Theocrazy

I've been away for a while, what with holiday traveling and an extremely busy stretch at work.

In the meantime, Terri Schiavo and the Pope have both been escorted from this mortal coil. Thank goodness for both of them.

One of the disturbing things I saw, as the Pope was interminably dying, was an alarming number of people expressing hope for his recovery. The man was 84, in utterly poor health and had experienced septic shock. He couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't perform his duties. He was a shell of his once-athletic self. His blood pressure was low, he had a urinary tract infection, he was having trouble breathing, his heart wasn't working right and his kidneys were malfunctioning.

And yet there were many people -- grown people, adults, who you would think would have good sense -- who were praying and hoping that he would stay alive. To what end? Just to make them feel better?

It's stuff like this that almost makes me believe we've turned into a nation of three-year-olds, for whom nothing but a unadulterated happy ending is acceptable. If you watched nothing but cable news, the gruesome Schiavo incident was simply a matter of life and death, with death always a bad thing, just as it was for those people hoping the Pope would keep drawing his ragged breath.

And some of those same ghouls -- George W. Bush, the Catholic church -- who latched on to Schiavo to press for their "culture of life" -- in which making sure a lump of flesh keeps breathing, no matter the cost -- also latched on to the dead Pope's corpse.

In Bush's remarks on the Pope's death, he called the pope "a witness to the dignity of human life." What does that phrase even mean, really? I know what it means in code -- it means the pope defended fetuses and vegetables, in Bush's view.

The human scum occupying the White House, accompanied by his soulless harpy bride, also said: "Throughout the West, John Paul's witness reminded us of our obligation to build a culture of life in which the strong protect the weak." Is that right? The Pope may have done just that, but it sure sounds funny coming out of Bush's mouth. As Carl Bernstein pointed out on Lester Holt's show on MSNBC on Saturday, the Pope regularly took the U.S. to task for its runaway capitalism, which protects the strong and punishes the weak. And Bush is, of course, the current pontiff of runaway capitalism. But hypocrisy or irony has never stopped him from trying to score cheap political points off a dying hunk of flesh before, has it?

Some U.S. Catholic bigwigs got on the news shows and said the same thing, trying to put the icing on the big, bloody Schiavo cake they're all looking forward to eating. At one point, when asked what the Pope's greatest accomplishment was, one Catholic bishop dismissed the whole beating-Communism thing and said his greatest accomplishment was getting sick and taking a long time to die because he demonstrated the dignity of life and suffering and all that.

Schiavo will be the figure on the cross the religious conservatives -- "theo-conservatives," Andrew Sullivan calls them -- use as a rallying point for their crusade to mold the judiciary in their image, and they loaded the Pope's still-warm corpse on another cross to carry in the same effort. As a devout and conservative Catholic, he may not have minded. But the stench of hubris was unbearable.

Fortunately, though, most of the U.S. wants nothing to do with their crusade. Just look at the polls taken around the Schiavo thing. As somebody said on Bill Maher this weekend, secularists and even moderate religious people are the new Silent Majority. Right now, the loonies are making all the noise. They'd better enjoy their victory dance right now. Smear that Schiavo- and Pope-blood on good, you freaks. Because once you run smack-dab into political reality, the only noise you'll be making will be full-throated whines of defeat.