NOT A DOCTOR'S DILEMMA.

I have taken a few companion animals to the vetbastards' for euthanising, it has never been straightforward, nearly all of them have had more life left to live - before I have put them in the car they have mostly  been catting or dogging as before  - but I had been aware that they were also suffering pain; I suffer pain nearly all the time but I understand it and as far as I'm concerned it is infinitely preferable to being dead.

 My guess is that animals don't - can't - understand and compartmentalise pain but even so I have a lingering thought that it is not their suffering that I choose to end, just my sight of it;  

the suffering of others is - what? -  not harder to bear than our own but more disagreeable.  

There's that phrase, I couldn't bear to see him suffering, it is the I that counts. 
 I like to think that most of are uncomfortable with the suffering of others although I remember reading of the Shogun who composed a haiku to the screams of a man he was having boiled in oil.  

That's the Japs and the Germans, for you, they occupy a unique place on Cruelty's glistening spectrum, you might even say thay've fallen over the edge.

It is only good fortune but it has never been the case that I couldn't afford the ongoing medication for sick animals, these were quality of life decisions which I was making because they couldn't.

 Sounds so pompous, doesn't it? I have always been a bit uneasy about that, I wouldn't want anyone making a quality of life decision about me, I'd fucking kill them  but there it is, it isn't the animals' world, hasn't been since we arrived  and invented our tools and weapons  and as I have said previously,  if all the animals in the world got together and formed a religion we would be its Devil;
  for fun, sport, for cosmetics and medicines and for dinner, they are ours to torture and  kill, even benevolently.

We know a couple who  are just  perfectly ethical. 

Well, they portray themselves as ethical, their judgements as considered and  themselves as informed-into-Virtue in everything they do;  they are Which magazine personified;

 po-faced wankers, you'd call them, we-know-besters. 

They had a lovely little dog, anyway, as bright as a button -  friendly, funny, intelligent - he knew the names of all of his toys - he'd make you lol-out-loud; spirited, playful, loving, the perfect companion, he would brighten the greyest of days. 

But one day, despite them, in every waking second, taking punctilious care over every single thing they did - they made you participate in a tea ceremony every time you had a cuppa round there,  all  consumeriste discernant et superieur; yes, ishmael, it's about so much more than just drinking,   we strive to savour and appreciate the fragrance; 

with a clean palate you can detect the blossom, things are so much better when you take a little care, aren't they? 

Now, I like tea, I drink loads of fancy stuff, even, sometimes,  in warmed cups, from a warmed pot, with the hot water just-so,  and with real tea leaves, and with no milk and no sugar;  

this shit, however,  always tasted like  floor-sweepings from the Ty-Phoo tea factory, down Birmingham way. 

This couple's game wasn't about discernment and certainly not about sharing an experience with others, fuck no, 

wasn't even just plain old-fashioned snobbery, it was something darker than  that, a kind of feverish and  remoresless,  psychopathic and countereit didacticism, even though they had nothing to teach anyone, 

they should shut the fuck up and listen quietly to their betters,

 like I do.  

I remember once delivering some furniture to a lovely country house in Kinver or Clent,  one of those nice, wee Worcestershire hamlets, anyway,  from which Birmingham and the Black Country are easily commutable; popular with lawyers, senior health professionals  and the ghastly TeeVee people but this guy was a Black Country engineer, had prospered in a small business making widgets and washers, he and his wife were really, really pleasant and they became repeat  customers.  And I remember looking at his new BMW and his lovely home and thinking You don't know a line of Shakespeare nor a bar of Beethoven  yet you live here and I don't, how's that happen? 

I learned in that instant that enjoying the sound of my own voice was a mug's game, that I had more to learn from others than they from me; everybody's story is better than mine, 

if they are permited to tell it.

Back with Mr'n'Ms Perfect there was also  the BMW 1100 escapade.

  Although naturally they drove an eco-friendly car they also bought  a superbike, for the thrill of the open road, and, you know, just to get away from it all, in the fresh air.  

Piled it up,  they did, getting away from it all in Caithness. 
There followed weeks in hospital, months off-sick, in recuperation.  Wrecked the bike but didn't dent their sense of superiority, not a bit of it. 

Oil on  the road, or some such, absolutely freak conditions which would compromise the skills of even the most seasoned and considerate riders, such as they. 

But one day, anyway,  and given the intense purity of their life choices and the great care they took of domestic minutae, it came as a shock to them when the wee dog was injured by a car outside the front door. 

The constant vigilance required to ensure the safety of small animals was a heading absent from their otherwise comprehesive, balanced and ethical Rule Book of Life.

But they were still prepared to make the right choice.

