Was in a bit of a funk yesterday, as the post
below reliably attests. Sometimes you just want to stop the train
here.
And get off. Before anything gets any
worse.
Do you ever feel that way? A
sense of some impending... not doom precisely, but something maybe slightly less
forbidding. The feeling that your nose has not quite yet been punched, but that
something is on the way to do so. You can almost feel the blood
trickling...
Well, that was yesterday morning. So being still
on leave (amen, amen) I did what I normally try do when faced with insubstantial
dread: I went to the gym. Lashed the water at high noon on a sunny day for a
good two clicks to try and think of something else, like the way your shoulders
and lungs feel after your fourth or fifth 50, and how quickly the second hand
sweeps through the 30 second rest you've allowed yourself. After 45 minutes or
so, it was mission accomplished on the mental side, but I was left with the sad
realization, having been an indoor swimmer all my career, that pool water makes
at best an indifferent sunscreen. Irish skin, quite unaccustomed, so very sad.
Came home to find the house quite
unoccupied, the Hobbit and the other elves having absented themselves to mall in
search of appropriate attire for the evening's festivities: Turf Club seats at
the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Horse racing, doncha know? Sport of kings, etc. One
dresses up. We were also expected to gamble - apparently that's what one does at
the races.
I'm not much of a gambler,
truth be told. Not terribly keen. On gambling. Not from any sense of Protestant
priggishness, but rather from a kind of resigned futility: Harrah's doesn't
build the big hotel and hire the pretty girls in high heels off folks like me
and thee who
make
money gambling, oh, no. And too often I've seen sad people at casino's who
need
to win, and so of course, they don't. But I don't condemn, free country, innit?
And I have even participated, from year to year: For me, gambling has meant
something to do at a blackjack table in Las Vegas (and later, Reno) every other
year or so, between professional exhibitions and symposia (*cough*) at the
Tailhook Reunion.
Our cross-the-street
neighbors had a pass loaned by a friend to get us up into the Turf Club, well
above the unwashed masses, rubbing elbows with the Hoi Polloi
hoity-toity. Which is a word you never hear anymore. Anyway, we all took
advantage. The pass was also supposed to get us out of the $20 valet parking,
but when the parking attendant saw the pass he also looked (fruitlessly, as it
turned out) for a little red sticker on the car. He even offered us me a chance
to prevaricate about our circumstances: "On the other car, perhaps?" A kindly
offer, no doubt well-intentioned, but I turned him down. Twenty bucks I've got
and call it cheap to save from telling a lie. After all, my hypocrisy only goes
so far </Val Kilmer / Tombstone
impression>. Parked, paid and perambulated up the escalator to where the
betting deeds are done by half-soused, well-met hail-fellows in sports coats and
open collared shirts. My tie (Brooks Brothers too, very proud) found itself
leaving my neck (ahhh) for a new home in my jacket pocket. The Hobbit and I,
having not the least idea what we were doing, and not particularly caring, of
course quickly won a tidy sum of cash on a quinella
(who knew? Certainly not us, until moments before). Tidy enough in fact to repay
our parking fare, and dinner besides. With drinks. In Del
Mar.
Which was
nice.
So, yes - dinner with the
neighbors, who've lived across from us for the better part of seven or eight
months now (could be longer, I'm not the right guy to ask). The Kat watches
their kids from time to time, as does the Biscuit, if she's not otherwise
engaged. We've socialized with them before on a couple of different occasions,
and now are moving past the standard California wave and smile into actually
learning more about each other. She's a physical trainer, freelance right now -
unaffiliated with any of the local body shops. Made the novice tippler's mistake
of matching your humble scribe drink for drink (for drink) on cosmopolitans, the
first time we went out together. Weighing in at just over half my body weight,
dripping wet. Checked out early from dinner. Felt a bit better after her
nap.
He's a specialist in in vitro
fertilization (IVF), brilliant and affable. Helps people make babies, people
that are having a hard time of it. Call it a labor of love if you like, admit
that practice makes perfect and you still have to concede that at a certain
point a couple wants to make it catch and can get pretty darned frustrated when
that doesn't happen. So: Good work, says I, and a man can be proud of it. He's
also painfully aware that it's controversial in some sectors of society, but
he's got it all worked out in his head: God gave us brains to use them, etc.
