life or death

April 10, 2005

Dear ,

For some the glass is always half empty....the rest of us find it half full.

Turn to CNN, not fox, and stop reading every word, and the pope's death becomes

a terrific outpouring of attraction and even love for a man who ran a huge

religious organization for so long.

Fir millions like me, the subject wasn't death itself at all. It was the humble

passing of a great man (whether one agrees with him or not) made into a

spectacle for all to enjoy who went to the pains of going to Rome. Death is a

fact of life, even for a pope, and the celebration was of his life. Even the

mass is now a celebration of life and not a funeral Mass as it once was.

Those who didn't get the picture are too sophisticated for their own good, and

unaware of the importance of color, ritual and ceremony in the life of man. I

heard no comments on the pope's health except to say he had Parkinson's. That

had been obvious to anyone who say him on TV or in person these last years.

You and the fellow you quote sound like the Grinch who tried to spoil Christmas.

No largeness of heart at all. You must specifically have had 2 broken arms,

since you didn't turn off what so disturbed you.

The Shiavio case was a different and very unpleasant incidence in the history of

politics and the media. It should have been a private judgment and we, in this

house turned off the constant commentary about a poor human being whose parents

could not let go.

Neither of these special cases can even be on the same page with that film, the

passion of Christ which certainly was neither history nor religion , but one

man's attempt to assuage his guilt. It was fiction. the other two cases

mentioned were fact.

So much for the culture of death. We watch CSI, by the way, and it isn't the

human tragedy, but the science of forensics that make us turn it on. Sometimes,

it is too much and I turn it off.

My suggestion is that if something on TV bothers one, the best thing to do is

turn it off. We all know that the media hypes everything...but who says we have

to be complicit? Forget the far right. they have been talking about the end of

the world ad nauseam.

We can make choices about our own taste. I personally feel sorry for people so

caught up in these tragedies. The public will feed on anything. Remember the

Roman coliseum? That was the culture of death. Remember the Iraq war, that is

the culture of death as every war is. The human race is blood thirsty. It didn't

become that way in the year 2004.

And are those who distain those visible, too visible reminders so much holier

and healthier? Tragedy always sells well, even the ancient Greeks new this, as

did every playwright. I find all these awful things which I cannot escape

seeing, Rwanda, Sudan, the tsastumi...as an occasion to pray for the victims and

feel gratitude, sure I admit it, that it wasn't my family.

We need to see the terrible things we human being do to each other, otherwise we

will never have any compassion. We need to celebrate the coming and the going of

our fellow human beings, and we need to remember, we are part of this race of

humans. We need to remember that life is full of suffering,death and

tragedy....while we sit in our comfortable living rooms stuffing our overfeed

selves about the rest of the world.

Sorry, , you really set me off once again, although I realize this isn't

your writing, only your choice of forwarding. .I find superciliousness hard to

take sometimes, and that is what I guess I am reacting to.( I usually like the

N.Y.Times.) The idea " look at those poor slobs, they have nothing to do but stay

glued to the TV and live vicariously. "

As far as the death of JP II, In my opinion, he earned the celebration and the

pomp...regardless of my opinion of him as a pope.

Toni

life or death

A Culture of Death, Not Life

By FRANK RICH

T takes planning to produce a classic chapter in television history.

" We've rehearsed, " Thom Bird, a Fox News producer, bragged to Variety

before Pope II died. " We will pull out all the stops on

this story. "

He wasn't kidding. On the same day that boast saw print, a Fox

anchor, Shepard , solemnly told the world that " facts are facts "

and " it is now our understanding the pope has died. " Unfortunately,

this understanding was reached 26 hours before the pope actually did

die, but as Mr. would explain, he had been misled by " Italian

reports. " (Namely from a producer for Sky Italia, another

fair-and-balanced fief of Rupert Murdoch.) Fox's false bulletin -

soon apotheosized by Jon , now immortalized on the Internet -

followed the proud tradition of its sister news organization, The New

York Post, which last year had the scoop on Kerry's anointment

of Dick Gephardt as his running mate.

