After posting the brief response to the death of Jack Kevorkian here this morning, The Corner asked me to reflect further. I decided to focus on Kevorkian as holding up a “dark mirror” to society. From my post:
So, now that he is gone, what is Kevorkian’s legacy? He assisted the suicides of 130 or so people and lethally injected at least two by his own admission (his first and his last); as a consequence of the latter, he served nearly ten years in prison for murder. But I think his more important place in contemporary history was as a dark mirror that reflected how powerful the avoidance of suffering has become as a driving force in society, and indeed, how that excuse seems to justify nearly any excess.
Thus, while the media continually described him as the “retired” doctor who helped “the terminally ill” to commit suicide, at least 70 percent of his assisted suicides were not dying, and five weren’t ill at all according to their autopsies. It. Didn’t. Matter. Kevorkian advocated tying assisted suicide in with organ harvesting, and even stripped the kidneys from the body of one of his cases, offering them at a press conference, “first come, first served.” It. Didn’t. Matter. And as noted above, he wanted to engage in ghoulish experiments. It. Didn’t. Matter. He was fawned over by the media (Time invited him as an honored guest to its 75th anniversary gala, and he had carte blanche on 60 Minutes), enjoyed high opinion polls, and after his release from prison was transformed by sheer revisionism into an eccentric Muppet. He was even played by Al Pacino in an HBO hagiography.
I conclude:
Time will tell whether Kevorkian will be remembered merely as a kook who captured the temporary zeitgeist of the times, or whether he was a harbinger of a society that, in the words of Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne, “believes in nothing [and] can offer no argument even against death.“
I am sure I will want to reflect on his obituaries in the MSM, but enough for now.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:48 pm
What’s the big problem with suicide, assisted or otherwise? it’s an individual choice. It’s very arrogant to be telling other folks what they should/shouldn’t do.
The world is overpopulated by a factor of at least ten so whomever doesn’t want to stick around should be free to leave without others sticking their own ideals into it. And, ultimately, nobody gets out of this thing alive anyway…
V Reply:
June 3rd, 2011 at 1:58 pm
@Big Don,
You can tell people what ever you want: it at least used to be a free country. You can outlaw whatever you want, and people will still choose that option.
So… even if we kept our laws and said what we say, your arguments are false. We can believe what ever we want, and you can still end your own life. All of these things are true, because it’s America, and you have free will. It’s not like the state can arrest a corpse.
However, I will not validate your choice as a good one. I will not say that suicide is the solution, because that presumes that life is a problem. There are things worse in life than pain. There are things worse than suffering. These things pass, though they are chronic.
I attempted suicide once. I’m glad I failed. Most people who are in the general position to do so for reasons of pain and suffering don’t. Most of those people wouldn’t be legally allowed to do so anyway, because their testimony wouldn’t be allowed in court, nor their wills be accepted by an attorney. Suffering is terrible. I have witnessed it, I have experienced it.
But killing someone because you can’t stand to help and/or support them, and have no idea what they really want is worse. If killing people to limit the “excess population” is such an appealing notion, why would you decry genocide? The death penalty as a cost cutting measure? Wasn’t Hitler fighting the good fight against overpopulation? What’s the difference between those inconvenient old people, inconvenient babies and *other* inconvenient persons you don’t agree with? Please answer those questions firmly before you continue in error.
Your science is incorrect about over-population. Your data is from projections that are at least 40 years old. We are short 44 million people here in the USA because of abortion. Europe is well beyond that, and will soon be suffering from a lack of sufficient workforce to keep their teetering economy productive. Japan is likely to go extinct at current replacement rates. These things are not far off, either, in 20 to 50 years the symptoms will be extremely evident.
HistoryWriter Reply:
June 3rd, 2011 at 5:19 pm
@V,
“There are things worse in life than pain. There are things worse than suffering.”
Such as?
