Pig Herder

Mark Steyn has been having fun recently tweaking the pundits who have been busy devising a coherent rationale for the coming "conservative crack-up." In today's Chicago Sun Times he observes that a decent concern for a human life, far from splitting conservatives into separate and hostile camps, more likely works against the high sounding cosmopolitan elites, with their tireless agitation for greater mankind.

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:

"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.

Nothing has rocked the boat lately like thinking about the Terry Schiavo case. I go back and forth, as I hear the next ethicist or doctor or pastor weigh in. Was it murder? Well, maybe not: consider that if the parents had come to the same conclusion (she wanted no tubes) as the husband, it would not be - or at least we would not be having this dialog. Or consider Kenneth Prager, a doctor and medical ethicist (and radio talk-show host Dennis Prager's brother), no "pro-choice" euthanasiast this man. On Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday he commented that if the scan he had looked at was actually that of Terry Schiavo (as it was told him it was) then there was no way she had any ability to sense hunger or thirst, or know what was going on - so bad was the deterioration of the cortex.

Then there's the larger "culture of life vs. culture of death" argument, which is very persuasive. It's hard to argue that we have not become desensitized to removing unwanted people, unborn or infirm. Richard John Neuhaus, cardinal and prolific essayist, was also on Hewitt's radio show yesterday, and he spoke plainly and convincingly that as a culture we place lamentably little value on human life that does not fit our ideal.

Well anyway, everyday some new slant on the case that gives me pause. But all along something has been gnawing at me. Like millions of others, the entire affair has caused me to reflect on my own Health Care Directive and Power of Attorney for Health Care decisions. I have these documents in place - fine. I checked the box that instructs my attorney-in-fact to pull the tube if I am diagnosed as terminal. Again, fine; or is it? Reflection, spurred by the Schiavo case, has me wondering about my decision: it was made in the comfort of an office chair, with a cursory calculation of the (long) odds that the terminal condition could be my own. As it happens, it looks as if it was a tad rash, maybe even just a knee-jerk predilection to be valiant when it's so easy - i.e., when the consequences of the decision are taken to be without cost.

So as this idea of easy gallantry - gutsy (pardon the pun), and surely popular - looks the more like it was at least a part of my decision "process" (in quotes because in hindsight it doesn't look like it was much of a process at all) on the Directive, there appears a fine piece by one of my favorite writers, on just this thing. James Bowman's piece is food for thought, and will hopefully have people asking themselves some probing questions.

My guess is that you would get a very similar number of people answering "yes" to some such question as: "If you were seriously injured to the point where you lost brain function and were reduced to the condition of a vegetable" -- the English, for some reason, colloquially insist on specifying the vegetable as a cabbage -- "would you want your loved ones to 'pull the plug' and allow you to die?" Now that's not what was happening in the Schiavo case, of course, but there may be another reason for people to pretend it was than mere eagerness to let her husband "get on with his life." For one thing, it's easy to answer yes. Not only are you not in such a lamentable state when you answer, but it's very hard to imagine that you ever will be. Nor is anyone ever going to be in a position to accuse you of inconsistency if, should the hypothetical become real, you should change your mind. Either you would no longer have a mind to change, or you would be, like poor Terri, unable to signify that you had changed it.

Yet it is the culturally acceptable answer. It is thought to be both courageous and tough minded to regard life without -- fill in the appropriate mental or bodily function here -- as being not worth living.

There you have it; that's what was gnawing at me. Thank you James Bowman.