Just another dead Iraqi. (Part 2.)

(Start here. I mean it.)

So ... what's behind this major wanker-oriented outpouring of grief over a faceless, nameless Iraqi non-blogger? I'm glad you asked.

It shouldn't be surprising that, on a regular basis, the majority of Wankerville needs to do something actually, you know, caring and compassionate to prove that they're still remotely human. After all, when you spend 23 hours out of every 24 being bitchy, shallow, mean-spirited, hateful, Bible-pounding, Christopathic screech harpies whose mission from God is to treat all of the less fortunate like crap, it's useful to make up for it briefly to try to balance the scales, as it were.

(Naturally, you will show this occasional compassion only to ideological fellow travellers. Murdered peace activists who appear to be liberals are still cause for celebration. If you know what I mean.)

But it's not enough to cry over a dead comrade. No, it must be done in unison, in a massive public outpouring of concerted and simultaneous support that just dares anyone else to take issue with any part of it. What it requires is (and you knew this was coming) the text message.

It requires that everyone in Wankerville suddenly get an urgent missive on their cell phone to descend en masse on that golf green -- to drop what they're doing and collaborate on a sweeping show of support and compassion just to let everyone else know that, yes, Goddamit, we care deeply and passionately about a dead Iraqi who we've never met, whose words we may have never read and whose name we don't even know, but that doesn't matter because we are compassionate conservatives who care unless it's for the other 30,000 dead Iraqis and, in that case, fuck 'em, and if you so much as question even the tiniest bit of our bogus, exhibitionist compassion, we will rip you a new one, bee-yotch. So there.

You think I'm kidding, but you've seen this before, haven't you? Yes, you have. And her name was "Terri Schiavo."

The parallels with Schiavo are downright creepy. For years, no one in Wankerville had the slightest interest in Schiavo. She languished in her vegetative state with nary a glance from all those "compassionate" conservatives. And then, suddenly, with neck-snapping speed, she became the story. People who had never even heard of the condition of "persistent vegetative state" were suddenly terribly, terribly concerned about someone in one. People who had never, ever heard of Schiavo (and who hilariously, in some cases, couldn't even spell her name properly) referred to her constantly on a first-name basis and descended like locusts on her to weep and pray and rend their garments. And all because they got the text message.

As I said, the parallels are just creepy. The years of complete indifference or ignorance; the sudden and overwhelming interest; the obsession with the single individual to the exclusion of anyone else whose condition was identical; the annoyingly public weeping and praying to make sure that everyone else knew what was going on ... yes, it just went on and on, didn't it? And, in the end, the final parallel will be when all of those mourners lose interest and wander off the golf green to wait for the next text message.

It really is all too predictable, isn't it?