Explaining things to me later, he said, Well, ishmael, I thought long and hard about it and decided that in the Wild, which, let's face it, is where he's from, he wouldn't survive an injury like that and so the ethical thing to do was not to have him mistakenly treated by the 'vet but to let him die...

You  had him destroyed? 

Yes, on balance, it was the right thing to do, it wasn't about his survivability, it was about the higher ethics of the matter, we were- as you know, we always are -  determined to be ethical, and that was what would happened in the Wild. He would never survive such injury in the Wild.
And we must never forget that however much we love them at the end of the day the bottom line is that  these are Wild animals we're talking about here, we simply  must never forget that.

There was no point in me saying;

 But he wasn't a wild animal, he was bred to order, just for you two and by your own admission he was  the central -  sleeping in bed - part of your family, now that your formerly lesbian daughter has - unsurprisingly - freaked-out, run-off and married a man twenty years older than you, her father.  

Never ceases to amaze me, the number of ethical ways people find to avoid spending money. 

If he'd just said that they couldn't afford it or something that would've been fine, and even though they are not skint a lie wouild've been prefereable to all that ethicsa horseshit. 

Probably the real ethical dilemma was that they didn't want a damaged dog, limping around their OCD-clean little Palace of Madness; who wants an injured dog? I mean, what sort of ethical consumer choice would that be, having and injured dog, limping and dribbling? 

The daughter once told me, that if even one book was out of the bookcase her mother thought the place a terrible mess, had an attack of the vapours.  
A recuperating dog, pissing on the floor? 
 Christ, she'd have had heart failure.

Very, very soon after this happened they acquired another dog,

 a shiny new one,  not from the Wild, where dogs come from,
 but from another expensive breeder.

 Infinitely elastic, consumerist ethics, 

have to be, though, considering:

“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we'll really get paradise in return? We've seen it on television.”― Yuval Noah Harari,

I'm no better, though, just because I spend that extra bit of money on companion animals.

 I make the best of it, the final trip to the vetbastard's. 

Yeah, I love you so much I'm gonna  pay somebody to kill you, and I'm gonna just gonna have to make the best of it. 

Just be grateful  that I don't consider you a wild dog, really, cos then I'd have to get me a gun and shoot you, like a real man does.

I don't know what I would do in the position of Charlie Gard's parents. I like to think that I wouldn't do as they did but I am older and stronger than they are.. 
Maybe, if I was their age, in this time,  I, too, would take my sad story to market
Colin Parry, after losing his young teenage son to one of the late Marty Kneecaps' peace initiatives, really took his tale to market,, interviews, trips, columns, a phone-in radio show of his own, the Today Programme. 
His mrs left him though and who could blame her? 
 
Nobody teaches Acceptance, nobody teaches that Shit Happens so it is unsurprising that the Gards are as they are, screeching and breast-beating, ululating like Arab women after a peace-making visit from the US Air Force.

 It is not as though their betters don't encourage commercial public soul-bearing; it is not as though Celebrity has Grace. Just Look at Prince Hooligan, the ginger drunk to see where the commoners are taking their cue. A trouble shared is a trouble earned-from.
  I saw a few minutes of that slippery cancer, Piers Morgan, the other night, the fearless but compassionate investigative journalist. He has a show about women in the States who have killed.  

Not BigTime Murder Floozies, like Hillary Rodham Clinton 

- didya see her do that Gaddafi rap she does, in that awful Arkansas whine: We Came, We Saw, He Died,

  eek-eek-eek, eek-eek-eek, 

I'm so funny I could jes plumb eat ma own shit;

 Christ, makes me shudder to remember it, makes me fall down and thank God for the larcenous, gibbering, cock-waving  half-wit, Donald Trump. 

Having proven  himself too fucking hideous even for US TeeVee prime time, maladroit even at celeberity blow-jobbing, the Moron's current outing is just a cheap,  miserable series about poor dumb bitches who have murdered someone and are never going to see a cock again, never mind the light of day. 

PiersBoy goes into the jail looking all perplexed and asks them some searching questions, as only a journalist on top of his game can do. All Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone redux, Piers asks How Does It Feel, over and over again, to be hated, to be in here, to have killed that boy?
It really is fucking disgusting; voyeuristic, parasitic, tittillating and trite, it's enough to make you believe in the Death Penalty, better your blood boiling and your organs jerking, better to bleed and rupture  from badly administered poison than be interviewed by Piers Morgan.

It's not as if the worthless crook didn't already deserve a good beating, is it? 
Here he is with Kelvin McFilth,

 And we wonder why the country's ruined by filth,  lust, greed, hatred  and stupidity. I'd hang these two in a heartbeat.

How does it fe-e-e-e-el?
 
But this show, even by Piers Morgan's reptilian, infamously low standards, is the baddest in bad taste; please, can't he be arrested for Indecency, the horrible cunt?

