The revisionist project to create a fictional Jack Kevorkian as merely a lovable, if sometimes tactless, man of compassion–rather the misanthropic and ghoulish nut that he really is–continues. (See Kevorkian paintings I uploaded to accompany this post. He sometimes used human blood in the paint.) You Don’t Know Jack, the biopic on HBO starring Al Pacino, pushes that meme, just as I predicted, and Newsweek approves. From the movie review:
Relax about Pacino’s tendency to chew the scenery. He’s terrifically restrained—even his flat Midwestern accent. His complicated Kevorkian comes close to being a lovable old coot in a cardigan and fishing hat, but he’s also rude and anti-social. He may be a weird guy, but he’s a zealot, not a murderer. Until this film, we have not glimpsed a human beneath the ghoulish Dr. Death figure. That fleshed-out image matters because Kevorkian remains a touchstone in the euthanasia debate. In a Vanity Fair/CBS poll last month, 40 percent of those asked said he was “not as bad as he’s made out to be,” and 34 percent chose “egomaniac who takes advantage of sick people.” Like the movie’s title, the poll put a cheeky gloss on a serious question. Making the grim message palatable may be the new, fashionable twist in burnishing Kevorkian’s image.
To depict Kevorkian as merely idiosyncratic, you have to willfully refuse to report the full story in all of its macabre vividness. And that is something the media has done now for nearly two decades. But let us be clear: They don’t know Jack because they don’t want to know Jack. But I do. As I stated in a previous post, this is the truth about Jack Kevorkian:
1. Before assisting the suicides of disabled, terminally ill, and the non sick despairing, Kevorkian went to most prisons where executions are conducted asking to experiment on condemned prisoners.
2. He never limited his killing practice to people with terminal illnesses. About 70% were disabled. Five of Kevorkian’s patients were not sick upon autopsy.
3. Kevorkian took the kidneys from one assisted suicide victim–a man with quadriplegia–and held a press conference offering them “first come, first served.”
4. Janet Good (played by Susan Sarandon), conspired with Kevorkian in his reign of lawlessness, even planning to help kill a patient and then, with Kevorkian, rush the cadaver into a hospital, so organs could be procured. (They never carried out the plan). She committed assisted suicide and her autopsy showed that her pancreatic cancer was not near the terminal stage.
5. Kevorkian did not care much about alleviating the suffering of patients, (he once said he couldn’t remember their names) but rather called it “a first step, an early distasteful professional obligation” toward obtaining a license to engage in human experimentation, writing further…
6. Kevorkian wanted to experiment on the brains and nervous systems of people he was euthanizing…
It is a disturbing sign of the times that a man who is so clearly disturbed and a social outlaw, could be depicted as a hero. Here’s a link to a more detailed piece I wrote about “Jack the Valiant” for your perusal.
April 15th, 2010 | 1:43 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys. Vince Humphreys said: SHS: Newsweek Loves Kevorkian http://bit.ly/97Du62 #tcot [...]
April 15th, 2010 | 3:34 pm
In regards to # 6: if one assumes that a person useless and disposable, then the whole idea of conscience can be put on hold, or on some shelf, as well. I don’t have to think about this person as a human being, therefore I can use them for experimentation. Witness Holocaust victims: thinking “logic” goes that since they are headed towards death anyway, then why not “use” them for experiments. Even if the experiments are made towards the progression of scientific discovery and the end of diseases (like cancer, for example), the end does not justify the means.
As a side note, Mr. Smith: Love the photos you picked. Although the first photo is making me uneasy: first hand appears to have a moon/crescent (muslim?) sign, whereas the other has is SS? I wonder what it actually is meant to represent?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
April 15th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
I think it is a protest against the Armenian genocide.
April 15th, 2010 | 6:38 pm
I see, I see. Then it would make a perfect sense.
April 15th, 2010 | 6:47 pm
It is obvious to me that Mr. Kevorkian is a scumbag. It amazes me that some people consider him a hero. It just goes to show how far society has sunk that he gets the respect he does in this society.
April 17th, 2010 | 9:11 am
Hollywood is one big whorehouse.
April 18th, 2010 | 10:12 pm
George Orwell’s critique of Salvador Dali comes to mind upon reading this.
I would recommend everybody who has read the above article to also read this, and look at the similarities between Kevorkian’s nihilist art and that of Dali’s.
Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
http://www.george-orwell.org/Benefit_of_Clergy:_Some_Notes_on_Salvador_Dali/0.html
April 20th, 2010 | 2:31 am
Will you stop lying about Dr. Kevorkian? He is one of the most Christ-like figures we have today and we will not have the spawn of Satan like you slander the good name of Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
April 20th, 2010 at 9:45 am
The7sticks: Truth is an absolute defense to slander. Everything I wrote is documented, and indeed, much of it out of his own book. What is wrong with you?
April 22nd, 2010 | 3:27 pm
Hey The7Sticks, are you serious? Your likeness to Christ is a total insult to God Himself.
April 24th, 2010 | 4:49 pm
Anderson Cooper’s interview of Dr. Death was so superficial. I remember Janet Adkins well, a beautiful but depressed woman of 54 who had played tennis shortly before she was killed by Jack. What is so dignified about being whacked by a creepy old guy in the back of a dirty van?
