Bored, mute, incontinent, unable to read (she had loved literature), she shared an institution with people so demented they often shrieked. She wanted but was unable to be dead, and the staff dealt with this by stuffing her with antidepressants. Covid finally saved her.
Since, like UD, lots of people visit their dead but not dead aunts in institutions, lots of people support medically assisted dying. My aunt had been all her life a very proud woman – proud, really, to a fault – and UD saw clearly with every visit how humiliating it was for her, how grindingly absurd, to hang around, heart beating.
Beating in the state of Maryland, seventy percent of whose people support medically assisted dying, while its politicians dither.
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An essay like Elaina Plott Calabro’s in The Atlantic is a fine example of first-rate propaganda on this subject. Most propaganda is crude and icky, but her essay is a lesson in the deployment of powerful sophisticated propaganda. Anti-MAD propaganda. Let’s see how she does it.
Her title is brilliant, intellectually and graphically. Big black slasher-film letters, each of which spits further gouts of black, dominate the first page. It’s a fucking ENORMOUS headline.
And here’s the content: CANADA IS KILLING ITSELF.
Now, given that Canada’s population has recently “soared” to 41.5 million, this might seem a strange headline, but it can’t be denied that the combination of style and content, right from the get-go in this essay, has you thinking THE HORROR THE HORROR. Red slashes across the letters, their own letters drawn from what we are to take to be the Kafkaesque administrative paperwork of Canadian MAD, create a loud lurid BUREAUCRACY KILLS effect. Before you even start reading!
The first few paragraphs deepen, with stylistic skill, this sense of the sickening surreality of a state killing its citizens, and the emergence of a class of doctors positively slobbering at the thought of their next victim.
[M]edical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.
Dance dance revolution! Come to mama!
And now the writer poses some quite stupid questions, like this one:
If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?
Uh, yes, there are many people… uh… most people… who shouldn’t be helped to die, no matter how keen you are on the autonomy thing.
It all reminds UD of this Onion article:
‘GRAND RAPIDS, MI—Dr. James Munson, known to millions as the infamous “vehicular manslaughter doctor,” participated in his 23rd doctor-assisted vehicular manslaughter Monday, running over an 81-year-old Michigan woman.
Munson, who was arrested and charged with first-degree vehicular manslaughter in the incident, hit Mildred Peters of Portage, MI, with his 1994 Ford Escort in a supermarket parking lot, killing her instantly.
“She was clearly in terrible pain,” said Munson, who did not know the woman. “She was moving very slowly, and it was a struggle for her just to push the shopping cart to her car. I don’t even think she would have been able to lift her groceries into the trunk without help. All this woman wanted was to die in a dignified, painless manner. Thank God I was able to give her that chance.”
According to witnesses, after saying a prayer and lighting a candle, Munson got in his car and accelerated to an estimated 80 mph, hitting Peters head-on with the controversial four-wheeled euthanizing device.
Munson’s lawyer, Donald Ranieri, defended his client in a statement Tuesday. “Dr. Munson’s only interest is in easing the terrible pain of the nation’s elderly,” Ranieri said. “It is his deep conviction that no one should have to suffer through life with Multiple Sclerosis, arthritis, or high blood pressure.”
When informed of the incident, Peters’ daughter expressed relief that the woman’s suffering had finally ended.
“It had been years since my mother was able to live a normal life,” said Jayne Peters-Williams, 48. “She was so weak, she couldn’t climb long flights of stairs. She needed help getting in the tub. And if she just wanted to read, she had to put on a special pair of glasses. What kind of a life is that?”
“My mother’s suffering is over at last,” Peters-Williams said. “As her crumbling, withered body soared through the air after being hit by Munson, for one shining moment she was finally free.”
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on physician-assisted vehicular manslaughter without patient consent. Michigan is one of just five states that permit assisted vehicular manslaughter with consent of a family member.
The nation’s leading ethicists are divided on the issue of automotive euthanasia. While some, such as Hemlock Society president Milton Habisch, call it a “clean, effective” way to end the agony of chronic pain sufferers; others assert it creates more problems than it solves.
“The procedure is far from perfect,” said Elaine Curtis, co-director of the San Francisco-based What About The Children? foundation. “In 1991, his car ran out of gas just before he was about to hit a Goshen, IN, woman suffering from back pain, and he was forced to borrow the bicycle of a nearby child, riding over his victim an agonizing 175 times until she finally died of internal bruising.”
Dr. Munson’s controversial suicide device is controlled by two foot-activated levers, one for acceleration and one for braking. By pressing down hard on the acceleration lever, the machine increases in velocity to the point where anyone it is aimed at can be killed quickly and painlessly. As an added precaution, Munson anaesthetizes himself with a fifth of gin before each procedure.’
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Calabro’s Canada has mucho Munsons milling about, eyes out for the next Mildred Peters.
Here’s one of the Munsons, it seems; all creepy sterile anonymity in a queasy blue filter, and backgrounded by ghostly body linens.
My point ain’t that the author is necessarily wrong to worry about hard euthanasia cases, as well as about a tendency to broaden – call them admissions standards. My point is that she should not have laid on the propaganda so thickly. To the extent that the reader is aware of this manipulation, her argument suffers.