Who's to say what's right for everyone, and so on. People have to follow their
conscience.
At some point, while I was
chatting with his fair lady, it became apparent that he and the Hobbit had
ventured down the winding and tree covered road of IVF, which leads of course to
the ivy-dappled side alley of stem cells lines and runs right past the
mercilessly forbidding off-ramp of human cloning. I tried manfully to focus on
what his wife was saying, while trying to attend as well with half an ear to the
Hobbit's conversation. I know of more than a few women who can do that sort of
multi-tasking successfully, but if there are any men so equipped, then in this
at least, they are my lord and
master.
Their conversation had gotten
into the shoal waters of both religion and politics by the time I was
unwillingly drawn in. These conversations can be truly revealing, and therefore
uncomfortable ground for those who barely know each other, and who are otherwise
having a pleasant time in each other's company. Also, there is a naval
proscription from talking about such things at the wardroom table, and some of
this carries over into my purely domestic life, making me doubly awkward. I
explained my reticence in just those terms, but several batteries of adult
beverages had already been discharged and my table mates were having no part of
it. Too, there comes a point where the unwillingness to express opinions can be
mistaken for the notion that one doesn't hold
any.
So, I told them that I thought IVF
was a wonderful thing. I also told them that it makes perfect sense to me that
excess embryos created for the purpose of human implantation, but no longer
needed, should rather be open to scientific development for stem cell cloning
rather than merely discarded (see George
F. Will on Sen. Frist , et al). I also said that it is not a very far
walk at all between the circumstances of those embryos created for the sole
purpose of generating life where before it could not take hold to
experimental
human
embryos explicitly created in order to be destroyed, so as to help ameliorate
some other, third person's life. A class of human life, in other words, created
only so that it might be destroyed. Must, in fact, be destroyed. In favor of
another's. That gives me the moral and ethical willies, quite frankly. Color me
a Luddite, if it suits you.
I read somewhere recently, and
please forgive me for not remembering where (or better yet, remind me) that a
gent was talking to a lady who expressed that her only concern in life was that
her daughter might still have access to an abortion, if in need. The gent
replied to her (paraphrasing), "Madam, I should not be the least bit concerned
about your daughter's right to an abortion. In fact, if I'm reading the trend
lines correctly, she'll not only be able to abort whenever she wants, but she'll
also have the right to put you to sleep, when she thinks it appropriate." Which
took us down that whole Terri Schiavo side road, and autopsy results (and people
who somehow felt that those autopsy results were vindicatory,
post hoc ergo propter
hoc). But only
momentarily.
What with all this racing
for the ethical borderlines, does anyone seriously doubt we are - Weeks? Months?
A year or two at the outset? From news that an actual human being has been
cloned and that now there are two of them. What then? No one has a freakin'
clue, is what, except those soulless (speaking literally) types who can't wait
to shatter the last relic of pre-modernist morality - the idea that somehow,
human life is, well... you know:
Sacred.
Build life. Snatch it away.
Choose who gets to live, who has to die. Weigh and balance quality of life for
someone else. After all: Are we not
gods?
This combines with the secular
trend towards salad bar morality - pick and choose what you like because, after
all, who are we to judge?
Gods! Are we
not gods?
Here it is then: The kind of
power we strive to claim is not consistent with our concomitant unwillingness to
stand in judgment of the things we might do with that power - but isn't it true
that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds"? Well, what then might we call an
informed consistency? Progress, says I. Or at least, a stopping of the train
here.
Before things get any worse.
See, I'm
not sure I'm ready for this. These kinds of decisions take us to the very brink
of a chasm which plunges down to a bleak, mechanical and dreary world, one very
far from that we grew up knowing. Soulless, unmagical, materialistic. Not sure
I want to live in a place like
that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not for
imposed virtue (which is really no virtue at all) nor even selecting one moral
code from all the competing sources. After all, our only real domestic faith in
America is democracy. Most of us at least, still believe in that. But these are
big steps we're taking - I'd just like to make sure we're taking them carefully
and judiciously. Hate to gamble on something like this, and be wrong. We do so
need to get it right. And I feel that punch coming from around the
corner...
Posted @
12:30 PM
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Posted in
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Sendit
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Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
