It was a week for those who mourn the human condition, and we
didn’t even have to wait for T. S. Elliot’s April.
The nine-year-old girl in Florida had lain dead for three weeks
across the street from the place she’d lived with her grandparents
and father and could not be found. There were massive searches with
volunteers, blood hounds, cadaver dogs, helicopters, but all to no
avail until a registered pervert told authorities where to look —
across the street.
The impotence of constituted authority seemed to make the crime
that much worse, even as it had in the city of Atlanta, Georgia,
where police looked for a supposed hijacked car taken by an escaped
prisoner for 15 hours only to discover it had never left the garage
where the hijacking took place. It gave the escapee 15 hours in
which to travel unmolested, allegedly to kill again, until finally
brought to bay by a widow reading from a religious tract.
It took days for the media and authorities to unravel the facts
of the Atlanta escape, the sum of which made both the county
sheriff’s office and the city police appear candidates for a late
night comedy.
It was a period during which the mighty arm of congressional
inquiry summoned the mysteriously mightier arms of major league
baseball to inquire about the use of steroids and illegal growth
hormones. A day of testimony and dissembling revealed a suspicion
that management would rather not know too much about the dressing
room, and that penalties for law breaking were subject to
collective bargaining.
As in the Citrus County, Florida, child slaying and the Atlanta
courthouse mayhem, the congressional peek into cream and clear
raised more questions than it answered. Sports pages were left to
ponder how many asterisks a record book might be required to
contain. The scribes stopped short of the obvious: a separate Hall
of Baseball inFame, to be situated in the hometown of say a Wyeth,
a Merck, or Eli Lilly, with perhaps the drug company paying for the
privilege of having its name on the edifice, as is done now in
sports stadia nationwide. The heck with Cooperstown.
Reeling from these assaults on the human ethos, we were left to
enter the weekend faced with the imponderable. As March Madness
pervaded the TV screen, and college basketball players plied their
frenetic skills, Congress returned miraculously to work to unravel
that greatest of mysteries: what is life? Or more exactly, when is
it over? And the name, Terri Schiavo, echoed under the Capitol
dome. Should her feeding tube be replaced? State courts had decreed
her husband’s wishes should take precedence over those of her
parents and the tube was removed on Friday. Led by conservative
Republicans, Congress moved to undo the state’s jurisdiction, to
somehow force the issue into the federal arena. President Bush
returned early from Texas to be on hand to sign such a measure into
law. An unseemly seesaw struggle was beginning: parents pleading
for the public to call their congressmen; the husband insisting
Congress was intruding onto a private terrain.
All the while, video of Mrs. Schiavo played across the screen,
at times a seemingly sentient woman, apparently responding to
external human presence. Apparently. But then, who knows for
certain? A people who cannot agree on life’s beginning were now
engaged in debating when and how it should end. And what the
individual herself would wish.
Amid the confusion there seems one thing agreed upon. Without
further sustenance, Terri Schiavo could live until, say, April.
Elliot’s cruelest month.
