Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (23 page)

ONE
night at the height of the siege, Mike Bell was driving home from the office. It was late and he was tired. He had spent the day trying to coordinate daily life at Woodside, one of several hospices he supervised as director of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast. By the beginning of 2005, there were checkpoints several blocks away at either end of 102nd Street. You showed your ID and the police checked it against a list provided by the hospice of who was supposed to work that day. Anyone wishing
to visit a resident had to notify the hospice in advance so the police could be notified.

“You had to clear that last checkpoint, right before the property, to be cleared,” Bell explains. There already had been several attempts—one by someone posing as a produce deliveryman—to smuggle a camera into Terri Schiavo’s room. “Once you got inside, it stayed pretty sheltered.”

Even past the checkpoints, the hospice workers at Woodside now were running a gauntlet made up of camera crews, radio hosts, ambitious pundits, print reporters, angry monks, people waving crosses, and Jesse Jackson. A group of students from Ohio State came to Tampa over spring break, not to party, but to protest. A man sent his twelve-year-old up the driveway with a cup of water to give Terri. Given her condition, it would have drowned her. It turned out the father was a convicted pedophile from another state and had failed to register with the Florida authorities when he’d arrived to protest outside the hospice. His kid got arrested for trespassing. He didn’t. There were police snipers on the roof of the elementary school. One day a hospice cook walking to work was called a Nazi.

At his office, Mike Bell got a steady stream of reports. He heard about the bomb threats, and about one phone call that was traced to Texas and how the FBI had made it to the guy’s door almost as soon as he’d hung up the phone. Bell also had to monitor all the cable networks to see what was going on in the world beyond 102nd Street, because he knew that, as soon as something happened in a courtroom, or someone got up in a legislature and made a speech, the impact around the checkpoints would be nearly immediate, as though everyone involved in this case were suddenly standing on the same great fault line.

“What was amazing,” says Bell, “was the choreography of it. We would just be learning of the next development and, here we
are, the care providers, and we would get a fax or an e-mail, or a phone call and, within two seconds, there would be someone out front from Channel 8 or Channel 10, telling us that there’s a new group and this is what their signs say, and it was just a mobilization.

“The thing we kept saying was that we respect your rights to your strongly held beliefs, but we ask that you also try and respect the fact that there are seventy-one other people on a very personal and private journey inside this place, not to mention these other people, coming and going, just doing their job, volunteering, the cook in the kitchen, and they have nothing to do with these decisions.”

There was no relief for Bell. His wife’s best friend lived next door to Michael Schiavo. Sometimes, when the friend’s children were coming home from school, they had to get off the bus up the block so as to avoid the storm of picketers on the sidewalk, calling the besieged husband a murderer. Bell’s wife told him that her friend had organized an escape route for Schiavo in case the crowd tried to take his house. Her friend had removed a panel from the fence that separated their properties. If he needed to, Schiavo could slip through the fence, sneak into the neighbor’s garage, and escape in a car that had been secreted there for the purpose.

One night, exhausted from another day of the siege, another day of being called a Nazi and an angel of death, Mike Bell drove home in his car, the one whose Florida license plate read “Hospice—Every Day’s a Gift.” The main roads were clogged with traffic, so he took his usual alternate route, zigzagging along back roads through residential neighborhoods.

“It was one of those days where, in the e-mail, we were all being condemned to hell, and I’m driving home, and this car is just a little too close, and it just seemed to be doing it the whole
way. For some reason, at a traffic light, it just very vividly in my mind went, ‘I have a hospice license plate.’ And it was crazy, I thought, ‘They used to bomb abortion clinics, you know, and if they think we have a side in this, and they’re out to get us because we’re the angels of death—’ And it just struck me, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t stay in that place. But I was very aware that everywhere I went [my car] said, ‘Hospice,’ and that I couldn’t, even for a minute, turn that off.”

It galled them all—Mike Bell and Louise Cleary, who ran the hospice’s media relations, and especially Annie Santa-Maria—to see their work being fashioned simultaneously into a weapon of political advantage and an engine of media frenzy. It had become plain that the least important factor in all of this was the health and well-being of Terri Schiavo. There were political and religious agendas. There was apparently a bottomless national desire for a televised freak show. There were advantages to be gained, and money to be made, in the fashioning of “hospice” into the kind of buzzword that is central to the vocabulary of a lunatic national dialogue. In such a dialogue, there is no debate, because debate admits at least the possibility of eventual synthesis between the opposing positions. The manufacture of a buzzword requires the reckless unleashing of a noisy public frenzy that does not so much defeat the opposition as simply exhaust it. There is no more debate present at those times than exists between a rock and a window.

Nobody knew better than did the people inside the hospice the delicate and painful questions that revolve around end-of-life issues. They knew the debate. They’d seen the debate in the eyes of the people who came every day to say good-bye, the people who came up to them now and wondered what would happen to their loved ones, what with hospice being compared daily on national television to Auschwitz. Those people wept
with the concern that Woodside would be closed. The real debate was in all the families, grouped in knots in the hallways, talking in low voices, sometimes fiercely, about the decisions that had to be made. The debate was in the people taking long walks out back along the stone paths, in a deep and silent place within them where the murmur of the brook and the music of the wind chimes did not reach. The quiet moments were the real debate, when the room grew still and breathless. Bringing peace to those moments was what hospice was about.