Yet you could also argue that Fox's howler was in its way the most

honest barometer of this entire cultural moment. The network was

pulling out all the stops to give the audience what it craved: a

fresh, heaping serving of death. Mr. had a point when he later

noted that " the exact time of death, I think, is not something that

matters so much at this moment. " Certainly not to a public clamoring

for him to bring it on.

Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing

going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted

on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully

edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been

worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity

rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the

all-forensics-all-the-time " CSI. " To help us visualize the dying

, another Fox star, Geraldo , brought on Dr. Baden,

the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and

Laci mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms.

Schiavo's.

As sponsors line up to buy time on " CSI, " so celebrity deaths have

become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news

and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal

encounter on a " Meet the Press " where one of the guests,

unchallenged, gave an A-plus for his handling of the

church's sex abuse scandal. , staking out a new career

as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession

he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in

Florida, eulogized nie Cochran on " Larry King Live " and

reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Olbermann.

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its

tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to

sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less

than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its

most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to

inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture,

they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding 's

vision of a " culture of life. " This has to be one of the biggest

shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the

number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America

under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40

percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant

fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the W.

Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like

condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research

are in shackles.

This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr.

Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a

vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The " Left Behind "

novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. all but pant for the bloody

demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as J. Greenberg

has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a

40-title series, " Left Behind: The Kids, " that warns Jewish children

of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too

late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original

series' 60 million.

These fables are of a piece with the violent take on Christianity

popularized by " The Passion of the Christ. " Though Mel Gibson brought

a less gory version, with the unfortunate title " The Passion Recut, "

to some 1,000 theaters for Easter in response to supposed popular

demand, there was no demand. (Back-of-the-envelope calculations

suggest that at many screens the film sold fewer than 50 tickets the

entire opening weekend.) " Passion " fans want the full scourging, and

at the height of the protests outside the Schiavo hospice, a TV was

hooked up so the assembled could get revved up by watching the grisly

original on DVD.

As they did so, Mr. Gibson interjected himself into the case by

giving an interview to Hannity asserting that " big guys " could

" whip a judge " if they really wanted to stop the " state-sanctioned

murder " of Ms. Schiavo. He was evoking his punishment of choice in

" The Passion, " figuratively, no doubt. It was only a day later that

one such big guy, Tom DeLay, gave Mr. Gibson's notion his official

imprimatur by vowing retribution against any judges who don't

practice the faith-based jurisprudence of which he approves.

This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its

biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its

" Left Behind " simulation, " Revelations, " an extremely slick

prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death

watches but could have been ripped from their headlines. In the pilot

a heretofore nonobservant Christian teenage girl in a " persistent

vegetative state " - and in Florida, yet - starts babbling Latin texts

from the show's New Testament namesake just as dastardly scientists

( " devil's advocates, " as they're referred to) and organ-seekers

conspire to pull the plug. " All the signs and symbols set forth in

the Bible are currently in place for the end of days, " says the

show's adult heroine, an Oxford-educated nun who has been denounced

by the Vatican for her views and whose mission is underwritten by a

wealthy " religious fundamentalist. " Her s affect

notwithstanding, she is an extremist as far removed from the

mainstream as Mel Gibson, whose own splinter Traditionalist Catholic

sect split from Rome and disowned the reforms of Vatican II, not the

least of which was the absolution of Jews for collective guilt in the

death of Jesus.

It's all too fitting that " Revelations, " which downsizes lay

government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time

slot of " The West Wing. " Perhaps only God knows whether it will prove

as big a hit as " The Passion. " What is clear is that the public

eventually tires of most death watches and demands new meat. The

tsunami disaster, dramatized by a large supply of vivid tourist

videos that the genocide in Darfur cannot muster, was so completely

forgotten after three months that even a subsequent Asian earthquake

barely penetrated the nation's Schiavo fixation. But the media plug

was pulled on Ms. Schiavo, too, once the pope took center stage; the

funeral Mass her parents conducted on Tuesday was all but shunned by

the press pack that had moved on to Rome. By the night of his death

days later, even had worn out his welcome. The audience

that tuned in to the N.C.A.A. semifinals on CBS was roughly twice as

large as that for the NBC and ABC papal specials combined. The time

was drawing near for the networks to reappraise the Nielsen prospects

of Prince Rainier.

If there's one lesson to take away from the saturation coverage of

the pope, it is how relatively enlightened he was compared with the

men in business suits ruling Washington. Our leaders are not only to

the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed

Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right

of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the

removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine).

They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of " Revelations, " to

the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere.

This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death

penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the

president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on

evolution, in 1996 officially declared that " fresh

knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more

than just a hypothesis. "

We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in

riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality

show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a

soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the

apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade.

-----

all,

Death? In Iraq? Somebody got killed? In Texas? Somebody got executed?

In secret gulags set up around the world? 108 and counting? Oh I get

it, from conception to birth!

Life!

regards,

April 10, 2005

Toni,

You know, you have the opportunity to do several things: keep your

judgments about me to your self, to comprehend what are your

inferences about me and what the evidence in support of those

inferences are, and, did I say, keep your judgments to your self?

T:You must specifically have had 2 broken arms, since you didn't turn

off what so disturbed you.

Funny, you didn't turn off the article by Rich. I have no idea

where you pick up an explicit idea about what disturbs me.

***

T:Sorry, , you really set me off once again, although I

realize this isn't your writing, only your choice of forwarding.

It seems to just me that you didn't understand Mr. Rich's points at

all. Clue: one person's riff on currents in the Collective.

However, it did give you a platform for a run at a sanctimonious

judgment of the size of my heart.

Tisk tisk. Shame on you.

***

Catholicism isn't built to hold Pope's accountable. I'm not a

Christian, so the whole affair is, to me, amusing and ironic.

regards,

April 11, 2005

Dear ,

I did understand Mr. Rich's comments. That was the whole point. I think his

assumption about our culture, the collective, was one-sided.

As for the largess of your heart. I judged that only from the remarks I thought

you agreed with about the pope's funeral.It was only on the basis, and only

about this issue. I don't think that was sanctimonious at all since my whole

reply was to the tone of Rich's letter. That is exactly what I thought of his

comments...un necessary and unfeeling about a small action in terms of the

world's current problems.I assumed you agreed or you wouldn't have forwarded the

letter.

I assure you I know all too well and you are correct about:

" Catholicism isn't built to hold Pope's accountable. "

If it were I might still be a member of the flock. That was again the point.

The only judgment I made about you was concerning one action....it was on the

basis of the Rich letter and applied only to that. I don't judge your whole

personality or character, and never have. I react only to the tiny sliver you

present in any one post. I expect we all do that to an extent, since you do the

same to me. It is part of our reaction to one small segment of the ideas of the

other posters.WE human beings do tend to judge the actions of others...as we

react.

So, please, tell Mr. Rich what I thought of his essay if you wish. It was he, I

was criticizing for one-sidedness. Inferences are always drawn on some action or

word from the other. They are not meant for the definitive description of the

whole person, but one small action. You ought to know that...after all this

endless dialogue.

In my opinion, if one publishes the views of someone else, one ought to take a

stand one way or the other on what and why one sent it on. There must have been

some reason, no? Or am I wrong in assuming you do something for no reason?

I turn off TV's all the time, I seldom " turn off " posts on this list, since I

cannot know what they will say until I have read them. If it is posted...I

assume it is there for everyone to see and react to.

So, peace, once again. Please try to remember that what each of us says produces

some reaction . We are always judged on that action..WE ask ourselves; why did

the other say, think or assume that? How else are we supposed to communicate?

Then we can discuss different reactions.

The anti judgment value, in my opinion is about important things, and are

judgments we make about the value of a person in general. on the totality of

another person....which, I agree is wrong and we must not do.But a comment about

a relatively small remark here and there...which points out a quirk on some

subject...well, if that hurt your feelings, I am sorry it does, because you see

I thought those remarks Rich made were your opinion also. Why would you have

included them otherwise?

Nice fighting with you for a change???? we haven't done that in a while.It does

add spice to one's life....and things have been so quiet for a while.

Toni

----- Original

.. ...Message -----

From: SC

To: JUNG-FIRE

Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2005 7:18 PM

Subject: Re: life or death

Toni,

You know, you have the opportunity to do several things: keep your

judgments about me to your self, to comprehend what are your

inferences about me and what the evidence in support of those

inferences are, and, did I say, keep your judgments to your self?

T:You must specifically have had 2 broken arms, since you didn't turn

off what so disturbed you.

Funny, you didn't turn off the article by Rich. I have no idea

where you pick up an explicit idea about what disturbs me.

***

T:Sorry, , you really set me off once again, although I

realize this isn't your writing, only your choice of forwarding.

It seems to just me that you didn't understand Mr. Rich's points at

all. Clue: one person's riff on currents in the Collective.

However, it did give you a platform for a run at a sanctimonious

judgment of the size of my heart.

Tisk tisk. Shame on you.

***

Catholicism isn't built to hold Pope's accountable. I'm not a

Christian, so the whole affair is, to me, amusing and ironic.

regards,

April 11, 2005

Toni,

Who's fighting? You made the wrong assumption, spoke twice in judgment of

me, and wrapped it all up rationalization posing as an apology:

" But a comment about a relatively small remark here and there...which

points out a quirk on some subject...well, if that hurt your feelings, I

am sorry it does, because you see I thought those remarks Rich made were

your opinion also. Why would you have included them otherwise? "

You should read what you write and what my objection to it was.

***

I wouldn't call what you wrote about my heart a remark about a quirk on

some subject. When I posted the long peices about traditionalism you made

the same assumption that in posting as much those excerpts must represent

what I think, believe or feel. Yet, you already know more about that aside

from unrelated postings than many people. Still, I pointed out to you that

I post items of interest, not verifications of my personal beliefs.

It's very aggravating to me. You are one of the most [deleted]

Do you like that perception of mine about one of your quirks?

No?

regards,

April 12, 2005

Dear ,

On occasion , I must agree with you. You find me to be " one of the most

[deleted] "

charming, delightful, lovely, sweet....and sometimes the most maddening, of

human beings. I imagine in that respect I am just like you.

Into every life a little rain must fall...consider it good for the soul to

suffer others as sometimes others must suffer you. How dull this world would be

if we couldn't all misunderstand each other, because we get into our own

way...and may not yet understand our own reactions. Happily we can always find

someone to blame for that.

As long as I have you around, at least I will never get too inflated..and

actually believe that everyone loved me. And that, is a blessing...( will it

make you angry to be a blessing to me?)

Maybe in the next life, humor will be one of your most treasured traits.Until

then, I must learn to accept the I meet here. Humor is a great relief in

this serious life.

And in order to facilitate knowing yourself better I ask...why post those

particular items ? They must have stood out from the rest for some reason? no?

Otherwise you would post everything without judgment.

One cannot hide one's motives from oneself forever, . Why would you chose those

particular " items of interest " if not to make a point affirmatively or

negatively...without having to take responsibility for your views?

In my occasionally suspicious mind,I find this an evasion: You chose not to be

responsible for your personal view of your choice. You said: " Still, I pointed

out to you that

I post items of interest, not verifications of my personal beliefs. " Think about

that remark.

Have you ever seriously wondered why both of us react to the other as we do?

What does that show us about ourselves? I have often thought about it, and have

decided humor is my best reply now... maybe very soon none of it will bother me

at all.I even hope to become saintly enough to let everyone be who and what they

are...and then I would no longer react, or allow myself to " get a rise " out of

your sometimes posts. Grace can do amazing things in my life..so I have great

hope.

Until then,you will have to bear with me, I am still all too maddingly

human...and so much less than perfect/whole.

Toni

Re: life or death