The Gards' child was born cruelly disabled and with no prospect of survival, he can do nothing unaided, he can't breath and is severely brain damaged,  he is senseless and his apparent destiny is to die  in pain, perhaps horribly so and his doctors argued that his life support; if you can call it that, should be switched-off.  
The parents disagreed, promulgating some unproven treatment option in the United States and - funded by the new breed of Internet well-wishers - took the matter to three British courts, where they lost and finally to the European Court, where they have also recently lost. 
Watching that hearing was the first time I had ever thought seriously about the European Court's jurisdiction; this matter had been thoroughly and painfully aired in three tiers  of our own courts and yet the Gards asked for and were allowed the final adjudication of an alien, supra-national, bureaucratic jurisprudence.  
I closed my eyes and tried to find worth in this procedure and in these arrangements and - much as I love the idea of Law - I couldn't. 
 If, as the anti-democracy Remaining minority say, we cannot protect our own human rights, our own working terms and conditions, if we need, instead, the oversight of judges drawn from nations recently fascistic, totalitarian and holocaustal then the war fought against these forces was lost.  
Imagine me walking the ghosted shore of Scapa Flow and telling those lads, No, you're alright, we can't trust ourselves to look after our own rights, see, so we need the Krauts and the Frogs and the Eyeties, to keep an eye on us, keep us right, lads, they will.  I mean, they have better judges'n ours, better laws, we'd be proper fucked without Jerry judges, watching uz human rights laws.  OK lads, simmer down, now, course you didn't die for nothing. It's just that doing what Germany says is the only true way to lasting peace. Well, you lads may call it cuntish, but your betters, well, they know better'n you, obviously, that's why they're your betters. Quiet,  there, less'avesome quiet in those ghostly ranks.

This Internet Camaraderie of Grief - everybody feeling for everybody else - it's quite odious, I think, distorting and devaluing.  This was a straightforward matter, one of solemnity, modesty and forebearance. No fucking chance, not among the New People.  Unto Them A Child Was Born but it was not to flourish and survive, these things happen.  But no, it was unfair and these parents would move mountains to make a Sad thing Happy, probably because they're worth it.

I do believe that the first British outbreak of IT Community Grieving  came with the wretched McCanns, 


who very swiftly not only amassed a small fortune - from which they paid-off their mortgage - but through which they also persuaded the gullible Internet fuckwit that every parent was as neglectful and duplicitous as they;  that the Portuguese police were the villains of the piece and instead of advising them to answer legitimate police questions the dodgy govament of Gordon Snot sent the flatfoot, stuttering  dimwits of the Metropilitan police over on holiday to Portugal, almost as if to arrest the Portugueezers for their policing failures. 
Even though Gerry and Cilla McCann trashed the crime scene, delayed reporting the child's absence until they had engaged a PR firm and rehearsed a series of stories, all of which collapsed under scrutiny and refused to answer any questions about the matter  they were popular Internet sensation. 
Not with me they weren't but with the New People. 

The Internet's  Highway of Vicarious Sorrow was Gerry and Cilla's best - and most generous - friend. I don't suggest that Charlie Gard's parents  are remotely as loathsome as Gerry and Cilla but they, too, have invited rank strangers to help them thwart Propriety, and to pay for the privilege. 
Their Child of Sorrow has become their platform and their cashcow.

I happened to watch the case at the British Supreme Court, a week or ten days ago.  Counsel for the Hospital - Great Ormond Street - argued that, well, basically she argued that the parents didn't own the child and that while broadly speaking  parents' wishes should be taken into account, where possible,  in this case they were so unreasonable that they should be discounted.  
There was simply no hope for this child and the claims of the US doctor were misinformed and  misleading.  
The parents were acting unreasonably, firstly  inasmuch as shipping the baby to the States would  make matters worse;  he was in pain, his tolerance to painkillers was likely to increase and the condition of his brain and major organs was such as to be unimprovable by any means.

The parents countered, firstly, that  the matter was not even justiceable and that it was no business of the Court what they did with their child. They knew what was best for their child.
 The Court-appointed Guardian and all the doctors concerned disagreed and two lower courts and now the UK Supreme Court dashed their unrealistic and selfish hopes, a decision, as mentioned above, endorsed by the European Court

This notion that parents always know best is just ludicrous, Daily Mail rabble-rousing.
Mick Philpott was and is a parent, should we support his fateful arson, because he said he knew what was best for his kids?

And even if parents think and believe that  they know best events can reach a pitch where the Court must do what it thinks best;  Every working day of the year Judges in Family Courts make decisions which upset one or both parents, and all around the clock  every day of the year, social workers and child protection committees remove children to a place of safety, temporarily or permanently.
Parents, Mr and Mrs Gard,  neither own nor know what is best for   their children, nor should they, 
this isn't Pakistan or India or  China, is it?  

