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Author Topic: OSC essay on Terry
Sid Meier
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http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-03-20-1.html

If I wasn't so distracted when reading it I'm sure I would have cried.

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Anna
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Hum. I hated this column, because it says that of course what Clint Eastwood means is that all disabled should die.
Guess what : I don't think Shakespeare was in favor of adolescent suicide, and that's exactly the same logic. [Roll Eyes]

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Sid Meier
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I don't think that was actually the point of the column more of an ironic musing.
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SteveRogers
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I dislike irony in real life situations.
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dean
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Robyn Blumner Article

My favorite excerpt of this article:

quote:
Many of the men and women who have been holding vigils outside Terri Schiavo's hospice are exhibiting the worst of America's home-grown strain of religiously grounded ignorance and hypocrisy.

They clutch their Bibles and rosary beads and hold signs that proclaim it a moral duty to care about life for the vulnerable and disabled, but exhibit no such passion when Republican leaders declare the need to cut food subsidies and medical care for the needy while reducing taxes for the wealthy.

Voting patterns indicate that the more overtly religious someone is, the more likely he is to vote Republican; and Republicans are more likely than Democrats to shrink potentially lifesaving programs for the nation's poor and infirm. According to that logic, patients such as Terri Schiavo should be kept alive indefinitely regardless of their prognosis, but it is okay to cut the state Medicaid program that paid part of their medical expenses. The logic is about on a par with the acolytes of Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, who weep and moan for "dead babies" but vote for leaders who are perfectly happy to ignore the 8.4-million children who don't have health insurance. (Terry, by the way, was in charge of organizing political pressure to reinsert Schiavo's feeding tube.)


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sndrake
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dean,

One of the nasty little realities I deal with on a daily basis is that the "right" and the "left" have a lot in common, at least when it comes to the media. Robyn Blumner has to do one thing to maintain the fiction that the issues around Terri Schiavo are simply one more pissing match between culture warriors:

She has to ignore all the non-religious, non-conservative people who were involved in fighting the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. Disability groups were involved in the fight before Randall Terry ever showed up on the scene. Three separate "friend of the court" briefs were filed by disability groups - a total of 17 organizations among those three briefs.

Here's the real irony, though. "Lefties" weren't alone in ignoring disability advocacy groups in this. Fox News, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, etc. all treated the disability community as though we were invisible. Likewise MSNBC, the NY Times, and commentators like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich.

Why? Because the "right" and the "left" have at least one thing in common: they want to frame this and other issues as being parts of their "culture war" and so another thing they tend to agree on is to treat disability groups as though we were nonexistent.

Here's a piece by Nat Hentoff (who tends to piss off both ends of the political spectrum regularly) on some of the press coverage:

Devaluing Lives

quote:
While the media focused on religious groups and pro-lifers (not all pro-lifers are religious) engaged in trying to save Terri Schiavo, largely ignored were many disability-rights organizations. Andrew J. Imparato, head of the largest of them, the American Association of People with Disabilities, emphasizes there are more than 56 million American children and adults with disabilities, and I would note that many of the rest of us may unexpectedly join their number.

quote:
While Terri Schiavo was still alive, moreover, Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, working hard to get congressional intervention, said: "There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them, and it is hard to determine what their wishes really are or were."

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Dagonee
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quote:
who weep and moan for "dead babies" but vote for leaders who are perfectly happy to ignore the 8.4-million children who don't have health insurance.
First, imagine that you accept the pro-life premise - that each abortion is equivalent to murder.

If that is the case, then almost 1/8 of every child without health insurance would have to die every year to make the lack of health insurance for children as deadly as abortion in America. Once you factor in that the Democrats haven't proposed a universal health care system, you realize exactly how specious Blumner's argument is.

Dagonee

[ May 04, 2005, 09:59 AM: Message edited by: Dagonee ]

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Annie
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It's not only specious, it's childish. "Yeah, well he did it first!" "Why am I in trouble? She made a bigger mess!" These types of arguments where we draw irrelevant parallels are what we try to teach six-year-olds to overcome. I am very religious, I am pro-life, and I am all for universal health care. There's nothing hypocritical about me supporting Terri Schiavo's right to live.
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sndrake
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Annie,

in all fairness I should add that there were dedicated pro-life vigils at the hospice for a long time before Randall Terry showed up. Most of them were from the Catholic community and were probably like you in their views on abortion and health care. They just didn't get the attention that Randall Terry did - but that's a larger problem in terms of over-generalization of the politics of people who are pro-life/anti-abortion.

