Gorgias George and Terri Schiavo

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Gorgias George and Terri Schiavo

Do you suppose there’s any way we could yank the feeding tubes from Tom DeLay and his band of demented maniacs up in Congress? Is there anyone out there other than hardcore evangelists who really believe that these hypocritical, messianic misfits care one whit about the “culture of life”?

Yet, there they were, burning the midnight oil in the House, concocting a crazed bill to allow “any parent” of Terri Schiavo to present his or her case to a federal judge. Meanwhile, Bill Frist, physician extraordinaire, is over in the Senate, claiming that he can diagnose Schiavo’s physical condition on the basis of looking at four-year-old tapes of a helpless woman whom doctors on the scene have declared to be doomed forever to a hopeless vegetative state.

And to top it all off, Fearless Fosdick, our president-for-life, cranks himself out of the bedclothes at 1:30 in the morning to catch a flight from Crawford back to DC, so that he can swagger onto the stage and sign this bloviated bill to save the life of one of his dearest citizens.

If I had a few bucks to invest in the stock market at this point, I would certainly google whatever company it is that makes barf bags and grab some shares of that sucker right away.

How utterly outrageous can this sorry excuse for leadership get before the people in this country rise up and demand that the butts of these ditherers in democracy be royally booted out of their power cages?

But I suppose that the worst of it lies in the fact that their hypocrisy, their truth-twisting, their production of fake news, and their plain willingness to say anything they conceive to be politically beneficial has belched and oozed to the point of covering this country with the slime of their deceit.

How dare they speak of a culture of life when they’ve allowed almost 1600 American troops to die in the wasteland that is Iraq. Or when they propose billions for AIDS relief and deliver next to nothing. Or concoct a budget that sentences thousands of poor senior citizens to squalor as a result of deep Medicaid cuts. Or a budget that deprives thousands of poor children of medical care because of the same cuts.

Shame on them for their duplicity and their complicity in a scheme to bring the government to financial ruin for the sake of cutting all the safety nets that have been in place for almost 70 years. Culture of life indeed.

There lived in 5^th cent. BC Athens a philosopher/rhetorician named Gorgias. Since the Greeks were heavily into political rhetoric, it was the theory of Gorgias that the ultimate goal of the politician was to persuade people to his point of view. What bothered Plato and other moralists about Gorgias was the fact that he eschewed logic, if not truth, and proclaimed that the argument was the end-all of rhetoric. That is, any argument that persuaded the people to your point of view was valid.

Ironically, it was also one of the postulates of Gorgias that words were not substances and hence had no validity or reality in and of themselves. Hence, words, by their very nature, cannot convey the truth of substance or reality.

Now, there are few who would charge our fearless leader with knowing anything about ancient philosophy – let alone an obscure rhetorician like Gorgias. But the fact is that his rhetorical tactics are so Gorgian that he might well be called Gorgias George.

Whether they be about abortion, gay marriage, weapons of mass destruction, or the life of Terri Schiavo, the words that frame the arguments of neoconistic Republicans from Bush on down are so enhanced by and weighed down with illogicality as to be what Plato might refer to as the ideal in gobbledygook. They are an offense to anyone schooled in the rigors of logic or the morality and principles of rectitude propounded by philosophers throughout the ages.

Yet, like Gorgias, these demagogues of delusion know well how to use the power of an albeit insubstantial word or phrase to sway the minds of millions who are unschooled in the precise use of language or the history of rhetoric and ethics.

And so, suspect concepts, like the “culture of life,” come into being and take upon themselves a special meaning for those on the uber right who claim a special hold on this administration. And “weapons of mass destruction” becomes a rallying cry with which to frighten millions of citizens who cannot - or simply are intellectually unable to - lift the veil of hypocrisy and deceit that cloaks the reality behind such trumpetings.

But most sorrowful is the fact that political demagoguery of this sort has been allowed to wrap its slimy tentacles around one poor soul in Florida who, most probably, will find peace only in death.

March 23, 2005