Now, we have the great Hollywood act of romanticization of euthanasia via Al Pacino, another saggy guy. If it weren’t so scary and dangerous, it’d be amusing. Let us all remember that this is the way Roe v. Wade became law: some states allow abortion and the Supreme Court agrees that it is a Constitutional right.
And what about the Netherlands? They have definitely landed at the bottom of the slippery slope. Read all about it online.
One more thing: as a retired hospice R.N. I know about “death with dignity,” and it ain’t Jack.
April 24th, 2010 | 5:35 pm
Even if Kevorikian wasn’t the best of men those
who suffer from a terminal illness deserve the choice. People try to demonize the practice because they have a problem with the idea of suicide and death and they try and push these fears onto Kevorikian and say that he was a bad person so inherently his mercy giving practices where.
April 24th, 2010 | 11:53 pm
My mother had surgically induced cirrosis. Even though it killed her, I still can’t remember how to spell it. And I hate it too much to look it up. Her skin would tear at the lightest touch. She was in the final stages and suffered every day. Her doctor said she could last up to eight years like that. She would be in the nursing home and she’d sink, sink, sink, quick they’d rush her to icu… pull her back up and back in the nursing home to sink again.
Finally I said to her doctor, “either help her get better or let her go.” He gave me the worthless crap about being in the business of saving lives. I told him if it was his dog in that condition, he would out of compassion, put it down. If it was his mother, he wouldn’t keep her suffering for up to eight more years. I told him no one was benefiting from my mother suffering except his bank account. At that point he turned shades of purple rage and insisted I leave. I did.
I went home and prayed.
The next time the nursing home called him about putting her in icu, he said for them to ask me and do whatever I said. I said, “no.”
My mother didn’t suffer eight years. She suffered eight months. Can you hear me??? She still suffered eight lonnnnng months. Unnecessarily. If she had been your dog, you would have had more compassion than the medical system had for my mother.
April 25th, 2010 | 12:13 am
Oh and by the way, I’m better at preventing suicides than anyone you’ll ever meet. But when they’re suffering and there’s no hope of it going away or getting better, keeping them alive just because you can is b.s. The best thing we could do to get euthanasia legalized is to open up nursing homes for dogs… people would go nuts if we forced them to suffer the same way we make humans suffer. But who could stand to treat a dog that way? Even to get equal rights for humans? Not me. I love dogs.
April 28th, 2010 | 11:57 pm
It is sad to me that all of you religious people think you know what is best for everyone else. How sad to think your thoughts should control the lives of others. Control your own life, but leave others alone. Why is that so hard for you?!
May 2nd, 2010 | 6:03 pm
FINALLY someone who agrees that Kevorkian is the opposite of a hero!! I saw this movie and thought that the movie portrayed him to be the opposite of what they had intended it made him look like an idiot/moron/crazy person!! Dick Thompson looked like the hero!
May 3rd, 2010 | 12:49 pm
I agree with Mike. I don’t support or reject this idea. I believe that everyone has their own choices to make, and everyone else that THINKS they have a say in someone else’s life should sit down and shut up. I am so sick of watching people not be able to make their own choices. I work in a nursing home, and you see cases that are so desolate that it would make your stomach curl, but the people living there have next to NO rights. Smokers that wish to live there must quit smoking, and people that want to have a drink must only have a sip a night. They have to have a doctor sign off on it and they aren’t aloud to keep it in their rooms it has to stay locked away in the nurses cabinet. If the nurse decides that they don’t need it on a given night they aren’t aloud to have it. Upon arrival, all the over the counter creams and butters that you used at home before you got to the home are taken away. (Example would be Bengay) even if that is the only thing that keeps your condition in check properly. Another thing that bothers me is there is a terminally ill woman that weighs between 400-500lbs and she hardly eats anything, she has a terrible disorder and her weight will never go away, her mother and sister both died the same way. However, if the woman wants a little bit extra whipped cream on her damn fat free sugar free tasteless pudding, the CNA’s go berzerk and tell her that she can’t have it. It makes me so mad. Her condition is unchanging and she is stuck waiting to die in the same room as her mother did, but she can’t have a extra flop of whipped cream?? People should stop trying to take control of other people’s lives. Didn’t momma ever tell you? You don’t mess with things that don’t belong to you. That STARTS with humans’ lives and ends with their belongings. Sorry for the rant, I just wondered if anyone felt the same way…
May 6th, 2010 | 9:45 am
Jack Kevorkian is a good man! he practices euthanasia to help people not hurt them. he does not “kill” people to kill them its to put them out of their misery. i dont see how people cant see this. if you were laying in a hospital bed being told you were going to die in 8 months and you had to just lay there like that in pain i guarentee anyone would want to die sooner.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
May 6th, 2010 at 10:38 am
As a hospice volunteer Jackkie, I can tell you that’s pure baloney. It’s also discrimination. And typically, you don’t deal at all with what HE WROTE were his motives–e.g., human quack experimentation.
May 7th, 2010 | 11:23 pm
All I can say is HMOs are the new Kavorkians (well, maybe not new…maybe it’s just we’ve all been too trusting and you haven’t experienced it in your lives yet). Children, keep a close watch on your parents and elderly loved ones. Don’t get sucked into a palliative care scheme sent over by the HMOs where they medicate you to into oblivion with drugs that suppress breathing and the result is involuntary passive euthanasia! There are lots of babyboomers out there…be aware of what’s really going on! It’s happening right now.
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