I keep wanting to issue a press release not-so-politely asking both Howard Dean and Tom DeLay to shut up about Terri Schiavo and go exploit something or someone else.

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Eaquae Legit
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I guess I'd make a really poor PR person, because my first reaction was "Why they heck shouldn't you?"
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odouls268
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quote:
Hum. I hated this column, because it says that of course what Clint Eastwood means is that all disabled should die.

I think OSC is referring more to the author's decisions for the character in the movie.

quote:
Hillary Swank's character was made up. She did what the author decided she should do. So after we see her grimly determined to overcome all obstacles, unwilling to be discouraged, adapting to whatever circumstances try to thwart her, suddenly the author decides that this time she'll give up and start demanding that the people who love her most surrender their sense of decency and goodness in order to indulge her despair.



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Anna
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Spoilers for Million Dollars Baby (but since the column was a spoiler too, no big spoiler for those who read the column)
I know that the column was written from the point of view of someone who realizes that fiction is, precisely, fiction, and whatever happens is what is wanted by the author.
But, and that is my point, the aim of the author (at last I hope so) is to make a good movie-book-play-whatever, not to make a point. So if the author decided that the character had to die, it may be because he thought that it would make a better movie. It didn't seem OOC to me, at last. Maggie fought all her life to have the right to decide about what she would live, and she fought her last battle by deciding when to die. It can seem perfectly anti-religious, but then again, the author makes decisions for his character, that doesn't mean that he would make the same decisions for himself or for loved ones.
That's the only reason I can see why I would continue reading OSC's books when I know that every gay character will marry and have kids - because I hope the author makes that to write a good book, not a point.
Think a little... I was half-kidding, about Shakespeare. If he was a loving parent, and his daughter's (or son's) loved one died, I hope he wouldn't have advice her/him to kill her/himself. But guess what ? Nobody would know about Romeo and Juliet today if he made the same decision for his characters, that would be a perfectly boring happy-end play.
So that's what bugs me in OSC's reaction towards Million Dollar Baby. I know he hasn't been the only one, and I know it made some people decide not to go and watch it, when for me, it was a wonderful movie. Arguing about the quality of the movie is one thing, arguing about his supposed moral content is another.
And about the things "that could not happen in reality", such as the bad treatment of Maggie in the hospital, well, same thing - it's fiction, no one said that it was reality, so if the author decides that he needs his character ill treated in an hospital, or badly wounded, or putting everybody KO, she will be that and do this, no matter that it can't happen in reality.

[ May 04, 2005, 05:18 AM: Message edited by: Anna ]

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sndrake
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quote:
So that's what bugs me in OSC's reaction towards Million Dollar Baby. I know he hasn't been the only one, and I know it made some people decide not to go and watch it, when for me, it was a wonderful movie. Arguing about the quality of the movie is one thing, arguing about his supposed moral content is another.
And about the things "that could not happen in reality", such as the bad treatment of Maggie in the hospital, well, same thing - it's fiction, no one said that it was reality, so if the author decides that he needs his character ill treated in an hospital, or badly wounded, or putting everybody KO, she will be that and do this, no matter that it can't happen in reality.

Well, it matters when the ignorance level of the audience is such that the misinformation and stereotyping is regarded as "genuine" and "deep" (quoting various reviews, not you). The majority of the audience seeing MDB didn't know rehab isn't the picture of isolation and drabness. Most of the audience didn't know how ludicrous the stampede of calamities really was.

A key difference between Shakespeare and MDB (besides the obvious one of quality - comparisons between screenwriter Paul Haggis and Shakespeare are ludicrous, although you're not the first to make them) is the level of knowledge the audience approaches these things with - specifically in the case of Romeo and Juliet. People have enough experience with their own teenage passions to recognize the tragedy of the suicides - and not see them as rational acts, but the product of the intensity of adolescence, with dramatic license thrown in.

One thing about OSC's essay, though...

He was far too optimistic about the law's response if he had killed Charlie Ben. The law tends to treat parents who kill kids with disabilities a lot more lightly than they do parents who kill nondisabled kids. In many cases, a significant part of the community will actually make the murdering parent out to be a hero, martyr or victim. No community seems to be immune from those kinds of reactions.

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