roachboy

"the moral thing to do"?

underneath this repulsive display of television-bourne sanctimoniousness from conservatives is a sequence of incoherent claims.

as usual, one premise comes from character assassination of the husband. republican hatchet men apparently feel that they are in a better position to render judgements about this case than he is. [for the record, i neither know nor care about the details of this guy's life--i dont see how they are relevant to anything beyond buttressing an incoherent collective froth in which the foxnews variant of conservative spins)

the usage of the term morality here makes it clear that for the right, it is a term without content, which they can fill as they like since they have convinced their followers that they control the entire discourse of morality.

but if you do not accept the assumption that the right can declare for itself what is and its not moral, and you look at the arguments, such as they are, it is pretty clear that the morality claims make no sense whatsoever. particularly not from a population that a few months ago was rapidly behind the war in iraq, which has no problem accepting the rationalization of torture, which is mobilized efficiently across the transmission belt system of right ideology to support any and all bushworld initiatives, no matter how insane they might be, no matter their consequences for folk living and yet to be living.

so if the morality argument is basically worth less than the energy it just took to type the phrase "the morality argument" then what is really going on here?


is this whole thing about a symbolic fight in favor of inherited privilege over legal relations?

how can the right on the one hand blab endlessly about the centrality of marriage and then on the other seek to usurp the legal priroity of the relation husband-wife and replace with with parents/children?

is the real argument about the image of the community--one based on hierarchies rooted in birth, in succession, all of which operate in a wholly private domain, as over against legal relations?

in which case, this is not about terry schiavo at all, but is rather some sick theater of republican delusions about the nature of Authority (always either divinely rooted or rooted in birth lines--both private, both not open to question).

it cannot be about health care, really, because the right has nothing coherent to say about it beyond cheerleading for the existing system no matter how incoherent.

it cannot be about "life" because from what i can tell, life is not an issue for terry schiavo.

maybe it is about the possibility of miracles. usually, with such things, the best strategy is to divert attention from real time and write a story about what happened after the fact--that way there are no camera watching and you can say as you like. miracles are easiest to find through ex post facto stories that work the claim to miracle into a starting assumption.

but it appears that after 13 years or so, the rationale of waiting for a miracle has worn pretty thin.

so the question changes:
how long can those who might not or do not believe be kept in a state of suspended pseudo-animation, their desires subordinated to the articles of faith of the christian right?

is that what this is about then? the subordination of legal channels, legal relations, to fantasies rooted in a particular religious position which has the quirk the tendency to claim for itself a monopoly on the term christian?

what does the right really hope to accomplish here? as much as i would love to see the entire edifice fall in on itself, i am not so naieve as to thing this a simple fuck up on the part of the aisle-rove axis--it must be understood as tactically functional at some level. but that functionality is so bizarre....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite