PERSISTENT VEGETATIVE STATES: a new Moment of Truth

I usually post my essays, like the one below, at the link above. Click on it and you can read past essays, plus a lovely almanac of sorts. I thank Yosephus for allowing me to display my essays here. You can also hear them at http://www.thisishell.net - the website of the radio show on which I read them.

3-26-05 PERSISTENT VEGETATIVE STATES

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: not the kid who pointed out the Emperor's nudity, but the Emperor's very nudity itself.

The following was written before Terri Schiavo died. I'm sure everyone's as relieved as I planned on being now that her soul is free to haunt her parents or her husband, depending on which side she was on in the "debate."

Everybody's sick of hearing about Terri Schiavo. And everyone's talking about her. And I think everyone's so sick of hearing and talking about her that they're really hoping she'll die, like, real soon. At least that's what the polls say. Most people want her dead. What kind of society wants a pretty little brain-dead woman dead? A society that's on the verge of puking from all the rightwing mishegoss.

Man, I want a brain-dead chick's husband to remove her feeding tube EVERY MONTH! This issue is really separating the nuts from the people. Polls showing people want to let Terri Schiavo die by a margin of five to one come out like three times a day, from CBS, CNN/Gallup, ABC, this, that and the other. Even FOX! But you should hear these crazy rhetoricians with their misdirected passions, cussing out the polls, denying their validity - it's almost as sad and disgusting as their behavior in general.

This could be it, people. This could be the issue that separates the expendable jerks from the rest of us. Here's what we do: I'm gonna start a cult, "Veggies for Terri." It'll be an anti-abortion, anti-semitic, anti-gay, misogynist group, of course, in order to get the proper nut-cases to join. Then, when they've all joined - and by all I mean Jeb and W and Tom DeLay included - we're all gonna get really thin and have heart attacks that leave us in a vegetative state. But beforehand, I'm gonna have all my followers sign a living will saying they would never, under ANY circumstances, want to be dead, killed, allowed to die, or ignored by the media. These documents would be fakes. Also, my heart attack would be fake.

Anyway, as soon as they were in their Persistent Vegetative States, I would pull the plug on them! HA!

Or maybe we can get them all into a stadium and gas them.

As you can tell, I'm not against the death penalty. I think Donald Rumsfeld should get it. Why him? Because he's in a Persistent Vegetative State, that's why. Also, he smells like a fetus.

The fact is, you can't kill everyone you hate. It's been tried, and it always ends in disappointment. But I would be remiss if I didn't point out that GOD HATES THESE PEOPLE WHO ARE TURNING TERRI SCHIAVO INTO A FETUS ON A CROSS! God hates them because they want to keep people in love from getting married and people who are dead from dying. God hates them because they are baboons having a feces-throwing tantrum. They are villagers with torches chasing Frankenstein's monster up to the windmill. They are the Gujarati Hindutvas massacring their Muslim neighbors. They're the mob calling for Jesus to be crucified. They're the Taliban killing men without beards and women without burkhas. They're the chasids from Brooklyn moving to the West Bank so they can kick and spit on old Palestinian women. They're the smiling soldiers giving the thumbs-up as they crowd around a prisoner they've beaten to death. The ignorant, hate-filled, reactionary mob. And right now, for the first time in I don't know HOW long, there's way more of US than there are of THEM.

So let's go get 'em! Just kidding. HA!

But we could.

No, let us be gracious. Like Michael Schiavo, who, despite slander and death threats, maintains his composure.

Right now, most of the nation feels the same sense of embarrassment and pity for these misguided souls as the rest of the world did for our nation as a whole when Bush was returned to the White House. So now EVERYONE knows what it's like to have the national discourse hijacked by idiots.

Everyone, that is, but the idiots. They're having a ball! And I say, let 'em! Let's whip this rightwing discourse up to full loft, to its fluffiest foam, its crème de la crème. Let it fluff! Let it foam! Let the zaniness flow, let none curtail the boneheaded clownishness of the fanatically embarrassing. Let them fanaticize themselves back into the margins of society, where they belong.

The more disgusting their grandstanding sideshow, the more Evangelical Christians who AREN'T complete maniacs will want to define themselves apart from the baboons. This can only be good for Evangelical Christianity, in that it will ostracize its intolerable members, cut off the gangrenous limb and focus on less circussy issues; perhaps the majority of Evangelicals will even come to realize that oppressing women, homosexuals, and vegetables is best done in the privacy of one's own home; and likewise it can only be good for the rest of us, because we won't have to be flailed at by Christianity's gangrenous limb any more. It'll just be a dead limb, crumbling in the sun like Chris Lee in House of Dracula.

Imagine a world without the ignorant, reactionary mob. Some people blame the devil for all the evil in the world. And some blame the Jews. And some blame the Muslims. And some blame the Liberals. And some blame the capitalists. And they're right, the capitalists are responsible, but so is the reactionary mob. In fact, evil couldn't exist without the reactionary mob. I think the hierarchy goes like this: the best people are the people whose compassionate convictions keep them always on the lookout to avoid becoming part of a reactionary mob. The next best are the people who have compassionate convictions that, for the most part, incidentally end up keeping them out of reactionary mobs. And the worst people are those who maintain a permanent residence in the reactionary mob.

And those are the people we should have a pogrom on. But we won't, and I'll tell you why.

They're very easily taken advantage of. They'll even go so far as to let the government dispose of nuclear waste in their laundry hampers. Consequently, they can be experimented on without their ever being the wiser. There's a lot we can learn from them. Like, how does someone in a morally vegetative state react when kicked in the groin? And, once he's down, how much is in his wallet?

They're also the people who buy the most lottery tickets, and we need them to run up the jackpot so we can play when it really matters.

This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!