The Ghost of Christmas Future

Now that the Christmas trees are back up at SeaTac, or those are up that haven’t since blown away, and now that people have calmed down a bit, I feel the need to work them into a frenzy again. That’s why this year I’m calling for all good Americans to stop recognizing foreign winters, and start recognizing American winters.

What I’m talking about is the fact that practically every calendar you can find around here, including calendars designed and printed right here in America, even right here in this city, show winter 2006 as beginning on the 22nd of this month! This is an outrage!

In fact, winter begins at a little past 12:20 AM Greenwich Mean Time. Did you know that’s code for British time, also known as ZULU time? Do we live in Britain? Do we live in Zululand? NO! We live in a city 8 hours ahead, or behind, depending on whether (math joke alert!) you’re positively or negatively oriented, ha. In any case winter starts on the 21st all across America from Maine to Hawaii, AND ANTI-AMERICAN CALENDAR MAKERS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW IT. Are you paying attention, Lou Dobbs, or don’t you care about the American Way of Life? It’s time we celebrated Freedom Winter! No more Brit Winter!

OK, now that I’ve got that out of the way I can do what I came here to do. Apparently nobody else noticed it last week but me, but a huge shift has occurred in the culture wars across this land, a shift that promises to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain.

I am speaking of the fact that Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota came this close (see pinched fingers, crushing the head of a flea) to needing a living will and testament. Fortunately all is well, this time. I’ve read that Senator Johnson has been seen by no less than three highly qualified Democrats, who all say he’s “looking good” and has an excellent prognosis until at least January 2009, so it won’t be at all necessary for South Dakota Republican Governor Mike Rounds to appoint anyone to take Johnson’s place.

This is great because it means that I can forget about the bad scenario I have in mind happening to Tim Johnson. I can imagine it happening to a fictitious Democratic Senator. So let’s do that together, shall we?

There are 51 Senators trying to keep the Senate in Democratic control. Actuarially speaking, they are most of them old, and no one would be surprised if they didn’t all last the next two years. The same can be said for the other 49, less the difference. But what happens when, sometime in the middle of next year, the Democratic Senator William “Willy” Orrnot from the great state of South Macadamia, governed by a Republican, slips and falls in an off-duty hula competition and gets himself concussed and then doesn’t wake up from it, ever?

I’ll tell you what happens because I can see it coming as plain as a car hurtling south on a northbound one-way in rush hour, what with all the screeching tires and the smashing glass and crushed metal. At first everyone will sit back respectfully and watch as the life support system is put into action, “the way he wanted it.” Then someone will leak the man’s actual living will, which will turn out to stipulate “no unusual life-prolonging measures” be taken. Then lawsuits will fly, at first involving only the family and the wife.

When it starts to look like the plug could be pulled, that’s when you’ll see a cultural war realignment.

I don’t know about the rest of you die-hard liberals out there, but I for one am ready right now to sign a GetOnWithItAlready.org petition calling for my Congresspeople to support “An Act for the relief of the people who don’t want Democrats’ plugs pulled.”

Did I say that the Schiavo Bill was unconstitutional? I must have been smoking something.

On Jesse and Other Hams

With the death of Pope John Paul II, we have lost a great friend of the poor and a great supporter of freedom and justice. I find myself thinking it cannot be. He's punking us, right? This is all a gag; the cardinals are in on it; they'll go through the whole process of picking some unknown as the new pope -- white smoke, black smoke, white smoke, black smoke – the new guy will step forward, and -- surprise! -- it's John Paul II again.

Of course, we here at Irony Central feel it is our duty to laboriously root out and expose ironies wherever they are, even surrounding the recently deceased. So we can't help but note that some of JP II's so-called socially conservative positions yield delicious ironies.

Let's take his opposition to the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. It may not be ironic that the Pope considered rubber prophylactics to be unnatural means of preserving the benefits of abstinence without preserving the form, while he considered a tube surgically introduced to the stomach by way of the navel (in grotesque imitation of God's own umbilical cord) to be a perfectly natural means of preserving the benefits of eating, without preserving the form. But there is literal irony in the way that John Paul insisted during his last days on not being taken to an intensive care unit.

Speaking of people whom I mostly agree with but not always, I was struck by Jesse Jackson's last minute push to restore Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. One of his assertions in that regard was especially interesting. He said, "We cannot hide behind the law and not have mercy."

Overlooking the debate over the notion that it is mercy to ignore someone's wish to die with dignity, I see Jackson equating obedience to the law and support of the courts' decrees with evading moral responsibility. This from a man who would have been president?

Here's another rule of mine: if a private citizen disobeys the law in the interests of doing what he thinks is morally right, that's civil disobedience. But if an elected official disobeys the law in the interests of doing what he thinks is morally right, he's substituting his morals for the people's laws and our constitution, and so then he's an arrogant ass.

Jesse Jackson is only spared that judgment by never having been elected. But he tried to talk Jeb Bush into being an arrogant ass. And the irony is: Jeb Bush wasn't! What a strange world we all live and die in.

I'm reminded of another irony connected to Reverend Jesse Jackson that I passed up last year. Remember the big flap about gay marriage that everybody was jabbering about during the presidential campaign? During that time Jesse made a little speech at Harvard in which he downplayed comparisons of the gay civil-rights movement with that of African Americans, saying, "No slave was ever enslaved because he was gay."

In fact, during the slave era, enslavement of Africans was justified on a bogus theory that they descended from a gay man! And Reverend Jackson, being a reverend, should have known that!

You see, there's this passage in the Bible that says one of Noah's sons, namely Ham, "saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without." So then Noah cursed Canaan (son of Ham) with perpetual servitude.

During the slavery era, that little passage was widely interpreted like so: Ham actually had sex with his drunken, passed-out, father, euphemisms aside. "Canaan" did not refer to just one of Ham's sons, but "Canaan" was taken to stand for all the descendants of the offender Ham. These included all black Africans in the view of Christians of those days.

Of course, nobody thought that Ham's crime was solely what we would call it today: incestual rape. No, it was seen primarily as committing a homosexual act. There's your irony.

Permission to Breathe

Let's make this entire column about Terri Schiavo!

Why not? Congress, which has nothing better to do, just devoted all of a weekend and part of a Monday maneuvering to pass a law with the exact title, "An Act for the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo." The law directs that one specific federal court, the US District Court of the Middle District of Florida, shall have jurisdiction over one specific case, namely that of whether Theresa Marie Schiavo's life support should be curtailed.

The good news is that the court is only granted jurisdiction to determine whether Schiavo's existing rights under federal law have been or are about to be violated. In other words the court has been given jurisdiction, by an act of Congress, no less, that it already had! (Tomorrow they may pass a law directing you to breathe!)

The bad news is that the intent of the act is to bring the power of Congress to bear on this case, even though Congress has no legal power in the matter, and they know it. To that end the act specifically directs the court to ignore all previous rulings in this case. The court is also directed to ignore any ongoing litigation in the state courts. ("You're to breathe, citizen, but only through this tube… ")

Whoa! That's a nasty slap in the face to your silly Founding Fathers and their silly "separation of powers," isn't it? Who needs it, when we can just order some judge, anywhere we want, in any individual case we want, to pay attention to nothing but what we say. Ignore the man behind the curtain!

Congress to the judge: "Fifteen years of court fights repeatedly resulting in rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo? What, fifteen years of what? Listen to your Congress… You are getting sleepy, very sleepy, and when we snap our fingers you will wake up and rule that Terri Schiavo's rights have been violated."

And if the court refuses to obey Congress, like on the grounds that they can take their unconstitutional law and stick it where their heads usually rest, no problem. Congress can just pass another act "to relieve the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo, again," this time in a different court. If that doesn't work, well I don't know, maybe they would have to get serious and pass a law that would actually legislate something, but they'll cross that bridge when they get to it.

All of this could have been avoided if ten or fifteen or better, twenty years ago, Congress had sat down and actually considered such situations and what they would want to happen in these sorts of cases. Then Michael Schiavo would not have spent fifteen years of his life fighting in state courts for something that Congress was just going to rule against, after all of it.

Oops, did I say rule? Is that what they're doing, ruling in this case? Gosh, no, they wouldn't do that, because that would be unconstitutional. They're just ordering a federal court to rule, their way, according to new rules that they just invented, in a long-fought pre-existing case.

Can you say ex post facto? But they believe they can get around that by a technicality: she isn't dead yet. So the "facto" hasn't happened. So they can still butt in, without regard for that little detail of the constitution.

Can you say bill of attainder? Again, they've got a technicality: courts have only interpreted the prohibition of bills of attainder to include such things as depriving specific people of life, liberty, or property in cases where Congress would intend to punish them. But the intent here is to deprive Terri Schiavo of her right to refuse life support in accordance with her own wishes (as determined by the courts) for her own good, not to punish her.

Hey, I got my outrage back!