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Reader question:
"In this sentence - Despite his prattle about
cutting the deficit, a grudging nod to global climate change, and yet
another plea for backup on his Iraq plan, Bush's presidency entered its
final phase on life support - what does 'on life support' mean?"
My comments:
"Life support" reminds me of a visit to an ICU
(intensive care unit) room in a hospital in Beijing, a few years ago.
There I saw how a mechanical respiration system worked.
When I came into the room, doctors had had a tube pushed through the
nostril of a dying patient down into his windpipe so that, with the
machine turned on, he could be seen breathing as though on his own, the
chest rising and falling in rhythm.
The breathing machine, as it is commonly called, is one such thing to
put a person "on life support" with. A life support system in the medical
field is an apparatus utilized to preserve life after a patient's own body
functioning system has begun to fail him.
For once, I saw the breathing machine at work. The patient I saw was
put on life support just so that he appeared to be still alive, so that
closest relatives and friends could come and see him for the last time,
before he was officially declared dead and gone. And that particular
patient appeared to be "breathing" strong, but with effort. His chest
heaved markedly every time he "breathed in", and he gave out a loud
snoring sound all the time. It was all the machine's doing, the snoring
along with the heaving.
Very cruel, I sometimes think when I recall that hospital scene. But
that is that. You got the analogy. For George Bush's presidency to be
declared to be "on life support" is for the writer of that sentence to say
that the US President's policies, on Iraq and others, are failing, barely
surviving, not at all working.
In other words, the presidency is on its last legs.
Or its days are numbered.
This last expression is literally true - Bush has just about two years
to go.
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