2 posts from 2009

Objections, to President Obama’s lifting of the Bush administration ban on federal funding to international groups that perform abortions and his voicing of support for human embryonic stem cell research, seem to have set my gray matter to working and wondering in a Cartesian sense: “I think, therefore I am.”

We can philosophically fashion in our thoughts great concern for a single cell that has no capacity for thinking on its own, and at the same time register less regard for a colony of cells that shares a common skin, has a birth certificate, and does as much thinking as any of the rest of us.

However, this concern for the fate of a single cell is not necessarily extended to just any old single cell.  Little mention is ever made of a single cell of the nose, toes, gonads or ovaries.  The focus is confined to the fate of a single cell called an embryo---the term suggesting its potential to someday be aware all on its own.

But the concern accorded to the non-think embryonic cell is not typically extended to some equally capacious cells called egg and sperm.  And even an embryo may be allowed to perish from the chemical abortion that can ensue from birth-control pills. 

Please excuse some aside thinking, but can anyone explain why church pews on Sunday are no longer filled with families of nine and ten?  Hum . . . and has anyone had a long wait in line at their pharmacy while right-to-life protesters demonstrate against the dispensing of murderous birth-control prescriptions?  But thank God, there have been some objections voices over a new and more potent version of the pill that is provided for morning-after. As some have said: How irresponsible; if not abstinence, at least regular precaution could be taken in advance.

And while protesting in defense of embryos, we may ignore the fate of completed humans that are painfully aware of the destruction they face: from collateral damage of war, starvation in some forsaken land, disease born from eschewal of promising embryonic-stem-cell research, executions on death row that can be accommodated within our awareness, or just some near death by waterboarding. 

Oh well, some must suffer that others may live until they and their gray matter are pronounced deceased---certified dead as dead may be, though many of their other cells may still be alive and kicking.  Brain dead, you dead, we say.

Not that I myself may find the time to go, but does anyone know where right-thinking people will be holding their next protest or silent vigil?  I’d be there, but I will most likely be at home holding my own rendezvous with hypocrisy---the partial kind.

The expression of the following opinion might be as little welcomed by some as was a 1959 telecast of author Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg.  The TV program’s dredging up of slightly-old Nazi war crimes was in Mann’s words “considered a breach of good manners in polite society in America.”

A feeling of responsibility goads me to unmannerly suggest that more recently some officials may have perpetrated the crime of torture in our name.  In determination of the facts and to salve a communal conscience, we might conduct our own judgment in Washington D.C. 

Desmond Tutu could be brought in to advise on the enactment of our version of South Africa’s Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act and establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear and record testimony from perpetrators, victims and witnesses of torture, and grant full amnesty to all that came forward and testified truthfully and completely.  Fess up, indicate you’re sorry and you go free to live in peace and comfort.  If you don’t, you stand trial and face the possibility of being locked away forever.

Short of this, maybe we could all just watch the old movie version of Judgment at Nuremberg.   Mann’s film deals with the push-come-to-shove morality of people under threat---the possible sacrifice of principle over security that President Obama rejected in his inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

In the forward to his movie script, Mann discloses that by the late 1950s and star of his witting of Judgment at Nuremberg, “it was considered a breach of good manners in polite society in America as well as in most quarters in Europe to bring up the subject of German guilt or the victims of the Third Reich . . . .”

This sentiment developed into threats, cajolery and intrigue intended to prevent the 1959 airing of a television version of Judgment at Nuremberg.   Tension in Germany between Soviet and allied forces over control of Berlin was stirring cold-war fears, but thanks more to momentum than to courage, Mann’s TV episode was broadcast.

A trailer to the 1959 TV drama and 1961 film version informed viewers: “On 14 July 1949, judgment was rendered in the last of the second Nuremberg trials.  Of the ninety-nine sentenced to prison terms, not one is till serving his sentence.”  This trailer had been scripted within the decade following the last trials in which life imprisonments had been decreed for some of the ninety-nine.

The telecast of Judgment at Nuremberg stirred an unprecedented public response.  Most vividly remember by Mann was a letter from a veteran of World War II and Korean.  It simply asked, “You mean to tell me those men you wrote about are walking around free?  What’s the matter with us?  What’s happening to us?”

Film director Stanley Kramer had also seen the TV drama, wondered what was happening to us, and contact Mann with an offer to register this concern in a movie on the judgment to be made at Nuremberg and all of Germany, America, and elsewhere.  Mann agreed and was pleased to find out that the great film actor, Spencer Tracy, wanted to play Judge Dan Haywood.

It would be nice to say, and the rest is history, but it is not---to which Dick Cheney clearly testifies in a CNN interview:

http://www.truveo.com/Dick-Cheney-on-WaterBoarding-Torture-with-Wolf/id/3161118071

If Cheney had said this from the prisoner’s dock at the first trial at Nuremberg trial, in which Nazi second in command Herman Goering was sentenced to death, they would have hanged Cheney.