Hang on a second, I need to check on how the Pope is doing before I start. Not too good. At least they stopped dressing him and wheeling him over to the window.

This is the week of death in a culture that is fascinated with death--as long as it's on a personal level. No fools, we, it's evident that the husband wanted to get on with his life. Or is it that the parents couldn't let go after fifteen years? And how conscious was she, really? Before March 18, when is the last time you even had a tiny inkling of a memory of the name Karen Ann Quinlan? And now that it's finished, we'll wait weeks for the autopsy report. How low can we go?

The shadow news is the ghost detainees. You know, the prisoners the CIA hid in violation of international law. Do you think they have any relation to those poor blokes we sent off to who knows which countries to be tortured? And how many civilians and service members were killed in Iraq yesterday? Oh, sorry, you can't find it because there are too many articles about the right to live and the right to die. Where do you draw the lines?

We continue to be an empire in decline. The poor we will always have with us, but don't you think one of the wealthiest nations on earth could ease their suffering a little? I hear stories of rats in New York and children in L.A. who hit the emergency rooms to have cockroaches removed from their ears. In Fort Wayne, two drug dealers confined a woman in a box for three days, letting her out to rape her, beat her, and force her to cash bad checks. Did poverty have anything to do with it? But these are distractions, mere tales. I can't think about them...I'm too busy worrying about the Pope.