Editorials
CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 14 Correspondence 450 Editorials 45 l The tears of KwaZulu: Raymond A. Schroth 453 I'll be right back: Harvey F. Egan 455 Politics & culture: John Garvey...
...A black judge for the black "chair" vacated by Justice Thurgood Marshall is nominated by a president who has spent the last two years fighting a civil rights bill because he says it has quotas, though it does not...
...CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 14 Correspondence 450 Editorials 45 l The tears of KwaZulu: Raymond A. Schroth 453 I'll be right back: Harvey F. Egan 455 Politics & culture: John Garvey 457 My first pilgrimage: Ewa Berberyusz 459 Poetry: John Cavadini 460 The veil is hard to lift: Ellen D. Warwick 462 Special supplement: Euthanasia: Albert R. Jonsen, Carlos E Gomez, Leon R. Kass, Daniel Callahan 465 Little girls dying: Jo McGowan 481 Media: Frank McConnell 482 Stage: Gerald Weales 484 Screen: Richard Alleva 485 BOOKS In Good Conscience: Jean Bethke Elshtain 486 The Search for God at Harvard: Robert Ellsberg 488 Irving Howe--Selected Writings: 1950-1990: Lee Siegel 489 Mao II: Mark Feeney 490 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Movies: Richard Alleva Stage: Gerald Weales Poetry: Rosemary Deen Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy, David R. Carlin, Jr...
...It was the battle of Blood River--South Africa's sacred moment, proof that God had chosen the Afrikaners to own this land and keep their white blood pure...
...The reasons are many...
...Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court is but the latest example...
...emotional and spiritual support...
...Even worse, it would mean the final abandonment of what is most sacred and vulnerable in the human project...
...So it is no accident that the rise in political violence corresponds with the breaking up of the old order, the rise of Inkatha, and the determination of pro-apartheid die-hards--referred to as a mysterious "Third Force"--that, even if a new constitution is in place by the time of the next national election, Nelson Mandela of the ANC will never sit as president...
...The national myth overlooks the social system part, whether it is the Catholic sisters who ran the school for black children that Thomas attended and the people and policies that supported their school, or Senator John Danforth of Missouri who acted as mentor to Thomas and, more important, who had a government job to give the young Yale Law School graduate...
...Admittedly the decisions of the current Court do not inspire the highest standards here...
...Certainly it is not physician-assisted, state-legitimized suicide...
...My bus rolled smoothly through Montana-like landscape toward Pietermaritzburg, in the province of Natal, about forty miles in from Durban and the Indian Ocean...
...In June, as Parliament repealed a series of apartheid laws, each day's paper and TV news brought new boasts: President F.W...
...One afternoon I ran three miles through the hills of the Kensington neighborhood--with its beautiful middle-class homes and gardens, middle-class snarling guard dogs, and WARNING security signs on their ten-foot walls--and stopped to watch a field hockey game at the renowned Jeppe public high school...
...The nomination of Thomas, widely advertised as a black conservative, opposed to affirmative action and dedicated to the bootstrap theory of American achievement, also gives the Democrats another-in-a-lifetime chance to shoot themselves in the foot...
...I'm not here to hurt anyone," Linares told hospital personnel...
...Why is this practice, which threatens to overturn two millennia of axiomatic respect for the inherent value and inviolability of the human person, apparently about to be welcomed within our cultural walls...
...10038...
...They will lose the struggle, he believes, "unless they recognize and encourage more acceptable alternatives" ("Active Euthanasia, Religion, and the Public Debate," Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, 676 N. St...
...Tribal chiefs, many of them, in the eyes of the ANC, corrupt stooges who played along with the system, became tools of apartheid themselves...
...it is quite another thing to 'allow the peaceful separation of soul and body.'" The challenge of Initiative 1 t 9 is not only for physicians and the prolife movement...
...Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder's woolly query about Thomas's allegiance to the pope is as vicious as it is ignorant--Thomas now attends an Episcopal church...
...Clair, Chicago, IL 60611, $10, pp...
...Staff: Harriette Balsky, Carmen Alava, Pamela Quatse Summer Intern: Hugh Garvey Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas, New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...Can he be more than that...
...Though we must all learn to accept the inevitability of death and its wrenching consequences, we must still maintain our hope in the face of them and help others to do so as well...
...Take the case of Rudy Linares, a twenty-three-year-old father who tearfully held staff members of a Chicago hospital at bay with a pistol in 1989 as he withdrew life-support systems from his sixteen-month-old son...
...I found a nation doubly obsessed: first with its history, the mythical, theologized treks and nineteenth-century battles which had established its identity...
...04106 (207) 799-4387, classified advertising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
...After all, if approved, the forty-three-year-old judge may still be sitting on the court in 2031, forty years from now, long after George Bush has passed from the scene and the Reagan revolution has had its counter-revolution...
...Yet, he appears to fit an ideological niche in George Bush's plans for the Supreme Court...
