Word: kevorkianism
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...Kevorkian is acquitted, it will be a major p.r. victory for the right to die. If he loses, he has vowed to starve himself to death in jail. Either way, Death will get plenty of headlines--but his spin doctor will probably get even more...
...when I hear about euthanasia and Jack Kevorkian, sirens go off in my mind. Maybe I'm working with an old paradigm, like Munich, but I can't help it. I think of the case of Franz Stangl, a perfectly conventional Vienna policeman and good citizen who after the Anschluss became a security officer at hospitals for the aged, infirm and imbecilic, and helped--humanely at first, so they said--to ease the very worst cases, the utterly hopeless, the deformed and subhuman, toward a death that all reasonable people at the time thought would be the only decent thing...
What's that got to do with Kevorkian? It is not so difficult, for me at least, to envision a society of brave new benignity and rationality, in which a sort of humane disposal system would tidy up and whisk away to dreamland the worst-case geezers and crones. They are, after all, incredibly expensive and unproductive; the poor droolers cost a fortune, the lion's share of an already out-of-control medical budget. They are miserable in their lives. And they are a terrible inconvenience to that strain of the American character that has sought to impose rational...
...course, when the baby boomers themselves get up into the Kevorkian years, there may be interesting changes in their thinking. Alongside the euthanasia that some might be willing to visit on their parents (the end-of-life completion of the parricide they rehearsed when shouldering their elders aside in the '60s), they will no doubt devote themselves feverishly to bringing about miracles to extend their lives. Viagra was just the beginning. The boomers' will toward immortality is quite fierce and will eventually produce, though I will not be around to see them, hilarious tragedies...
...point, says Cathleen. Most doctors around the country consider Kevorkian a sort of useful nut, she judges; they are not necessarily unhappy that he has raised the issue. The problem with my solution, she says, is that it gives doctors no legal protection. For example, a nurse who disapproves of the decision of family and doctor to withhold care or to actively hasten death might report the case and have everyone up on malpractice--or murder--charges...