No Final Exit?

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Planned death be no longer proud.

Well, now the political bosses have finished killing off the races for the presidential nominations, it’s time for an update on the world of planned death without primaries.

One year ago this month, Jack Kevorkian managed to get himself convicted of second-degree murder, a result he worked long and hard to achieve.

"Now I’ve got them right where I want them," he told me hours after the verdict, calling forth images of Custer at Little Bighorn. What he seems to have thought was that throngs of outraged supporters would protest, and this would help pressure the courts to a speedy ruling striking down the law, or at the very least, gain him a new trial.

Instead, he was almost immediately forgotten. "Prisoners don’t usually hold press conferences,’’ an assistant prosecutor purred when Jack hit the slam. The world had grown weary of his show, and without fresh video and Geoffrey Fieger at work to keep the gallery stirred up, the restless media soon drifted back to cross-dressers and criminals.

Emboldened, the authorities moved in on his protégé, Dr. Georges Reding, who reportedly fled to his native Belgium to beat a murder rap. Congress – virtually ignored by the media – now threatens to reverse the law voters passed in Oregon, the only state to legalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Planned death be no longer proud. And across MediaLand, remarkably, there seem suddenly to be no more horribly suffering people agonizing about taking their own lives. For nine years the airwaves and public prints had been full of ‘em, but once Jack was on ice, interest vanished.

Naturally, the wretched are still there, in as much or more despair. But unless a story has vast social significance (JonBenet, for instance) – the media can only pay attention for so long. It isn’t like all of us were going to get old and die, or something.

Yet in recent weeks a new assisted-suicide sensation has been sparking more controversy than anything since the infamous rusty Volkswagen van. Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, long ago became the do-it-yourself Kevorkian of the movement with his best-selling Final Exit. But now he’s out with a video version.

And that’s meant fireworks. The keepers of modern morality don’t much care what you write; it’s them damn pictures they can’t stand. The video has been shown on public-access cable in a few places, including Hawaii, touching off a firestorm of protest.

Most of the barely half-hour-long tape shows Humphry, a vigorous looking 70-year-old, sitting at a desk talking. But it does give quite specific instructions on the best and most painless ways of Doing It, shows and tells which pills are best for the job, and in the film’s most potentially disturbing sequence, ol’ Derek himself demonstrates what he calls "self-deliverance with a plastic bag.’’ Now I do not especially want some toddler learning how to put a plastic bag over his head. Nor would this be good for 15-year-old Debbie, right after she has just caught her Eddie kissing Cheryl. But the hue and cry is hypocritical. Few kids are ever likely to see Final Exit, and few indeed would stick with it after its first boring minutes. Far more homes have loaded handguns lying around than ever will have a Final Exit video (try and do something about that, dear readers) and a mere riff of the remote will turn up far sicker stuff sprawled across the spectrum of the vast wasteland any day. Naturally, from his jail cell, Kevorkian has denounced Humphry and the video, though he has never seen it. He has had an off-again, on-again relationship with Humphry for 10 years, with Humphrey generally supporting Kevorkian and our homey generally being rude. "Only a doctor should do this," he thunders. Yeah, well, you were the only one in business, JK, and you got yourself benched. Shall we tell the suffering to take two aspirin and call Kevorkian when the parole board lets him loose, sometime after May 2007? Frankly, the brutal truth is they are unlikely ever to let him out, even if, as his lawyer says, he’s promised not to do it anymore.

Kevorkian is too much of a lightning rod. The establishment intends to make certain he stays where he is, if for no other reason than to teach ‘em all a lesson about thumbing your nose at the powers that are. Yet 76 million baby boomers age relentlessly on, getting ever closer to their appointment with the morphine drip. This one is far from over, as almost all of us will grimly see.

Embarrassed Again: The neo-fascists of the Michigan Democratic Party were once again shown up by the voters they despise. Having pulled out of the presidential primary, they ordered their troops not to participate, and to wait instead for their private caucuses last Saturday. What happened?

Damned if 99.6 percent of the state’s registered voters didn’t listen to my call for a caucus boycott! Fewer than 19,000 humans statewide showed up for the two-hour farce – less than half the number who voted in the reviled Democratic primary, without even counting the many thousands who voted for John McCain.

The primary drew 43,000 Democrats, who voted either uncommitted or for Lyndon LaRouche, who got nearly as many then as Prince Al did Saturday. The party won’t count those votes. Fortunately, they won’t be doing the counting in November.

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for the Metro Times. You can write Jack Lessenberry c/o this paper or via e-mail.