Word: hopelessness
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...writers like Charles Dickens. The analogy, though flattering to the soaps, is apt enough. The trials of Amy and Sandy or Nick and Martha are just as important to many TV viewers as the sorrows of Little Nell were to readers a century ago-and just as gratifyingly hopeless. Says Kitty Barsky, a writer on both One Life to Live and All My Children: "This is the big payoff-to end up with everyone watching in tears...
...19th Century Portugal itself was so poor and hopeless that the very existence of colonies aboard was a consolation to the ruling elite, if none to the impoverished mass of Portugese peasants. "In this cursed country," wrote a Portugese to the Spanish philosopher Unamuno, "all that is noble commits suicide; all that is vulgar triumphs. Our illness is a type of moral illness, of moral fatigue...In Portugal, the only belief worthy of respect is the belief worthy of respect is the belief in the freedom of death...
Like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Poe's article is obviously intended more for shock effect than literal advocacy. But it does address a question that increasingly concerns physicians: How to deal with the hopeless case? Realistically, replies Poe, "Medicine should not use silly euphemisms such as rehabilitation and convalescence for its losing patients. A marantology service could be a place where a person could die in dignity without all the pother death engenders elsewhere...
...supposed to shorten life," he says. "But there is a limit to what we ought to do to prolong it." The marantologist, he suggests, would not only recognize these limits but help the public do so as well. The result-peace, comfort and relief for the medically hopeless-would benefit both patient and physician. "Marantologists would not always look on death as an enemy, but often as a friend," concludes Poe. "They would have their vision extend beyond life into eternity...
...trick to slough off. It could be done, and diggers were caught napping in deep graves or sunbathing in trenches. Those who were languid, or in some manner troublesome, were asked to leave town. Some volunteers never caught on, and the worst ones were legendary. One year a particularly hopeless digger was told to find the edge of a foundation but instead cut about three feet further into the boundary bank than necessary, causing the field house above him to collapse. Some sites gave awards to the most spastic digger in honor of one infamous digger whose ineptitude was legion...