HW
pentamom Reply:
June 5th, 2011 at 11:22 am
@HistoryWriter, A culture which persuades people that there’s something wrong with them if they don’t want to get off the planet ASAP when trouble strikes.
HCM Reply:
June 7th, 2011 at 2:27 am
@pentamom, There’s a profound difference between knowing that overpopulation is bad, and exterminating millions of humans.
June 3rd, 2011 | 1:48 pm
Big Don — Thought experiment time.
Let’s say that tomorrow morning when you wake up, you find out that ten people in your workplace, the mailman, and the folks who run the gas station have all killed themselves in various ways. Also the teenage girl down the street, a mother with a couple toddlers, and the little old lady down the way. (I’m being fair and not mentioning relatives. And I’m assuming they don’t splatter their brains out over your house or anything like that.)
Are you okay with that?
HistoryWriter Reply:
June 3rd, 2011 at 5:17 pm
@Maureen,
OK with me, as long as I don’t have to send flowers to everybody.
HW
June 3rd, 2011 | 4:05 pm
Don, because a lot of people think of it when the suffering is temporary and can be treated. If it’s made legal, the loss of life that could happen would be catastrophic.
The argument starts about giving terminal patients a way to end real suffering, but as I have read Wes’s blog, it keeps getting larger and larger. You are okay with it not to end suffering, but as a way to get rid of some of the too many people. Some people think there should be no safeguards at all. Where will it end?
xomacoma Reply:
June 5th, 2011 at 7:04 am
That’s ridiculous, legal or not, if someone wants to kill themselves, they will find a way. All we do is treat illnesses, it doesn’t solve any problem, in fact, we appear to have more illness than ever before, physical, psychological, or otherwise. What’s truly catastrophic, is that, we are reversing natural selection by continuing the lives of genetically ill people and we are already extremely over-populated. How come it’s only humane to end an non-human animals misery? How come we we can see the benefit of controlling the populations of other animals, but somehow we’re above it?
HCM Reply:
June 7th, 2011 at 2:50 am
@xomacoma, Unless that are quadriplegics, or poor, or no connections in the medical world, or are too physically ill to do it, or…
June 3rd, 2011 | 5:46 pm
“You can tell people what ever you want” Yes, but unless the commentary is invited, you may be viewed as a [not nice person]…
[Those issues are not relevant to the post. I don't allow free-for-alls] If it’s an adult by free choice, no problem. Kevorkian’s clients all went to him for help, they weren’t coerced
June 3rd, 2011 | 8:10 pm
Don’t take it the wrong way, but this is the fourth time in my life that I’ve been relieved to here about someone’s death. Although, I guess it really won’t have that much effect on society as a whole, since he has been stopped from killing people since the late 1990s.
HCM Reply:
June 7th, 2011 at 3:20 am
@safepres, I too will feel that way when Margaret Tighe, Kevin Andrews, Tony Abbott, John Howard et al meet their deaths (natural or otherwise).
June 4th, 2011 | 3:40 pm
Well . . .
I surely hope any who, like Big Don, think the world is over-populated by a factor of 10, will do the right thing as the prescribe it for others.
Ya think?
HCM Reply:
June 7th, 2011 at 1:54 am
[Over the top. Please reformulate.]
jb Reply:
June 7th, 2011 at 10:05 am
@HCM,
Over the top? Reformulate?
Not hardly “over the top” in Kervorkian’s playbook. But I will rephrase what I said to Big Don:
“Do unto yourself what you would have done unto others.”
THat work?
June 6th, 2011 | 9:01 am
[...] the weekend. Wesley J. Smith, one of Kervorkian’s leading critics, reflects on his death here and here. He then reviews various media obituaries for Dr. Death, mostly negatively: Bloomberg, New York [...]
June 7th, 2011 | 1:53 am
Kevorkian will be remembered as a compassionate maverick who let his compassionate conscience (if marred by a fetish for medical experimentation) go too far.
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