They knew the debate and they knew that what was going on around them in the glare of the lights was not the debate. Instead, it was something that reduced the debate to the counterfeit currency of a performance argument. They knew—oh, God, how they knew—that a lot of the people across the street wouldn’t last long doing the kind of work they did every day inside the hospice.

Yet those people were believed. The louder they yelled, the wilder their claims, and the more brutal their rhetoric, the more the outside world seemed to believe them. The people inside the hospice knew the truth, but truth was different now. Truth also was anything anyone was willing to say on television. Truth also depended on how fervently you performed for the cameras, how loudly you were willing to pray, how many droplets of blood you painted on your sign, and how big your papier-mâché spoon was. Enough people believed and were willing to act fervently on behalf of those beliefs, so those beliefs must be as true as any others. The Great Premises of Idiot America were all in play.

Events began to run in a pattern. A court would rule in favor of Michael Schiavo. The Schindlers would appeal. There would be a delay. The appeal would be denied. The Schindlers would file another motion. Another court would rule. The Schindlers would appeal. Some legislature would get involved.
The crowd across the street would grow. The TV lights would grow brighter. At every juncture, there would be new characters introduced into the ongoing drama. A judge to be vilified. A bold legislator with wet eyes and a golden tongue, channeling the thoughts of a woman whose brain was dissolving. The tube would be removed. The tube would be replaced. Someone inside the hospice would have to do it.

On October 21, 2003, at the encouragement of Governor Jeb Bush, the Florida state legislature passed “Terri’s Law,” a measure specifically giving Bush the unilateral power to replace Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, which had been removed, for the second time during the endless litigation, six days earlier. The law was nakedly, almost hilariously, unconstitutional, in part because it directly contradicted a law the legislature had passed during a less frenzied time several years earlier.

It seemed to Annie Santa-Maria that she had become hostage to a situation detached from any familiar reality. She knew the issues involved in the actual debate, knew them backward and forward. Hell, she’d helped develop the procedures going all the way back to her volunteer days with AIDS patients. But, now, in this one case, it seemed that her life and her work were following a script written by someone else. This was the way she remembered living in Cuba.

“I was watching this”—Annie laughs—“and I’m thinking, ‘Surely, they’re not going to pass this. They’re going to overturn the self-determination act they passed years ago.’ And they did. They created a law that was so narrow, that was just for this case, that it was unconstitutional. And when that didn’t work, they went to the Florida Supreme Court, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“When they went to the [U.S.] Supreme Court, and they needed other attorneys to help write the briefs, none of the local
attorneys would work with Michael Schiavo. So they were forced to go to the ACLU because the president had so much power, and his brother, the governor, had so much power, that the lawyers were afraid it was going to kill their practice if they touched it because this was a political firebomb to promote the Republican and the Christian agenda that the president and his brother had and nobody wanted to get in the middle of that and ruin their career over that.”

Annie argued with the lawyers. They were throwing away their own rights to self-determination because they were afraid of politicians and preachers. “I told them, ‘Look, you want to be tied to technology against your will because somebody’s afraid that their religious views will be damaged?’”

Annie began to monitor the newscasts, as Mike Bell did, trying to discern the outline of the next day’s story. She stopped concerning herself with whether the story might have anything to do with what actually was going on in the hospice. “We had things happen here and then the [Schindler] family would come out and tell us something totally different than what had happened and the press would run with it. And whatever story they created that night, that’s how we knew what to prepare for the next day. It was always based on whether or not they thought they were doing well. And when they knew the media would be here, there would be more of them doing the carnival circus. You know, it was time for their press releases and their messages of hate and disruption, and yelling at the staff as they drove by, and holding out signs, and calling them murderers, and asking us to repent and not work for hospice, and ‘You don’t have to do this.’”

Annie turned down police protection, although she’d gotten death threats. “They offered me police, but I didn’t need it,” she says. “There were so many other people they wanted to kill.”

“ANNIE?”
says Captain Mike Haworth. “Annie rocks.”

It was Haworth’s job throughout the siege to coordinate security in the neighborhood of the hospice on behalf of the Pinellas Park Police. It was Haworth whose men had busted the fake deliveryman who’d been bribed to smuggle in a camera. It was Haworth who’d have to tell Jesse Jackson’s driver that there was no room nearby in which to park the reverend’s limousine. Shortly thereafter, while Jackson was giving a press conference down the block, a man sprinted across the street and made it all the way up to the driveway of the hospice. He was going to rescue Terri Schiavo from the people inside who were killing her.

“He made it right to about here, where he engaged one of my canine officers,” says Haworth, pointing to a spot not far from the front doors. “The good news for him was that my canine officer had left his canine in the cruiser. The bad news was that the officer deployed his Taser. And that was our only Tasing out there.”

Haworth is a native Floridian, a brawny serious man with a signifying crew cut and a steady gaze. He is the kind of cop who asks you politely to do something, and is willing to do so repeatedly, always politely, but with something formidable there in reserve. The son of a police chief in Dunedin, Haworth went away to Texas for college and did five years in the Air Force before returning to Florida, where he worked his way up through the ranks at the Pinellas Park department from traffic officer, through narcotics, until he was placed in charge of the department’s SWAT team. He and his men were sent to the neighborhood around the hospice on three lengthy deployments.

“It was always about Michael, Terri, the legislators, the governor, the president,” he says. “It was about everybody but us. We did not want to be the story. We wanted everything else to be the story.”