Reply #44: I like the way you make clear how unclear this case is. [View All]

[the_spectator]

It's also why I'm happy to have the Repubs get caught up in it, and have the Dems basically stand aside. This is also why this case IS essentially a one-off situtation. It's not going to be a defining moment for either side. It's trivia - compelling, dramatic, human-interest-story trivia. It's OJ.

It's NOT about the "right to die." No one really knows what Terri wants. Her husband claims she verbally expresed a wish to die in these situations. His corroborating witnesses on this are HIS brother and the brother's wife. Look, they were a typical young couple. Neither Terri or Michael at the time of their young marriage strikes me as particularly intellectual or deep-thinking types - not particularly likely to have a serious heart-to-heart talk about "what if" at that stage in their lives. I doubt Terri expressed any wish whatsoever to him. At most, she may have said "yuck" while half-watching some long-forgotten TV Movie about that Quinlan girl. Even if she ever said anything, I doubt Michael would remember it years later - probably "in one ear, out the other" like most things wives say to husbands!

It's NOT about the "cruelty of starvation" or anything like that - Terri IS, I believe, brain dead at this point.

It's about a family dispute - between Terri's parents and sibilings and Michael, her husband. But Congress isn't really "invading this family's decision or privacy" - they've already done that to each other. They've already made it a public issue themselves, both sides. BOTH sides are maddeningly stubborn. BOTH sides have been co-opted by people with agendas: Randal Terry has the parents, that lawyer and Dr. "Death" Crawford has the husband.

What gives this human-interest-story its human interest then? What has driven so many people to care enough to keep Terri "alive" that Congress did what it did? What makes a "Terri-head"? I think it's really all about Michael, not Terri. He's NO HERO, no matter what anyone says. He's an overgrown neanderthal, the type to be domineering over "his" women. A type that often never seems to have trouble attracting women to him, incidentally (and obviously in his case.) It is POSSIBLE that he wants her dead out of malice or spite, or for money. It is POSSIBLE that he was abusing her and this caused or contributed to her state. It is POSSIBLE that his "visits" to her over the years on her virtual-death bed have been occassions of absolute terror for Terri, IF Terri has ever been really conscious since she came out of her original coma, some 15 years ago. And all this real possibility is intensely compelling, intensely horrific. It's literature. It's Zola's "Therese Raquin" with the brute and his whore and (in that case) the old woman, mute, silent, paralyzed, but hearing everything, knowing of the crime.

It's literature!