Kevorkian: Death of a brave iconoclast (w. VIDEO)

PATRICE GREANVILLE

JACK KEVORKIAN, maliciously nicknamed “Dr. Death”, was a true-life hero, and like all genuine originals, he marched to his own drummer.

From time to time, even in contemporary America, a land now awash in appalling mediocrity, runaway imbecility, and prudish conformity—most vices inherited from the religious Calvinist fanatics that settled this nation and reinforced  by modern media—you get a true brave man, a veritable original, to challenge the tide of obtuse conventionality, and Kevorkian was such a man. That he was sent to the slammer for 10-to-25 by a judge who richly deserves her obscurity, is a testament to the burden that dumb religiosity and hypocrisy collect on America in the form of pervasive custom, a burden still far from lifted.

Kevorkian’s sin was his endorsement of the right of human beings—when imprisoned by a dreadful and incurable disease— to determine for themselves when they should leave this world. Murder, his opponents called it; assisted suicide in the face of painful and insurmountable odds was the term (properly) used by Kevorkian and his supporters. While no debate concerning life and death can ever be easy, we struggle with such option all the time in the case of our beloved companion animals, often choosing euthanasia as the most humane and charitable path when their pain becomes unbearable or their quality of life has deteriorated to the point of daily agony. The integrity of such logic should apply to humans, but apparently speciesism  once again gets in the picture and quickly muddies the waters, a notorious instance of human exceptionalism, a narcissistic hangup widely embraced by our breed but clearly in need of re-examination. Unfortunately, the pious busybodies never rest.

Against this backdrop it’s perhaps worth remembering that in an age when the official* mantra in the US is to fight fanatical Islam in all its forms, a hard enforcer of religious conformity, America, too, has a long tradition of violent social busybodies. Below we offer some of the interviews that CBS, notably 60 Minutes, did with Dr Kevorkian.

OF ALL THE INTERVIEWS he conducted for “60 Minutes,” Mike Wallace often said none had a greater impact than this one. (Watch video below)Dr. Jack Kevorkian had long been a public advocate of assisted suicide for the terminally ill. From 1990 to 1998, he claimed to have helped end the lives of some 130 willing subjects. In September of 1998, Dr. Jack Kevorkian videotaped himself injecting Thomas Youk, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, with a dose of lethal drugs.  Two months later, that videotape, along with Wallace’s interview with Kevorkian, aired on “60 Minutes,” sparking a national outcry. In March of 1999, Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 10-to-25 years in prison. He was released in 2007. Dr. Jack Kevorkian was 83 when he died. He suffered from kidney and heart problems and died, according to news reports, of natural causes. He is reported to have passed to the other side peacefully, in his sleep.—PG
* We say “official” because the way that rule (“fight fanatical Islam”)  is applied reeks with hypocrisy as Saudi Arabia is probably one of the chief  purveyors of Muslim fanaticism, and a brutal enforcer of such practices at home.

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DR KEVORKIAN & ANDY ROONEY (1996)

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