...Rather, it is the watchful and loving care of the dying by society, and the assurance of their comfort throughout the natural and inevitable process of death...
...Ask George Bush how he got into Yale...
...465-480) makes clear, active euthanasia is perilously close to achieving legalized status here in the United States...
...Their resurgence, first as a tribal force, now under the auspices of the Inkatha Freedom party, corresponds with the birth pains of a"new," postapartheid South Africa, which is neither as peaceful as the white liberals who rejoiced at the February 1990 release of Mandela had hoped, nor as "democratic, unitary, and nonracial" as the ANC platform dreamed...
...Given what is now known about the nominee, Clarence Thomas seems at least as qualified as the two most recent appointments to the Court...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 15 Dutch St...
...In the unlikely event that Thomas's nomination should go down, Bush can go on to nominate one of the Hispanics on his list to show not only how nice he is, but how dedicated to minority rights as well...
...We don't know it, but at the intersection we have just passed, six men have been killed within the last few days in clashes between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom party, the followers of the KwaZulu "homeland" chief, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who that week was on his way to Washington, D.C., to promote himself as a non-Communist alternative to Nelson Mandela's ANC...
...Offensive remarks and anecdotes about Thomas seem to have been the first tactics adopted at least by some Democrats...
...To allow physician-assisted murder would be to alter irrevocably the nature of the physicianpatient relationship...
...the worldtraveling "Holiday on Ice" show opens in Johannesburg...
...Loving care of the dying includes the effective control of pain...
...On potential longevity alone, Thomas's competence and capabilities deserve serious scrutiny...
...an invitation to a track meet in Kenya...
...deKlerk accepted in one word capital after another...
...Its proficiency is astounding, and its unintended outcomes sometimes alarming...
...so does money and so does public policy...
...Will he hold up under "PC" scrutiny for being black and conservative...
...In fact, the Georgia state flag, which includes the Confederate colors, stood on Thomas's desk, according to a colleague, as a symbol of what black school children in Georgia had to face...
...They all bring to the Court the same life experience and lack thereof...
...Portland, Me...
...Rumors of a confederate flag displayed on his desk when he was an assistant attorney general for the state of Missouri, set off another frenzy of protest...
...Rather than the embodiment of the pull-yourselfup-by-your-own-bootstraps myth, Thomas's story more closely follows the pattern by which most Americans have made it in this society: a decent education, hard work, a sense of responsibility-and a series of social systems ready to support such an individual...
...When the major physical systems 452: Commonweal have broken down and there does not seem to be any reasonable expectation they can be restored, extraordinary mechanical devices can be removed...
...It is one thing to kill and murder...
...He's--well--just a nice guy...
...Yet today, choosing carefully----don't go downtown on weekends--you could move around Johannesburg, particularly places like the Eastgate shopping center, and think your world was white...
...Of course, there is much about which to question Clarence Thomas...
...Such alternatives are outlined by ethicist Stanley Harakas, writing in the same volume...
...Details of Thomas's life exposed over the last several weeks show a man struggling against the tide of bigotry that still pulls against the security and well-being of so many blacks and of this country itself...
...Display advertising correspondence should be sent to Ruth E. Taylor, 11 Graffam Rd., So...
...It is precisely in these latter situations that contemporary medical ethicists and moral theologians must make their most serious efforts to clarify and apply what were the traditional distinctions between ordinary and extraordinary means of treatment...
...absent a critical misstep during the nomination hearing or damaging new information, he will probably win the consent of the Senate...
...What is it about our current political culture that allows a man who has felt and resisted the pain of racial bigotry to now be attacked for everything but his race--his childhood religion, his conservatism, his supposed disloyalty to kin and community, and perhaps even his sense of irony...
...Yet, twenty-four hours later I stood on a hillside in KwaZulu, 450 kilometres south, looking into the charred remnants of a hut where two young women had been murdered in a tribal war that, nationwide, for the last three years has killed an average of nine people a day...
...10038...
...In the process, medical doctors would become state-licensed medical dispatchers...
...Or take the case of Nancy Wallace who signed a petition for placing Initiative 119 on the ballot: "My mother was sentenced to five years on a feeding tube," she told the New York Times...
...It just wiped me out, spiritually and financially...
...9 August 1991:453...
...and the judicious withholding and/or withdrawal of extraordinary means of medical treatment when continuing them has become unreasonable or unjustifiable...
...Rather than the "nonentity" that might follow Thomas's defeat, Calabresi urges support of Thomas: "For there is just a chance that such a one may stand up to the pack again, and remind us all of what it is like to be poor and friendless and to be facing a hostile state...
...New York, N.Y...
...We pass a military convoy...
...Such care has been practiced for centuries in the Jewish and Christian traditions, among the latter by specific religious orders as well as in families, and its modem manifestation is the hospice movement...
...Connections, formal and informal, count...
...Apartheid, by creating the ten "homelands" (Transkei, Venda, KwaZulu, etc...
