of the most selfless and devoted wives he has seen, but he said that to rule in her favor, he would have to extend the bounds of California law. "If I must err, I am going to err on the side of caution. It is necessary that I choose life," McNatt said. "I am not ready to start down that slippery slope without some form of guidance." The ruling, which McNatt predicted would be appealed, came 1 1/2 hours after the court day usually ends and before Wendland's mother and sister presented their case. Elements of the case have been considered by the state Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court. The case also has grabbed headlines in national magazines, won attention on Internet bulletin boards and aired on the TV newsmagazine "Dateline NBC."

A very similar case as Terri's - with very different results .............How I wished, these past weeks, that Terri had had her case brought before Bobby

[Petronski]

Perfect.

[ClancyJ]

Boy, I was just about to fire off a comment. Good thing you put in the /sarcasm.

Steyn is great. Funny how some can so clearly understand.

[ClancyJ]

Boy, I was just about to fire off a comment. Good thing you put in the /sarcasm.

Steyn is great. Funny how some can so clearly understand while others just do not get it. Are we in a parallel world?

[snowsislander]

If he’d stop his shrill bleating for a couple of minutes, he might notice that the ‘theocrats’ who want Terri Schiavo to live include Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who’s not just a Democrat but a gay one.

I don't think Mr. Steyn is correct about Congressman Frank -- I thank that Congressman Frank was one of the leaders of the pro-death camp:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Reps. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Jim Davis of Florida, two who led the opposition on the House floor to congressional intervention, declined to talk about the politics of the issue, saying it was a day of mourning.

[phatus maximus]

Just think in 10 years this will be routine because there won't be enough rooms for all the elderly who are in the same situation..

[snowsislander]

Ooops.

Try that bit again:

I thank think that Congressman Frank was one of the leaders of the pro-death camp:

[AHerald]

Did you notice that Steyn's audience is international and not primarily Christian - he made a point not to lapse into scripture or villify people as evil. Hmmmm, wonder why?

I did. And I prefer Steyn's style, to say the least. And lest you or others think I defend or align myself with those who would refer to all their opponents on this issue as evil, let me be clear: I can't stomach that sort of argument and demonization. Period. But I accept that the extreme ugliness--from both sides--is part of life on public debate forums, especially when dealing with deeply emotional and divisive issues such as this.

My sarcasm was aimed at those here who've become such obsessive defenders of legalistic processes that they reflexively dismiss cogent arguments on behalf of Terri, like Steyn's, as being equivalent to ignorant extremism.

[maine-iac7]

I thank that Congressman Frank was one of the leaders of the pro-death camp:

It will be a long time before I get the picture out of my mind of Frank on the Sunday night emergency meeting of Congress - leading the screaming descent against "interfering" for Terri. He was at his best raging, ignorant self.

[Bogolyubski]

Steyn is a temendously talented writer with a unique gift for cutting through the spin and lies generated by the MSM and the left - leaving the reader to ponder the truth about the big pitcure. Even better, in these latest articles he reaffirms an important moral principle - the sanctity of life - in which our civilization is rooted. This principle has been shockingly disavowed by many so-called "conservatives" in this nation over the past several weeks.

If your're reading this, Mark, thanks for standing up and agruing for what is right. You've presented us with the essential truth of what has happened here. Thanks so much.

[Eagles6]

Too bad Gw and Jeb didn't have his 'nads. Steyn is approaching the realm of VDH as a "Search and Read".