Hot Blog Topics

I’ve been trying to write a post about Terri Schiavo, but I fear I am proving that women are not up to par when it comes to political blogging. There, that takes care of the big topics in the blogosphere.

Topic A: Women bloggers. This is going on and on, and you can read all about it at feministe and Bitch Ph.D. (here and here and here and here and in a bunch of other posts--dang that is one prolific political woman blogger). Basically it boils down to questions that I seem to have heard before: Are there women bloggers? Do women bloggers write about politics? Are women bloggers worth reading? This one seems pretty simple to me: Yes. Yes. Yes. Now please shut up and go away (not you, Bitch Ph.D.).

Topic B: Terri Schiavo.

The main thing that strikes me about the Terri Schiavo case is how sad it is: how sad that she has been in this condition for so long, how sad that the disagreement between her husband and parents has reached this point, how sad that one family’s tragedy has become grist for American demagogic politics as usual.

For Schiavo’s parents to want their daughter alive seems eminently reasonable, and I hate to see that desire demonized. But I would definitely have more sympathy for them if they hadn’t turned this into a pro-life test case (when you ask Randall Terry to be your spokesman, you’re definitely playing the game) and weren’t colluding in outrageously bogus political maneuvering (for Congress to subpoena a woman who hasn’t left her hospital bed in 15 years is to degrade its own powers beyond belief--though these days the limits of belief seem to be taken further every day).

I wonder, too, what drives Michael Schiavo. He claims he is trying to honor his wife’s wishes. His opponents say he wants to take the money from her malpractice settlement and marry his girlfriend, but apparently the money has almost all been spent on Terri’s care, and he could have married the girlfriend by divorcing Terri and letting her parents take over her custody and care--which certainly would have been easier and hardly unethical.

Maybe I’m proving the lameness of women bloggers on politics here, because while it’s inconceivable that I would align myself with the pro-Terri camp, I also have little to say about the medical case that Terri is brain dead, or even the large-scale implications for patients’ rights. Mainly I just want to point out what nobody seems to be talking about: how sad it is on every front. If Michael Schiavo “wins,” Terri dies; if her parents “win,” she lives on in this state, which may, for them, and even, who knows, for her, be better than nothing, but not much better, certainly not what anyone would have wanted for their daughter when they first held her, newborn, in their arms.

There, see, I’m being just like a woman: all maternal and emotional and wishy-washy, while the big boys are staying up late on Sunday night to pass big boy legislation. Maybe I should just go back to baking cakes.