I had some sympathy for these wretyched and woebegone  parents, caught-up, as they were,  in Celebrity's thoughtless maelstrom, until I saw them, that is, and then I realised what - whom- the hospital had been up against;  they were an open sore of Want and Grievance.  They wanted the child flown overseas, experimented upon, they wanted the child to die at home, they wanted to bathe him, this desperately ill infant, and have him sleep with them in their bed, they wanted to do normal parent and family things, they wanted this and they wanted that, they were being treated unfairly, no-one was listening to what they wanted.

Theirs is a sad situation, alreadydrowning  in an overdose of misplaced  Sympathy, they don't need mine.

And I read the vox-pops:

 Oh, fuck me, this is terrible; the parents' rights count for nothing; it's just typical; Oh, this is so sad, there simply is no right and wrong in this.

There were thousands upon thousands of comments from the Obvious Imbecile Believers, tapping-away, enraged.. 
Their opinions, of course, are no less valid than those of MediaMinster's emotional retard, Jon Sox, at Channel Four News, nearly in tears the other night,

"Good evening. I know nothing, we, the media, the pundits, we know nothing." 
 Jon Snow, on Jeremy Corbyn, Channel Four News, 8th June 2017


 because he was interviewing a doctor, a real doctor, and clearly a very caring doctor, Sarah Wotsaname, the Tory MP, she seemed to hypnotise Soxy, a very calm,  reassuring voice and delivery, repeating and re-emphasising her very calm and reassuring solutions to all the ills of parliament, indeed of the world, of Life and the Human Condition; focussing, Jon, on what is Right but Practical and Affordable, Right but Practical and Affordable, Jon; 

proper tranced-out was Jonny.  

mrs ishmael used to deploy these techniques with clients, not NLP but just mild hypnotic trance, it is very effective and Sarah Wollaston. MP,

Focus on your breathing, Jon, that's right, just focus on your breathing.

played the silly old duffer, Sox, like a trout. 

He'll probably move to Doctor Sarah's constituency, just so's he can vote for her. He was always a fool, Jon Sox but as they say, there is no fool like an old fool.

With dimwits like Jon Sox orchestrating the national tune, no wonder it is so discordant, its chorus ready to leap on a case like baby Charlie's and emote itself into a dissonant frenzy.
  But this no-right-and-wrong thing, this phony dilemma-facing-the-parents, this is so stupid, so corrosive.  
There is no dilemma.

World Wide Words drily says this:

The original dilemma in rhetoric was a device by which you presented your opponent with two alternatives; it didn’t matter which one he chose to respond to — either way he lost the argument. When you did this to your opponent you were said to present two horns to him, as of a bull, on either of which he might be impaled. As the scholar Nicholas Udall said in a translation of a work by Erasmus in 1548, it didn’t matter to which of the two points a person made a direct answer, either way he would run on to the sharp point of the horn.

More mischievously, Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Enquiry Into Values,  posits a couple  of dilemma-busters:

Pirsig says you have one hand on each horn of a bull, restraining it; if you release the left horn, you will be gored by the right and vice versa, you can only hang-on.
But, says the philosopher-mechanic, you can sing the bull to sleep, bore him, by asking endless questions about his competence. - or as in the case of the Gards endless court questions about about the justiceability of the case, should we all really be here in the first place, since we as parents own the child and his future?

And then, from Pirsig, my own favourite, you can throw sand in the bull's eyes, sharpish, though, before he realises you have released a horn.

And now we have the Gards' solution, which is a combination of these: to invite everyone else to grapple with the two dilemmic horns, ihrough a huge vicarious, angry misery and make a lot of noise.

It is all counterfeit because there is no dilemma. 
Idiot columnists may have conjured one but it is not a dilemma at all, the lonesome death of Charlie Gard, at least it is not to me.

This situation rebukes us all, this gabshite debate is not a choice between finely balanced alternatives, this is a living horror, requiring Mercy, nor rhetoric, doctors, not lawyers.
This is not a vote on Brexit, this is a running tap of Sadness, the lights of Grief, left-on, burning bright and harsh;
 even if this child could breath it will never think or  see or hear or smell or touch,  there is nothing there of life, save the pain.

 There is only one proper course of action, not two or more; just the one, to which  the parents and their followers, including some ghastly celebrity "funders," investing, Geldof-like,  in their own caring images, cannot reconcile themselves;  that course excludes alternatives;  there is no dilemma, there are only right and wrong.

Another bovine metaphor is not about procrastination and immature philosphising;

taking the bull by the horns means that we do the only right, the least wrong thing 

and kill the child. 

And then make the best of it.