"I Don't Want to Die"

What's with the near-obsessive repetition of this shriek of terror? It's ubiquitous. And silly.

‘Mommy, I don’t want to die. I love you,’ was the alleged plea of Louisiana nine-year-old Camille Hebert before her mother stabbed her to death.

"I Don't Want to Die of a Heart Attack When I'm 25," proclaims the title of a dieting blog.

"I don't want to die, ever," comments an anonymous blog reader in response to the post of a 95-year-old who proclaims his desire to live.

Why not die?

Were any of these people composing an immortal symphony when the thought of death came to them? On the verge of curing cancer? About to sign a treaty abolishing torture, nuclear weapons and poverty forever?

Did they think they were alone in this? By the time I started writing this, about 61,900 people had died this day on the planet.*

Life's a bitch and then you die. My preferred version of this urban saying is "life's a bitch and then you marry one." The image makes a better allegory. Life does treat us roughly and we are pretty much stuck with it, like it or not. The only divorce available is death.

So why prolong it? Are we all so rich, so healthy, so overwhelmingly happy, so virtuous that living is, itself, a philosophical good or a psychosomatic pleasure?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not proposing that we all engage in mass suicide. (The environment will take care of that, if nuclear weapons don't.) I'm just wondering if we can all just look at death in the face and behave with some semblance of dignity.

I am dying. I will die. All of us are dying from the minute we're born. At some moment in the future that we don't know, we will all be dead. Probably forgotten not long after. Our bodies will turn to dust.

So?

When I was a believer in God I thought, of course, that there was something else on the other side. Some people do everything here thinking of that other side: they are "good" to avoid "hell." I didn't particularly care: I thought being good was worthy in itself, or being bad sounded like more fun at the time.

Now I doubt there's anything at the other side of death, at least not much more than there is on this side -- which is to say, not much at all. Cosmically, we are smaller than microscopic; in terms of the span of time in which we can estimate events to have occurred, our lives are shorter than seconds.

What's so important, precious, significant, worth defending about our particular lives?

Die. Die with some self-respect, not like a quivering fool.

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* Note: as I was putting the finishing touches on this post the number of deaths today stood at more than 66,800. To paraphrase the movie disclaimer: 3,900 people have died during the writing of this post. Now there's a number that is more fitting. That would likely wipe out everyone I have ever known.

Speculator Dies, Gets Canonized

Abe Pollin may not get a Rot In Hell Award, but that's because he's too insignificant to deserve hell. Purgatory will do. In any case, what's with stiletto sharp columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times canonizing a guy whose life was essentially devoted to real estate speculation?

He owned a basketball team -- because he was rich. He invested lots of money in downtown Washington, D.C. -- because he was rich. He started, too late to live to see it, an "affordable housing" project in the Third World section of Washington, D.C. -- because it assuaged his conscience concerning how he got rich.

As Balzac wrote, behind every fortune there is a crime. I haven't investigated into the details of Pollin's particular crimes, but I'm sure nothing of what he did was charity. He had fun being a basketball owner, he got his money back and then some from his "courageous investing," that's why it's called investment.

Oh, and after making millions for how many decades in the Washington area, did he decide to set aside a portion of the land he bought, on speculation, in Southeast Washington, where health, wealth and well-being indicators are closer to most developing failed states than the USA. And what tax breaks did he get from the deal?

The land in Southeast has been cheap for years while Pollin and his friends were buying it up in expectation of the planned development that a baseball stadium near the area would bring. With the best politicians money can buy, the land he bought for chump change is becoming quite valuable.

So, excuse me, but Abe Pollin was no saint. He was merely a speculator who got rich. I'm so tired of the hagiographies of shameless name-dropping sycophants such as Dowd.

The Gory Details

Should the public be spared the gory details of unpleasant things such as war or rape, asks a participant in a discussion.* Is there no role for narrative that tells us in the first person what certain horrible experiences are like? In brief, no.

Let me put this in context.

We live in a world soaked in portrayals and testimonials of gore, human, animal, plant and possibly even mineral. We are so overloaded with these sounds, images and words that there is a surfeit of Holocaust jokes, Christa McAuliffe jokes and dead Kennedy jokes.

I confess I told a September 11 joke while the towers were still smoldering (something to do with the World Trade Center's architectural design, or lack thereof) and George W. Bush told another one to his budget chief in the next few days (something about hitting a presidential disaster "trifecta").

We joke about these things because it is part of the human condition. Nothing new.

There is nothing about war, rape, genocide, hunger or suicide airplane hijackers (aka "terrorists") that we haven't heard of, seen replayed umpteen times on television, read the book, the novel, the film treatment of the novel, the T-shirt and the bumper sticker. Anyone beyond the age of 11 (and quite a few below) who denies this either (a) has been sequestered in a jury panel since 1963; (b) lives on another planet; or (c) is lying.

Want war gore? Read "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. Get off on genocide? Oh, where to start ... ? Try "Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Hannah Arendt. Rape? Try 2 Samuel 13:1-21.

There is nothing new about this. Nothing worth retelling. No one will stop war, genocide or rape because of a good first-person narrative. The only thing more "literary" or "artistic" gore serves is the narcissism of the writer or artist, who fleetingly gets attention for work that is utterly unoriginal.

Don't feed Narcissus.

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* See Son of Polanski or Abandonment vs Rape for links to the discussion.