...and now with its future--the pariah's new international respectability...
...Each human life has an intrinsic value...
...There is a meritocracy in this country but it does not and could not work on individual merit alone...
...Whether accepted or rejected by the Senate, the Thomas nomination shows thatpace the Willie Horton ads and the veto of civil rights legislation, George Bush is no bigot, not really...
...Ronald E. Cranford, M.D., in analyzing our current dilemma, writes: "It is ironic that the two groups most opposed to active euthanasia--the medical profession and the prolife movement--are the ones most responsible for this grassroots movement toward active euthanasia...
...I had come to South Afric~ because it seemed, in its transition from apartheid to democracy, the politically most interesting place outside of Baghdad...
...Clarence Thomas's story is complex and rich...
...Who among us does not fear that we or a loved one may some day be made to suffer a uselessly prolonged (and possibly financially catastrophic) death...
...The revolutionary character of Initiative 119 will dismantle that sea wall and leave us exposed to the tides of arbitrary power and mere utility...
...Guido Calabresi, dean of the Yale Law School, clearly not a friend of the current Court or the Bush adminstration, but a friend of Thomas's, urges his confirmation (New York Times, July 28, 1991...
...475), those traditionally vowed to the art of healing would become "agents of death...
...South Africa as host to the Olympics in 2004...
...About another hour away, in the midst of the "Great Trek" in 1838, Andries Pretorius, with 500 well-armed men and two cannons, killed 3,000 Zulus armed with spears, and didn't lose a man...
...Under Washington state's Initiative 119--on this November's ballot and presently favored to win approval--physicians would be allowed to consciously end the lives of competent terminal patients who had requested relief from their sufferings...
...Will an apparently casual approving remark about natural law invite insinuating questions about Thomas's religious views...
...There's got to be a better way...
...An ethos of comfort, coupled with the atomization of the individual in our society and a loss of transcendent spiritual values, has heightened a natural fear of dying and death...
...Will Thomas pass their abortion litmus test...
...COMMONWEAL Clarence Thomas ~ or someone who cultivates the image of being an utterly reasonable nice guy, George Bush manages to pull off dazzling displays of cynicism...
...DIAL 119 FOR MURDER As the special supplement in this issue of Commonweal (pp...
...Telephone: (212) 732-0800...
...124...
...REPORT FROM SOUTH AFRICA THE TEARS OF KWAZULU BLOOD ON MANY HANDS bout an hour to the north of Elandskop, during the Boer War (1899-1902), the Boers ambushed a British train and captured war correspondent Winston Churchill...
...One of the ironies of his life trajectory, however, is not its singularity but its similarity to that of many Americans...
...It is for all members of society...
...It is overwhelmingly made up of gray Republican political hangers-on of virtually identical backgrounds...
...In Leon Kass's unflinching words (p...
...Does it add too much to the cynicism quotient to say that much of this legislation was made necessary by the Reagan-Bush Supreme Court overturning previous civil rights decisions...
...And that fear is more and more compounded by another creature of our own making: modem medical technology...
...And ask Clarence Thomas the same...
...Forster or D.H...
...This is also the George Bush whose presidential campaign played on the intertwined racial and sexual fears of Americans...
...Nor do we mean to suggest | 9 August 1991:451 that his political and ideological propensities are off limits to Senate probing...
...Yet such is the degraded state of national politics that George Bush, the nice, can't lose...
...The boy had spent half his life in irreversible coma...
...The area reeks, with its military monuments and Voortrekker museums, of South Africa's white history--a historical prison from which the nation is only beginning to escape...
...But there is a big difference between what the Democrats and their allies in prochoice and civil rights groups have pressed so far and what might tell us something about Thomas's abilities to uphold and interpret the Constitution...
...in a series of laws in 1913, 1951, and 1971) as something like Indian reservations where all blacks, unless licensed to work in cities, were expected to live, used tribalism----or "ethnicity" or "cultural identity"--to isolate blacks and consolidate white minority power...
...It is this civil war's tragic paradox that the Zulu people--by nature and history so gentle, hospitable, often Christian, almost saintly in their forbearance--seem to have reached for their redefinition back to the 1820s, to those twelve years when the monster, warrior king Shaka, famed for his splendid physique, transformed the Zulu kingdom into a militarized state, which degenerated into a reign of terror...
...This action," Harakas says, "should never be confused with euthanasia, which brings to an end, deliberately and consciously, a life which is capable of maintaining itself with normal care...
...Olympic Games approval looms...
...With all the boys so white, blond, and fresh-faced, handsome in their bright uniforms and blazers, I could have been in England---or rather on the set of a British movie based on some E.M...
...I just want to let my son die...
...Lawrence story...
...In 2004 the white population will be 10 percent...
...That realization is the greatest safeguard in promoting the advancement of human rights and the dignity of each one of us...
...This Court is outrageously homogeneous...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
