"...insisting that her story have a happy ending"

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for the country to be obsessed by Terri Schiavo, and by the plight of her parents and husband--and you probably know most of them since they've been interminably discussed in every conceivable forum. Here's another one: For every American feeling compassion for Schiavo, there are at least several more who feel a consolation and satisfaction, maybe even a sense of triumph. Events have complicated, peculiar resonances in the mind. As the instincts seem to be set loose to an unimaginable degree in American society and overseas, Schiavo's unfathomably suffering face, with its strange beatific-seeming smile, is like a justification for all the carnage. This vale of woe is what life is, it seems to say--at least to those who want to keep her face just as it is, forever. It's a chilling complement to "The Contender," whose fixation on pummeling seems to say that this is what society is.

But there is something more. In a stroke of utter fascinating inanity, "The Contender" has made its motto Nietzsche's overquoted epigram, the war-cry of every hormonally imbalanced adolescent: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This seems to be the message extracted from Terri Schiavo's condition by the Christian legions. They don't, as good Christians would, want to leave Schiavo's death in God's hands and allow her to ascend to heaven. They don't, as no one has the courage to point out on the talk shows--the lions are throwing themselves to the Christians--see a contradiction between their opposition to stem-cell research and abortion on the grounds that God's will must not be tampered with by science, and their insistence that science must interfere with God's will and keep Schiavo alive. (And there was Senator Joe Lieberman on "Meet the Press" Sunday, describing America as having been founded on "Christian" premises. But the origins of the Constitution lie in the Enlightenment, in deism, and in Voltairean revulsion against religion. Is Lieberman now afraid to say so?) These Christians really think that if Schiavo is kept alive long enough she'll come out of her vegetative state--she'll win. Just as those poor pummeled guys on "The Contender" might win if they allow themselves to be pulverized enough. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger--even if it kills you. You realize that pulling punches on the show is like imploring death to pull its punches with Schiavo. In both cases, the spectacle of suffering is prolonged to the satisfaction of some observers.

So for the Christian right, Schiavo has become something like a human antidepressant. Her plight, perhaps, makes them feel better about themselves and not Left Behind by Hollywood, or by sophisticated Northeastern elites, or by urban decadence, or urban mores, or urban wealth. And by arguing, no, insisting that her story have a happy ending, they can cheer themselves up about the society they are helping to create every day, a society in which being able to celebrate the spectacle of the weak getting pummeled, and the weak wasting away from within in a vegetative state, is the measure of one's strength. Nietzsche and Christ, together at last.
Lee Siegel, The New Republic