Friday, June 3, 2011

Jack Makes "Final Exit"

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, 83, better known as Dr. Death, because of his controversial crusade for assisted suicide, has himself just "passed away peacefully and naturally" without anyone pulling his plug, or injecting him with lethal doses of drugs ... no assisted suicide for Jack. The man who assisted and pushed for others to have the right to knock themselves off, faced his own natural death without seeking the escape of suicide.

Dr. Kevorkian was an unemployed pathologist who authored a book titled, "Final Exit", the first how-to book for suicide, followed by the development of his famous suicide machine,which he named. "Mercitron". He also had Orwellian dreams of setting up suicide clinics, which he called, "Obitoria". Assisting in the suicide of more than 130 people, he was convicted in 1998 of second-degree murder in the case of a 52 year old man with Lou Gehrig's disease, leading to his medical license being irrevocably revoked.

Early in his career, Kevorkian planned to conduct invasive medical experiments on "living" human beings. His focus, in the beginning, was on death-row inmates facing execution. Why death-row inmates? Dr. Kevorkian explained, "The best way to understand the mechanisms of the criminal mind is to study all parts of the intact living brain." Question ... What separates Kevorkian from Jeffery Dahmer? Answer ...The media and Al Pacino.

Al won an Emmy in 2010 for portraying Jack in the HBO film, "You Don't Know Jack". You bet you didn't know Jack! Like most serial killers, Jack had many facets. During his acceptance speech, Pacino praised Kevorkian, calling him, "brilliant and interesting and unique". So was every prototype of the Anti-Christ we've ever had ... ie ... Nero, Diocletian, Pol-pot, Genghis Khan ... in our day in age ... Stalin, Hitler, Bin Laden, to name a few... I'm sure they were all darlings of the media in their day too. Al went on to say, "It's really an honor to have had the pleasure to try to portray someone as brilliant and interesting and unique as Dr. Jack Kevorkian. And the fun I had just trying to get inside of his head, which of course, I could never." Let's hope not. What's Al selling here? What's brilliant about killing people? What's interesting about assisting vulnerable human beings to die? And what is unique about someone who is just another serial killer? Unless you have an agenda? What was the Emmy really for? Have actors who played Adolf Hitler ever glamorized the monster, or enjoyed getting inside his head?

Kevorkian went to prison after killing Thomas Youk on CBS's 60 Minutes and was released 8 years later, a frail old man, but still a crusader for death. With the death of Dr. Kevorkian, will the debate over assisted suicide go away? I highly doubt it ... and here's why ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, will absolutely bring about rationing of health care as a federal mandate. In the year 500 BC Hypocrites separated physician as healer from physician as killer. The first and primary goal of medicine is, "to do no harm". That wall was breached in 1973 when the physician became the killer with abortion, followed by Dr. Death, to be continued with Obamacare.

Ponder, Oregon, Washington and Montana, already have legalized physician assisted suicide. How many other states will follow. Will Jack be back?

No comments: