Some kind of Metallica

Rock documentaries are an interesting bunch. Inevitably, in our glossy age, they take the confessional form, following the narratological arcs so favored by programs like E "True Hollywood Story" or VH1's "Behind the Music." We're all modern-day Hegelians with the lather-rinse-repeat regularity of rise, sucess, excess, hubris, catastrophe, repeat. (Perhaps this explains the inexplicable popularity of Scarface among members of the recording industry and professional athletes, at least as documented by MTV's "Cribs." There is certainly a gleeful, hyperkinetic exuberance to Pacino's meteoric rise and unimaginative decline into cocaine addiction, paranoia, and violent murder. But I digress.) Invariably, criticism of rock documentaries focuses on how glamorous the band's life is made out to be, what a petulant bunch of idiots the band's members are (not enjoying their fame enough for our taste, are they?) or how much the events in the documentary resemble events in the fabled, now nearly mythical 'mockumentary' This is Spinal Tap. To paraphrase Mr. Dylan professors and great lawyers feel obligated to regurgitate inane quotes from Spinal Tap at particularly inopportune moments. Haven't we, as a civilization, heard enough times already that "it" (whatever it is, a new car, a new cuisinart, a material posession of some merit and consumptory pleasure) "goes to 11?" But again, I digress. You will, I aver, see what I mean.

I.

The much maligned heavy metal band Metallica has a rabid and terribly nostalgic following. Any conversation with a serious Metallica fan (and I don't mean dainty poncers like Curt Minerd or Eric Engler who labor under the amusing delusion that their crapulent S&M classical-art-rock collaboration with the poor San Francisco Symphony Orchestra is the pinacle of their career) will inevitably devolve into pointless bickering about exactly when the bastards sold out. Some will say it was when Dave left. Some will say it was when they softened up and made the melodic piece of crap Ride the Lightning. Some will be smartasses and claim, post-modernly, that they had always already sold out. In any case, everyone will agree that the Black Album was a definitive selling out (especially when they hired the Bon Jovi producer and haplessly named buffoon with great hair Bob Rock). In any case, the '90s were a decade of disapointment for the true, the proud, the tattoed folk with eardrums hammered flat from listening to "Whiplash" too many times (turned up to 11, yes, and I'm not sorry at all.) Metallica was treading water, getting fat from having sold 90+ million albums, and doing all that conventional stuff people tend to do when they get rich and happy, like having children and accumulating extensive land holdings.

So what's the point? Not much except to say that the band, in 2001, was pretty rudderless. James Hetfield was a pretty soused alcoholic, Lars Ulrich is an overgrown man-child who is simultaneously petulant and demanding, and Kirk Hammett is some kind of Buddhist saint, rather spacy but clearly a genuinely nice guy. How do I know this? Well, for the whole production of the aggressively mediocre St. Anger disc Metallica was seeing a shrink (charging a cool $40,000 bones or clams or whatever you call them a month) and letting a documentary team film them.

The result? Some Kind of Monster, the real-life documentary that just might, on balance, end up being a better rock documentary than This is Spinal Tap! I've got a compendium of various reviews to follow: Slate, A.O. Scott, TheOnion AV Club, and the Village Voice. David Edelstein of Slate begins his review thus:

It sounds like a swipe at Metallica to compare the smashing new documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (IFC Films) to a nonfiction remake of This Is Spinal Tap (1984). But it's more of a testament to how smart that landmark mockumentary was.

A.O. Scott pays tribute to the mockumentary in his second body paragraph:

Early in 2001, Metallica, one of the longest-lived and most popular heavy-metal bands, went into a converted military barracks in San Francisco to begin working on a new album....

At first the idea of a rock band in therapy sounds unlikely, if not downright comical, like ''This Is Spinal Tap'' with a screenplay by Janet Malcolm. And hearing James Hetfield, Metallica's ferocious, sometimes fearsome lead singer, talking about his feelings with Lars Ulrich, the band's baby-faced drummer, can be a little jarring. But Metallica's music is rooted in strong, unruly emotions, and it has been, for many fans, a kind of therapy in its own right.

Thankfully, Nathan Rabin is able to write a couple of paragraphs without referencing the albatros Spinal Tap but the same cannot be said of Chuck Eddy at the Voice:

Lars deserves bonus points for being shorter than his wife, and his remark that the band's "in a bit of a shit sandwich" wins the most-blatant–Spinal Tap–reference award....

Psychobabbling $40,000-a-month shrink Phil Towle occupies the David St. Hubbins's girlfriend role; he never quite draws Zodiac-sign portraits of band members, but his implicit suggestion that they try being Kraut-rockers in "meditative mode" would've made him a more useful producer than biz-sucking slimeball Bob Rock.

I want to put away my hammer for a minute and do some close reading, though. The reviews all hit upon a common point: Metallica isn't a bunch of rock gods but just a couple overgrown kids who have been sufficiently insulated by money, power, and prestige that they've never really had to grow up. Hetfield, before he goes into rehab, ditches his son's birthday to go bear hunting in Siberia and his lame attempts to justify the fact that he was downing stoli shots--you know, for the birthday--instead of actually being there begin to verge on the pathetic. Lars is hardly a shit-kicking metalhead but rather a wealthy art collector and former tennis star, and one of the more amusing sequences in the film feature him knocking back cocktails with his wife (easily 6 inches taller than him) while his excellent modern art collection (including a Basquiat that sells for 5 million) goes on the block at Christie's. In some ways the finer grain that the film gives you of these rock stars illustrates just how accidental their fame is. They're just a bunch of guys with some talents, some synthetic potential, and their mega-stardom is inexplicable. There's no reason, as Dave Mustaine (Metallica and Megadeath) seems to think, that there's anything besides luck in what separates a modestly sucessful band from a hugely sucessful band. Them's the breaks, I guess. But that's what's humanizing about the film: it adds transparency to rock musicianship, reveals the squables and sulking and arguments and powerplays that occur behind the curtain and before METALLICA struts out on stage in front of 100,000 watts of amplification.

II.

Back to Edelstein again.

The documentary was intended as a relatively straightforward look at the making of an album (it would be St. Anger), the first in years for a group that, in its 20-year history, has sold nearly a hundred million records. But as the film begins, that old black magic isn't there. The longtime bassist, Jason Newsted, has decamped after feeling artistically suffocated, leaving producer Bob Rock to fill in. More important, there's something eating the singer, James Hetfield, who's quarreling incessantly with the drummer and cofounder, Lars Ulrich.

The band members engage a therapist, Phil Towle, to help them talk through their problems, but Hetfield can't rise to the occasion—can't manufacture the adrenaline or endorphins or whatever it takes to make kick-ass heavy metal at age 40. There's a nasty exchange about Hetfield's guitar-playing, which Ulrich calls "stock," and then Hetfield takes off, slamming the door conclusively. The next thing anyone hears, he's in rehab—for, like, nine months.

That's a hell of a scene, Ulrich and Hetfield bickering like a married couple. It later turns out, as Ulrich engages in a bit of drum confessional, that Ulrich had always felt alienated from Hetfield and that he thought Hetfield was not only closer to Dave Mustaine but also unable to express any deep feelings of emotion for Ulrich unless it was after "42 beers." This, I'm afraid, is the real emotional center of Metallica and their problems--this tryptch of Dave, James and Lars. They're all disparted, now, no longer whole, aching, in an impossible way, to be together again, at the begining.

Will Hetfield be strong enough to endure the camera's scrutiny, now that he's so undefended? It's quite a contrast, this quiet, clean-and-sober fellow, sunk deeply into himself—his image intercut with shots of him in his prime as a Dionysian long-haired boozy metal titan. Suddenly, Hetfield's life is structured, his Metallica participation limited to four hours a day. But it's Ulrich who chafes against the restraints. He hates that Hetfield controls the recording process even passively, by his absence. The scene in which they have it out is a triumph of the therapeutic process: We see that this conflict goes so deep that it's like we're watching a marriage unravel. A marriage and a big, big business.

At some point, all successful rock bands must confront what Max Weber called "the bureaucratization of charismatic leadership." But isn't that bureaucracy what metal generally rails against? And what to do about that touchy-feely therapist, who starts to pass them lyrics and to fancy himself (they think) a part of the band: Must they shed him to regain their potency and be able to swagger on stage as true Metal Men? Hetfield raises the ultimate question in a climactic performance before inmates at San Quentin: Can you have aggression—the kind of head-banging fury that gave birth to heavy metal—without negative energy?

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is loose and uninsistent, yet these questions are always in front of us: The movie is brilliantly structured. (The structure is brilliant because it's barely visible.) It's about a youth culture that makes all aging graceless, a therapeutic culture that makes all aggression suspect, and a capitalist culture that makes the potential collapse of a zillion-dollar enterprise like Metallica the stuff of high drama.

Scott picks up on these threads as well. How, exactly, do you grow up when your fans want you to continue to channel their very adolescent rage? Hetfield poses these questions, more or less rhetorically, when the band films/plays at San Quentin. He tells the inmates, ferociously tattoed in tank tops and orange prison garb, held back by a thin line of uniformed guards with rifles, that he sucessfully channeled his rage into music, that he was angry enough to be in here with them. This reads as almost inauthentic but Hetfield is sincere, after his rehab, and learning freshly music as vocation and not just avocation.

For nearly 20 years, Mr. Ulrich, Mr. Hetfield and their various band mates have channeled the basic adolescent experiences of alienation, frustration and rage into melodramatic, at times self-consciously mythic squalls of sound. One of the insights ''Some Kind of Monster'' offers is just how much work this transformation requires, perhaps especially when it is undertaken not by teenage rebels but by family men in their early 40's.

The film takes for granted that rock 'n' roll, while it remains the soundtrack of youthful disaffection, has long since become a respectable middle-aged profession. Both Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield, the band's founding members, who started playing music together in the early 1980's, are married men with young children. They also behave, with each other, like a long-married couple who find themselves bored, dissatisfied and on the rocks.

Mr. Berlinger and Mr. Sinofsky have uncovered the mysterious dynamic of their collaboration, a relationship that is, superficially, both an artistic bond and a business partnership but that is also a deep, bubbling source of identity and anxiety for each man. Mr. Towle, a bald, platitudinous fellow who has soothed the battling egos of professional sports teams, thus becomes a kind of couples therapist for Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield. They are not the only people in the room -- Kirk Hammett, the band's guitarist, and Bob Rock, the producer and acting bassist, also participate in the sessions and have their own concerns and grievances -- but the band's genius, as well as its dysfunction, seems to grow out of the tension between the drummer and the singer.

Eddy's column is far less reverent than either Edelstein's or Scott's. He begins by attacking Metallica for becoming staid "has-beens."

Which is kinda true; once broken-childhood-surviving singer James Hetfield finally goes through rehab and starts insisting on working only four hours a day so he can make his daughter's ballet lessons, you feel sorry for the dork. But then you remember how crappy Aerosmith got after they knocked the monkey off their backs. Not to mention that Metallica haven't made a decent album of original songs for 16 years.

And you remember that "therapy rock" has been the dullest cliché on earth ever since Nirvana inspired emo, and that the whole idea that we're supposed to care about rock stars as people (as opposed to, say, makers of songs and riffs) is ridiculous, and that rare-vinyl-collecting tennis-prodigy geek turned Basquiat-collecting drummer Lars Ulrich and Buddhism-spoutingly mild-mannered half-Filipino hippie guitarist Kirk Hammett had never seemed remotely threatening in the first place, and that Lars's Napster-baiting period absolutely justified Metallica's recent legacy as the most hated band by their own fans in rock history, and that this group has been obsessed with suicidal tendencies and sanitariums and sundry other mental health issues ever since their beautiful "Fade to Black" in 1984, and it clicks: This flick is almost all old news.

Eddy's opprobrium reaches delicious heights:

In fact, from an opening blurb calling them the top touring band of the '90s through a concluding one where the album tops charts all over the world, much of Monster is just a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how "important" Metallica are and, worse, how much "integrity" they have. ("We've proven that you can make aggressive music without negative energy," gawd.) The first 45 minutes drag; things picks up once old-married-couple control freaks Lars and James start acting like they're gonna beat each other's brains out.

James is pleasingly paranoid once he's on the wagon; earlier and more vodka-marinated, after bragging about shooting a constipated bear in Russia, he returns to the studio and sings like a constipated bear, and nobody notices!

This is spicy, and I enjoy the right of younger, more aggressive critics to find fault in a band that has grown old enough to be (not just serve as) loco parentis for their fanbase. That's the essential conflict here, between growing older and growing up, between maintaining youthful intensity with a lifestyle that no longer permits group sex with groupies, cocaine, and destructive alcoholism. It is true, perhaps, that rock and roll is a young man's game and that any bands that survive into elder-statesmanhood are forever going to be seen as lame. This next paragraph is delightful:

But he's [Lars] not nearly as lovable as his ancient Danish dad, Torben—a bucktoothed, troll-bearded ex-Wimbledon third-rounder, jazz muso, painter, poet, filmmaker, and arts journalist who looks exactly like the wizard-of-the-rings mountain man inside Led Zep's Zoso gatefold. He's also the only person brave enough to tell Metallica their music sucks.

Eddy decries the Metallica marketing machine, though it is hard enough to believe that the band would comission a documentary actively critical of them, and through his delightfully acidic commentary he reaches the same conclusion that Edelstein and Scott have about the new, reformed, refashioned, post-therapy, Metallica: they're a bunch of middle-aged men.

Another dumb personnel decision occurs during new-bassist auditions: Metallica pass over impressive unknown Elena Repetto and perfectly doom-toned Unida/Kyuss stoner Scott Reeder for Suicidal Tendencies klutz Robert Trujillo, apparently for his rap-metal cred. Pretty amusing, though, when Trujillo, stuck in a room with all these lonely men discussing "feelings," suddenly realizes he joined a new age band. And pretty tragic when Kirk Hammett, clearly the movie's good guy despite badly needing assertiveness training, argues for guitar solos, to no avail.

Yes, that's the true marvelousness of the video, seeing the coming of age of a rock band.

III.

Chuck Eddy did point me at this hysterical review of St. Anger by a disgruntled fan, Colin Tappe.

With St. Anger’s hype machine working overtime inside my brain, I was gratified to say the least when I finally saw the video to the album’s single “St. Anger”.

The video is a fucking GEM, lemme tell ‘ya. Metallica are playing at San Quintin, and in between the band playing the single to a bunch of entertainment staved prisoners (Pick one of two of the following useless parenthetical interjections: a) talk about a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE! Gua-hu-hu OR b) “hmmm, should I get gang raped in woodshop or go and see the filming of the new Metallica video?”) there’re these short skits of minorities committing crimes and going to prison which resemble all those straight-to-video gang themed films that were so popular when Boyz In The Hood first came out.

As if Metallica finally tapping into the oft-neglected “incarcerated gang member” demographic isn’t good enough, the song, St. Anger is one of the biggest pieces of shit you’ll EVER hear on any airwaves. My jaw dropped when I first heard how AWFUL the thing sounded. I mean, I honestly can’t recall the last time I heard a single from a “Major Artist” like Metallica with such shitty production! Even the cable access Christian video shows would blush at the not-even-demo-worthy sound quality. Needless to say, “St. Anger”, and thus St. Anger were now weighing HEAVILY on my mind.

Hmmmm. Delightful.

The guitars are not only tuned way low, but mixed super quiet, so needless to say the bass is completely obscured in the non-mix. All you can hear is DRUMS, and VOCALS, which is fucking ABSURD because, as the cover of the CD indicates, THIS IS A FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, and maybe it’s just me, but when you buy a FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, you’re supposed to be able to hear the FUCKING GUITARS!!! What’s more is that, as you may have guessed, the drums and vocals are the worst fucking part! Completely ignoring Hetfield’s now-AWFUL pseudo (or is it post?)-Vedder et al. vocal style, the way which the vocals were actually recorded on the CD make them sound even WORSE, if one can imagine! Take the legitimately laughable vocal build on the opening cut “Frantic”; with each repetition of the chant “Frantic, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tock” Hetfield’s voice goes an octave higher and higher than he’s comfortable singing, so that by the end of his ranting Hetfield’s voice sounds as pubescent as his core audience. What’s more is that on closer examination, namely by watching the accompanying DVD of the rehearsals for St. Anger where Hetfield’s vocal build DOESN’T crack like a 13 year old Phil Anselmo, it seems that Bob was the one egging him on to go for those high notes.

...

Lyrically, it can only be expected to be written at a 6th grade reading level, with the emotional development of the writer not going too far out of that age range, but these guys must have been some pretty fucking stupid 6th graders, man! Some random excerpts; “Shoot me again/I ain’t dead yet”, “Can’t you help me be uncrazy?”, “Kill, kill, kill, kill”, and of course, one of the most baffling lyric to get actual radio airplay in a LONG time “I’m madly in anger with you.” Jeezis, I’ve heard of attempting to sound intellectual, and I’ve heard of pseudo-intellectual, but these guys must be TRYING to sound pseudo-intellectual. Like, ain’t these cats something like a half a fucking century old a piece? And they’re still wrestling with thesauruses to voice their “pain”? Christ, I hope if I ever get to this state of living off of fumes of nostalgia for my youth my retrogressive trip won’t be so fucking SQUARE sounding as these assholes.

So, that's a fan. Then again, Colin Tappe is so meta-post-Metallica that he doesn't even like their old stuff!

The thing is I’m not even a fan of Metallica’s old shit. “Those who can’t Slayer, Metallica” I’ve said on more than one occasion.

Truly, he has to be their ultimate fan. I bow before his superior intellect on this one. If to be a real fan of Metallica is to prefer their early work over their post 1991 stuff (somewhat analogous to having a preference to Van Halen over Van Hagar) then to be an ultimate fan is to not even like their old stuff at all. This is all so very delightful.

IV.

Speaking of Van Halen...I know that Neal C. Hannan (last seen on this blog with Buckethead) is a eu-fan, or at least as much of a eu-fan as someone that was in utero for their early work or as someone that confesses to taking pleasure in solo Sammy could be, and I'm fully aware that Van Halen will never get back together, and in all likelihood couldn't even be assembled in the same room for any appreciable length of time, but oh my, wouldn't that be fantastic? I do believe that our trusty filmmakers Berlinger and Sinofsky might have a calling in following around other great bands and just being the fly on the wall, so to speak. I'd love to see a Van Halen documentary in which the absolutely soused (speaking of someone that needs to go to rehab) Eddie Van Halen could tell the booze magnate (Cabo Wabo Tequila!) Sammy Hagar or the overly corpulent aging egomanic David Lee Roth that he was his favorite frontman. What a battle royale would ensue! That would make the glaring and pouting and pacing of Lars Ulrich seem so positively emo compared to the real rage that great enemies could incite.

I'd love to see John Paul Jones tell Jimmy Page that he was a fathead. I'd love to hear what Sir Paul McCartney really thought about John Lennon and Yoko. I'd be very curious what Tommy thought about Ozzy or if Daltrey thinks Pete is a pedophile (I mean, we've got an interview where he supports him, but what does he really think?)

I'm afraid, though, that this will all have to play out in the theatre of the mind. Then again, I don't mind that, all that much. The popcorn's cheap and nobody ever stands up in front of me to go to the bathroom. That, and the floor is always clean. Good times.

And Metallica? I've never been their biggest fan. I've enjoyed some of their stuff, less so others. I enjoyed Some Kind of Monster though, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. I'm a big fan of schadenfreude, myself. Maybe I enjoy it a little too much. But it was a good time watching Metallica grow up and sort through their issues. Maybe they won't rock quite as hard as they used to. But they'll be able to reduce albums that their fans hate and compare unfavorably to what they did in the golden years and they'll continue to able to afford great art and horses to ride around their ranches on and expensive cars and all will be well.

What more can you really ask for?

On the killing of the helpless

The publication by two Dutch physicians in the New England Journal of Medicine of an article calling for the formalized euthanasia of disabled newborns has caused a bit of a furor. Before we consult the various responses to this article, let's review the primary source. Verhagen and Sauer inform us that, of the "200,000 children born in the Netherlands every year, about 1,000 die during the first year of life" and for 600 of those 1,000 "death is preceded by a medical decision." Okay. Verhagen and Sauer then inform us, after some boilerplate about subjective pain and how adult euthanasia has been legal since 1985, that they have developed the "Groningen Protocol" to better systematize the practice of infant euthanasia. Groningen starts with a simple triage:

Infants and newborns for whom such end-of-life decisions might be made can be divided into three categories First, there are infants with no chance of survival. This group consists of infants who will die soon after birth, despite optimal care with the most current methods available locally. These infants have severe underlying disease, such as lung and kidney hypoplasia.

Infants in the second group have a very poor prognosis and are dependent on intensive care. These patients may survive after a period of intensive treatment, but expectations regarding their future condition are very grim. They are infants with severe brain abnormalities or extensive organ damage caused by extreme hypoxemia. When these infants can survive beyond the period of intensive care, they have an extremely poor prognosis and a poor quality of life.

Finally, there are infants with a hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering. Although it is difficult to define in the abstract, this group includes patients who are not dependent on intensive medical treatment but for whom a very poor quality of life, associated with sustained suffering, is predicted. For example, a child with the most serious form of spina bifida will have an extremely poor quality of life, even after many operations. This group also includes infants who have survived thanks to intensive care but for whom it becomes clear after intensive treatment has been completed that the quality of life will be very poor and for whom there is no hope of improvement.

So, like all Gaul, sick babies can be divided into 3 types: the hopeless, the very poor prognosis, and the infants that really are quite sick and the doctors should make a decision about their future quality of life. So far, so good. I don't think that the first two categories are as troubling as the third. In the first two cases, with or without care, there is no viable prognosis for the infant. However, in the third case an active decision is being made to terminate life that would otherwise survive (albeit in a limited context). Because the third category is the most troubling, the good doctors continue to explicate it:

Confronted with a patient in the third category, it is vital for the medical team to have as accurate a prognosis as possible and to discuss it with the parents. All possible measures must be taken to alleviate severe pain and discomfort. There are, however, circumstances in which, despite all measures taken, suffering cannot be relieved and no improvement can be expected. When both the parents and the physicians are convinced that there is an extremely poor prognosis, they may concur that death would be more humane than continued life. Under similar conditions, a person in the Netherlands who is older than 16 years of age can ask for euthanasia. Newborns, however, cannot ask for euthanasia, and such a request by parents, acting as the representatives of their child, is invalid under Dutch law. Does this mean that euthanasia in a newborn is always prohibited? We are convinced that life-ending measures can be acceptable in these cases under very strict conditions: the parents must agree fully, on the basis of a thorough explanation of the condition and prognosis; a team of physicians, including at least one who is not directly involved in the care of the patient, must agree; and the condition and prognosis must be very well defined. After the decision has been made and the child has died, an outside legal body should determine whether the decision was justified and all necessary procedures have been followed.

This wouldn't be an article in the Journal without data, however. Our authors now present a table of acceptable considerations used to end the life of a newborn in 22 cases of "very severe...spina bifida."

I think we're starting to see why people find this Groningen Protocol so troubling. There's a startling expansion of power on the part of the physician (admittedly parceled out into advisory bodies) to make decisions, early in life, about the individual's "predicted lack of self sufficiency" or "predicted inability to communicate" or even (irony) "long life expectancy."

Verhagen and Sauer conclude their article by suggesting that far more than 15 to 20 newborns a year are being euthanized and their hope that the Groningen Protocol will provide guidelines and requirements to more systematically implement infant euthanasia.


That's a very exhaustive protocol, including the need for parental informed consent, and advice for how the doctors should advise, consult, and clarify their decision about euthanasia.

Dilemmas regarding end-of-life decisions for newborns with a very poor quality of life and presumably unbearable suffering and no hope of improvement are shared by physicians throughout the world. In the Netherlands, obligatory reporting with the aid of a protocol and subsequent assessment of euthanasia in newborns help us to clarify the decision-making process. This approach suits our legal and social culture, but it is unclear to what extent it would be transferable to other countries.

Transferable indeed. Tony Sheldon, writing a near-instant response in the British Medical Journal notes how Verhagen became, almost overnight, a widely hated man.

Verhagen asks, "If I have no techniques, no options to treat, if palliative care is not an option, what do I do? Do I send the child away, or really help it and hasten its death?

"We are not making this up. Horrible diseases do exist where a child is suffering unbearably but will not die immediately."

Last autumn he attempted to make politicians in The Hague take notice by revealing that a joint local protocol had been drawn up by paediatricians and the public prosecution service in Groningen under which paediatricians who deliberately ended the lives of neonates would not be prosecuted for murder if they followed strict criteria. Verhagen then called for a national protocol and a multidisciplinary committee to advise in such cases.

Within weeks he had become an international hate figure. Doctors in Groningen were painted as barbarians proud of killing babies, and the Vatican compared the doctors' practices to those of the Nazis.

That's just not adequate, however. Verhagen is careful to locate his remarks within a Dutch consensus. It is certainly true that the Netherlands is more amenable to assisted suicide than other nations. Moreover, there is something admirable about Verhagen's frank address of these concerns. Far from shirking the question (or simply tolerating the status quo of unreported physican activity) he has directly confronted this sensitive medical issue:

Verhagen's own desire to confront the issue was sparked by a dilemma involving a newborn baby with a severe and untreatable form of a rare inherited skin disease, epidermolysis bullosa. This causes the skin to blister on contact, which can result in infection, sepsis, and death. The child was in severe pain whenever the bandages were replaced and was unlikely to live long. The parents did not want their child to suffer. The public prosecutor said, "Do what you have to do," but gave no assurance that a murder charge would not follow. Verhagen decided that, in such circumstances, he could not help the child to die. The child was discharged and died a year later from an infection.

Meanwhile Verhagen became aware that doctors in his department deliberately ended the lives of newborns, but in secret.

I certainly agree that silence--or a unspoken status quo--is far more hazardous than a transparent and agreed-upon protocol. Although the cold facts might be distasteful it is important to confront the issues which are (apparently) routinely faced by medical practioners and families.

A desire among the public prosecution service to encourage dialogue between the legal and the medical world allowed Verhagen to act. In 2001 he invited a local magistrate to tour a neonatal intensive care ward on a normal day. Verhagen claims that the magistrate was "amazed" at what he saw. "People do not understand. It is not just about deliberately ending life. We are dealing with death on a neonatal intensive care ward every day, children are dying, decisions are being taken to stop or whether to start treatment."

...

Examining the medical reports, the local advice not to prosecute, and the national decision to accept that advice, Verhagen realised that in every case the same argument was accepted. Although the newborns were not dependent on intensive care, the doctors accepted "deliberate termination of life" because of "the presence of hopeless suffering, with no means of alleviating the suffering."

...

So what kind of "exceptional cases" could the estimated 15 among 200 000 births a year be? The 22 reported cases were all of severe spina bifida or hydrocephalus. But Verhagen stresses that 99.9% of babies born with spina bifida are treatable and go on to lead fulfilling lives. However, different specialist teams all agree that in some cases of spina bifida involving brain damage and other congenital malformations treatment is pointless. Another example is severe hypoxia at birth where the brain, lungs, and heart are all damaged and the child may be having continual convulsions.

These are, obviously, judgment calls, and, on balance, suspect ones. Why are teams of doctors making decisions about the "pointlessness" of treatment for disabled infants? What is unacceptable about Verhagen's own decision to let nature take its course with the child with the skin infection? Is not some life, even a year of life, more humane than euthanasia?

Critics argue that these decisions are not based exclusively on physical suffering but on other criteria as well, such as quality of life, future ability to communicate, and the chance of the child leading an independent life. Verhagen argues that all doctors already make such decisions. "We are not working in intensive care for the sake of intensive care but to be able to offer the child a better future. We are continually making decisions about a child's prospects."

By raising these issues Verhagen believes he can encourage Dutch paediatricians to report their actions, as making the decision to end a life is "the most important decision a paediatric team will ever make." He believes that by not prosecuting doctors Dutch society has already accepted deliberate killing as an option, but "the politicians are leaving the doctors to struggle on."

I find these closing paragraphs aggressively creepy. The idea that doctors are continually making decisions about their charges and that these decisions are not made on clear, unambiguous scientific determinations but rather on fuzzy concepts like "predicted lack of self sufficiency" is frightening. Without clear guidelines (and I'm not sure the ambiguous and broadly written guidelines of the Groningen Protocol apply) these decisions are to be made at the level of the physician, giving these Dutch pediatricans the unenviable responsibility of deciding whether a child deserves life or death. Responsibility, I dare say, that has been arrogated from God.

A few things are clear.

1. Disabled infants are often euthanized and these decisions are rarely reported. This is not, according to this AP report, limited to the Netherlands where the kill rate is estimated to be five times higher than reported.

In France, 73 percent of doctors in one study reported using drugs to end a newborn's life, but those cases aren't reported to authorities. Meanwhile, 43 percent of Dutch doctors surveyed and between 2 percent and 4 percent of doctors in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany and Sweden reported doing so.

In the United States, some doctors and ethicists - both supporters and opponents of euthanasia - say newborn euthanasia has happened occasionally for decades, although it is much more common, and accepted, to withhold or stop intensive treatment and let the baby die. Experts said the new Dutch report will generate discussion but won't change American public opinion or practices.

It seems that the debate, then, is over infants in category 3, infants that need to be deliberately killed, not infants that will die on their own without radical intervention or even with radical intervention.

2. Fetal screening for a variety of diseases (Cystic Fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, Downs, etc.) are widely accepted as appropriate. This Lives piece in the New York Times follows one couple's discovery that their infant has Osteogenesis imperfecta type II. The mutation, in either the COL1A1 or COL1A2 genes, results in profound, fatal, defects in skeletal formation, with the long limb bones "severely shortened and bowed." Jonathan Tropper describes his response to the diagnosis:

We walked on rubber legs down the hall to Dr. Eddleman's office, where he emerged from behind his veil of jargon just long enough to impart that we hadn't done anything wrong. Osteogenesis imperfecta type II was his diagnosis, a freak mutation over which we had no control. I could see in Liz's expression that it would take some time for her to believe him.

The fetus might make it to term or die in the womb. Either way, it wouldn't survive for long after birth. This disease, the doctor said, is ''fatal in infants.'' You know you've arrived in a different universe when the word ''fatal'' comes as a relief. Because until that moment, I had been trying to extrapolate what the flesh-and-blood version of this baby would look like in the maple crib we'd ordered, asking myself if we had it in us to raise such a severely compromised baby. Liz would later tell me that she was also sadly relieved. ''Fatal'' was our absolution -- we would not have to learn darker truths about ourselves.

...

Nothing can prepare a woman for 18 hours of labor to deliver something she knows will be dead on arrival. Inducing labor at 20 weeks takes longer than at full term. When it came time to push, they gave Liz a Valium-Demerol drip. She would remember nothing. No one offered me a drip, so I still remember what came out of her that day. We didn't want to know the sex -- we hadn't all along -- but there it was on a form: Baby Boy Tropper. I'd always thought it might be.

It felt strange, returning home the next day. We didn't know how to mourn, how to categorize what we'd lost. Certainly, it had been a traumatic event, but had we lost a baby or a pregnancy? It felt different on an hourly basis. When we were sad, we wept. When we were O.K., we felt inexplicably guilty. But as those first, long days wore on, we slowly began to treat it more like a late miscarriage and not a lost baby; a painful setback, but not quite a tragedy. Still, we couldn't help feeling we were somehow shortchanging our fetus-baby a measure of grief in the name of our own emotional well-being.

Tropper's grief is modulated by his unwillingness to see the deformed "Baby Boy Tropper" as fully human. An accident, yes, a terrible mutation, germline mosaic, preventing the appropriate patterning of the skeleton, forcing the developing life to fall too short of normality, of the (miraculous) we expect. I feel moments like this, not the severe embryonic lethal mutations that force early miscarriages, really can call into question what is human. Should the Troppers have insisted on naming their son? Should they have insisted on burying him? Should they not have given him up for tests, consigning him forever to be personless, just another data point in a paper to be published in Fetal Abnormalities Research or another obscure journal read by the depraved obstetrician?

Would they feel differently had they aborted, as couples routinely do for Tay-Sachs or other serious malfunctions? Does it matter that Baby Boy Tropper was born, even if he was already dead?

Should humanity be defined not by the vast majority of us that have 10 fingers and toes and organs in the right place but by the margin calls, the babies in the tail who do not? Are they cautionary, reminding us of how fortunate we are to have developed appopriately or informative, reminding us of how mysterious life (and genetics) can be?

3. Peter Singer has a unique viewpoint on the issue. For Singer membership in humanity is not conferred by birth but by intellectual development and self-awareness. The prospective person must be aware that "he or she is the same being who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future." Failing to meet this standard makes you less than human, more like a mouse. In fact, Singer poses the question of whether it would be better to save a human or a mouse from a burning building (I love Singer's perversion of this question, usually asked to differentiate between human lives):

Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens.

...

But when it comes to a question of taking life, or allowing life to end, it matters whether a being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a life -- that is, can see that he or she is the same being who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future. Such a being has more to lose than a being incapable of understand this.

...

That?s why, in general, it would be right to save the human, and not the mouse, from the burning building, if one could not save both. But this depends on the qualities and characteristics that the human being has. If, for example, the human being had suffered brain damage so severe as to be in an irreversible state of unconsciousness, then it might not be better to save the human. (my emphasis)

There's the acid, at the end. Humans who are no longer human (incapable, in Singer's rubric of defining themselves as beings in time, don't count anymore. They are no more special than a fieldmouse. Singer's blatant disregard for life on the margin (infants, disabled, the elderly, anyone injured in a car accident) is monstrously consistent:

Q. You have been quoted as saying: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." Is that quote accurate?

A. It is accurate, but can be misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term ?person? (which is discussed in Practical Ethics, from which that quotation is taken). I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. (my emphasis)

Don't let Singer onto a maternity ward! That being said, there is something to be said for Singer's insistence that self-awareness and knowledge of existence in time should be prerequisites for personhood. Singer is at least as comfortable with post-natal abortions as he is with late-state pre-natal ones. Many others are not. In this sense, Singer is more honest than a lot of critics, asserting that viable fetuses and freshly born babies should both be seen as disposable. Now, this might strike everyone as a terrible formulation, a coarsening of human existence, and a slippery slope to euthanizing the disabled, the elderly, and the brain-damaged. Singer does little to disabuse us of this notion. Even so, this more stringent definition of humanity might allow us to more easily consider the validity pseudo-human-pseudo-teratomas that might be created for the harvesting of stem cells.


So what do I think? Well, I report, you decide. I realize that's a cop-out. I'm going to say a couple things, in no particular order, and I'll just leave it at that.

First, I think the distinction between pre-natal screening and abortion and post-natal screening and euthanasia is perhaps a subtle one. That being said, there's a lot more popular revulsion at the idea of Doctors making decisions about whether a child lives or dies and gassing them with CO. Aborting a fetus with known (and profound) abnormalities seems more acceptable. (Additionally, Ashenazi Jews have carried out the world's most sucessful screening program to eradicate Tay-Sachs in their population. Is genetic testing and pre-selecting healthy embryos wrong?)

Second, I think that there's a difference between euthanizing the disabled and preventing the disabled. This is probably the largest point, but if there's a safe and reliable way to insure healthy offspring do not parents have an obligation to pursue it? However, once a disabled child (or a normal person becomes disabled) society has a duty to preserve the life and functionality of that person. People, unlike horses, aren't shot when they break their leg. If people were being born unable to walk because their mothers were drinking apple cider during pregnancy, it would be advantageous to prevent pregnant women from drinking apple cider.

Finally, the troublesome bit of the Groningen Protocol is about the Category 3 infants. Category 1 and 2 infants are beyond current medical care: they should be cared for appropriately but have no chance at life. I further support Groningen's belief that hazardous and costly surgery that will not produce palliation or amelioration of the condition should be avoided. The problem I have with Groningen is suggesting that many conditions which can be lived productively should be euthanized anyway. Many of the infants that Groningen recommends should be euthanized suffer from spina bifida. The New York Times interviewed one man with spina bifida:

Douglas J. Sorocco, a lawyer in Oklahoma City who has spina bifida, said that doctors might be quick to classify a baby as a hopeless case who might, with the right medical care, lead a happy and productive life. He said he might be classified as having "the most serious form" of the condition, since he was born with an open spine.

"People with spina bifida are having families, and making a contribution to their communities," said Mr. Sorocco, who is chairman of the board of directors of the Spina Bifida Association of America. "I would say I have a life worth living. My wife would say I have a life worth living. My family would say I have a life worth living."

That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with Groningen. Sorocco has lived a rich life, with a wife and children. He's a president of a foundation. He's a lawyer. I dare say that his local community, the community of spina bifida sufferers, and, on balance, the world would be a poorer place had he been euthanized after birth by a (perhaps) over-zealous doctor concerned about his "predicted lack of self sufficiency" or his "long life expectancy." I'm by no means a pro-life activist, but I don't want to support a world in which potentially productive citizens are snuffed out, as a matter of course, because medical professionals have decided that their lives aren't worth living. I'm sorry, but that's a perversion of the principles of medicine and an arrogant abrogation of decisions that have no right to be made by anyone, even committees of MDs.

...A Good Pan

Readers,

I like to tie this blog to my life. I'm aware that I blog about a wide range of subjects, but yet, opinions on a wide range of subjects are available, anywhere, and often for less. College Humor routinely features writers of less talent (or so I fancy) but supplements their often lacking prose stylings with healthy servings of nubile college student breast. I can't really help you people with that, except to say, well, I know a website... But that's no matter, and that's not the point. The point is, friends, to let you inside the man, to let you find out what I like, and what I don't.

Well, one of the things that brings me great joy in life is a good pan. Whether it is a restaurant that serves swill, or a car that threatens the very limbs of its passengers, or a book that pleases like a bed of nails, or a film that sets your hard earned $9.00 on fire, or whatever can be reviewed, oh, how I do love to read a review that sets upon the offending object d'art like wolves upon a injured cariboo, tearing the hapless animal limb from limb in a maelstrom of gnawing and gnashing. Or, a review that sets upon the bloated, overripe Hollywood 'blockbuster' like so many pirhannas upon a floating ox, helplessly pumping its stubby legs as the voracious fish swarm and in a trice transform that animal into skeletal remains, picked clean as if by acid. But, it is not just a film or a novel or a car or a restaurant that deserves such savagery. My heart also thrills to a nasty obituary--the pan of pans, if you will--the couple paragraphs that dismiss a life's work, accomplishments, and forever read the departed out as a scoundrel, a scapegrace, a fraud, a liar, a villain.

I.

Elvis Mitchell, formerly with the Times, is a master of the art. His reviews brim with the tired fury of a critic that has seen ofal presented as filet for too long. Take this review of Battlefield Earth, the Travolta embarassment.

None of the aliens -- who apparently are evil just because it feels good -- get around to chortling: ''Puny Earthlings! No one can save you now!'' But Mr. Travolta does the next best thing. He throws back his head and delivers a stage laugh that would embarrass the villain from the shoddiest Republic Pictures serial or an episode of ''Xena: Warrior Princess.'' The eye-rolling broadness of his turn in ''Broken Arrow'' suddenly becomes a marvel of nuance and understatement.

''Battlefield Earth,'' directed by Roger Christian (''Nostradamus,'' ''Masterminds''), is beyond conventional criticism. It belongs in the elect pantheon that includes such delights as ''Showgirls'' and ''Revolution'': the Moe Howard School of Melodrama.

...

The only professional thing about the movie is the sound: it's so loud you feel as if you're sitting on a runway with jets taking off over your head. The drone of real aircraft would be preferable to what passes for plot.

Effective, but who can't find something mean to write about such dreck? Mitchell delivers an effective review of Jurassic Park III, a endearingly schlocky blockbuster unapologetic about its intentions to scare and make money in 90 minutes.

Grant is referring to the quick, fierce prehistoric creatures better known as velociraptors. He has learned that the raptors can speak and communicate, and adds, ''They were smarter than primates.''

The animals are indeed smart: they were bright enough to turn down much of the dialogue that the human actors have to speak. The beasts don't have to voice lines like Grant's ''No force on Earth or Heaven will get me back on that island.'' Nor will the raptors -- or their new reptilian co-stars, the equally deadly spinosauruses and the pteranodons (who look like more capable relatives of pterodactyls) -- have to deal with passages like the inevitable ''What's it gonna take?'' response from the gee-whiz benefactor Paul Kirby (William H. Macy), who whips out a checkbook to persuade Grant to join the expedition.

...

The idea of being stranded on an island with prehistoric carnivores isn't nearly as terrifying eight years later, after witnessing real predators size one another up on the ''Survivor'' series. Given the post-''Survivor'' landscape, ''Jurassic Park 3'' strips down to the material's origins in ''Westworld,'' the theme-park-turned-haunted-house movie for which Michael Crichton wrote the script before he wrote the ''Jurassic Park'' novel. (In his way, Mr. Crichton is as ruthless a creature as the raptors: he has picked clean the bones of his every idea, though he didn't write this third script.) Steven Spielberg didn't return as director, either, which may be why ''Jurassic Park 3'' is so short -- only 90 minutes. No one lingers over grace notes that gave the first couple of films real staying power, like the banner that floats and lands on a big plastic dinosaur.

And even though ''Jurassic Park 3'' ticks off all the conventions -- ''Chances are we won't see a thing,'' Grant says, just before a plane crash that puts everyone at the mercy of the park's denizens -- the movie dashes like a one-track-mind raptor. It's speedy, light on its feet and louder than bombs. Much of the talent behind the cameras has done survival-of-the-fittest films before. The director Joe Johnston's filmography includes ''Jumanji.'' The writers Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor visited the Darwinian world before with ''Election.'' (Peter Buchman was also a writer.) And they seem determined to check off all the to-do notes necessary for a prehistoric exploitation picture: we're missing only Raquel Welch in a yummy fur bikini.

This is fair, more than anything. Mitchell manages to take a magnificent shot at Crichton, ravenously picking at the bones of his once-great ideas while still respecting the summer charms of the blockbuster. He's a good critic, definitely able to balance the good and bad in a film.

''BLACK HAWK DOWN'' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere. Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott's most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you'd swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot. Because Mr. Scott's eye delivers so much information, he then is at a loss to give the material a proper emotional grounding. ''Black Hawk Down'' is like Mr. Scott's ''G.I. Jane'' but this time with an all-boy cast.

Sam Shepard, as Major General Garrison, seems to be smoking a Montecristo No. 2 primarily so that billowing clouds of Cuban smoke can register in the war room; it doesn't help that the cigar has been given as much characterization as anyone in the movie.

This covers both the suberb, claustrophobic cinematography and the "war porn" aspects of the script and stunningly dehumanizing treatment of the "skinnies."

'Black Hawk Down'' wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily. The handsomely staged gunplay and explosions, rigorously matched to exacting Dolby Digital in selected theaters, abound, while a cast of non-American actors like Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom try out their Yankee soldier accents, with vowels so oddly enunciated that you expect them to be singled out as foreign spies. Again, Mr. Scott spot-welds his extraordinary painterly application of talent to video game detachment; his ''Gladiator'' looked like a Play station 2 product designed by Bruegel. But the mercilessness here is gruesome.

In ''Black Hawk Down,'' the lack of characterization converts the Somalis into a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts, gleefully pulling the Americans from their downed aircraft and stripping them. Intended or not, it reeks of glumly staged racism. The only African-American with lines, Specialist Kurth (Gabriel Casseus), is one of the American soldiers who want to get into the middle of the action; his lines communicate his simplistic gung-ho spirit. His presence in this military action raises questions of racial imbalance that ''Black Hawk Down'' couldn't even be bothered to acknowledge, let alone answer.

This is excellent craftsmanship. Mitchell is a joy to read, an effective critic, and a real loss for the Times.

II.

If films can be reviewed, so can lives. I enjoy a negative obitutary as much as anyone. Take, for example, this recent Boston Globe obituary. Father Gilbert Phinn recently passed away, and the Globe included in his obit the fact that he had helped to cover up his own corner of the sex abuse scandal.

There, in the ninth paragraph of an otherwise positive account, was a description of how Phinn, as archdiocese personnel director 23 years ago, reportedly told a priest with a history of sexual abuse to keep his past a secret from the pastor when assigned to a new parish. The exchange was originally reported in 2002. Those who knew Phinn were hurt and angered by what they saw as a very cheap shot. It dominated conversation at his wake and standing-room-only funeral, attendees reported. Here in the ombudsman's office the issue sparked far more outcry than any other obituary during my three-year tenure, with most complaints from Milton, where Phinn served most recently at St. Elizabeth's.

How's that, now. The best part of the whole thing is that Phinn is no longer able to speak in his defense:

The obituary should have noted that Phinn, as clergy personnel director, first urged the archdiocese to restrict the accused pedophile priest, the Rev. Robert M. Burns, to duty as a convent chaplain, so he would not be near children. When Burns was assigned to a parish anyway and, sources said, Phinn told Burns to keep his past secret from the new pastor, Phinn was following archdiocesan direction. (Asked in 2002 about that exchange, Phinn said simply, "I prefer not to discuss it.")

The obituary might also have noted that Burns went on to become one of the most serious clergy sex offenders and was convicted of sexual assault, jailed, and defrocked. Knowing that would have helped readers make sense of the reference.

But pish posh! The Globe needn't apologize for piling on the dead. Phinn, by all accounts, fucked up, doing his small part to further the Catholic law of omerta (or was that the Mafia law?)



The undisputed champion of nasty obituaries is Christopher Hitchens. He writes with unabashed verve, and tears into his victims like a bear drunk on mead. Reading his polished viciousness always gives me a thrill.

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

More could be found, I'm sure, in his slim 1997 paperback The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (Amazon)
Or, dare I say, here:

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions. (my emphasis)

Vicious! Scathing! Shows no mercy!

Hitchens has written a number of nasty obituaries. He truly respects giving the deceased a honest send-off, a honest evaluation of their life. Here's his treatment of Susan Sontag. Fair, eminently fair, I'd say.

Mention of that last place name impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did.

...

It's easy enough to see, now, that the offer of murder for cash, made by a depraved theocratic despot and directed at a novelist [Salman Rushdie], was a warning of the Islamist intoxication that was to come. But at the time, many of the usual "signers" of petitions were distinctly shaky and nervous, as were the publishers and booksellers who felt themselves under threat and sought to back away. Susan Sontag mobilized a tremendous campaign of solidarity that dispelled all this masochism and capitulation. I remember her saying hotly of our persecuted and hidden friend: "You know, I think about Salman every second. It's as if he was a lover." I would have done anything for her at that moment, not that she asked or noticed.

...

A man is not on his oath, said Samuel Johnson, when he gives a funeral oration. One ought to try and contest the underlying assumption here, which condescendingly excuses those who write nil nisi bonum of the dead. Could Susan Sontag be irritating, or hectoring, or righteous? She most certainly could. She said and did her own share of foolish things during the 1960s, later retracting her notorious remark about the white "race" being a "cancer" by saying that it slandered cancer patients. In what I thought was an astonishing lapse, she attempted to diagnose the assault of Sept. 11, 2001, as the one thing it most obviously was not: "a consequence of specific [sic] American alliances and actions." Even the word "general" would have been worse in that sentence, but she had to know better. She said that she didn't read reviews of her work, when she obviously did. It could sometimes be very difficult to tell her anything or to have her admit that there was something she didn't know or hadn't read.

But Hitchens has hardly given up panning the dead. This obituary for Bob Hope bristles with a sublime nastiness. Hitchens attacks him for being unfunny:

To be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is not a particular defect or shortcoming in, say, a cable repair man or a Supreme Court justice or a Navy Seal. These jobs can be performed humorlessly with no loss of efficiency or impact. But to be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is a serious drawback, even lapse, in a comedian. And the late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remunerated lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic. There is a laugh here, but it is on us.

Give a man a reputation as an early riser, said Mark Twain, and that man can thereafter sleep until noon. Quick, then—what is your favorite Bob Hope gag? It wouldn't take you long if I challenged you on Milton Berle, or Woody Allen, or John Cleese, or even (for the older customers) Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl. By this time tomorrow, I bet you haven't come up with a real joke for which Hope could take credit.

Spicey! And, can we go on? Why, of course.

This is comedy for people who have no sense of humor and who come determined to be entertained and laugh to show that they "get it." Hope had a huge vault of material, much of it mercifully unused, that was amassed by "researchers" and cross-indexed by subject. The great thing, for him, was to be able to bang on the existing funny bone by daring, say, to make a gag out of Reagan's notorious propensity for naps.

It's true that Hope had a mobile face and could twist it to look suggestive or leering (though he wasn't in the same class as Benny Hill or John Cleese in this respect). The idea that all women are attractive, not especially thigh-slapping as a concept in itself, can often work with audiences who are very easily pleased and whose members don't want to be left out of the general mirth. The sexlessness of Hope's routines, however, was just another clue to their essential conformism and cowardice. Eye-rolling and wolf-whistling are among the weakest forms of crowd pleasing that we possess. And Hope never stretched or challenged an audience in his life. For him, the safe and antique moves were the best, if not the only. The smirk was principally one of risk-free self-congratulation.

"Essential conformism and cowardice!" Cutting. There's nothing quite like demolishing someone for what they are allegedly good at. Hitchens finishes his patient demolition with a real zinger:

Even the most determinedly fawning obituarists had to concede that most of his movies and many of his "joke" anthologies were basically insulting in their unfunniness. Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, stuck with writing an appreciation on the same day as Canby's labored obituary (and stuck by the newspaper with the exact same vaudeville photograph as illustration) fell back on the exhausted line that Hope always played the same character, which was Bob Hope. A fitting tautology. Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian. (my emphasis)

And, if you want more, we've got Yassir Arafat and Hunter S. Thompson.

III.

I don't mean to seem to condem a nasty obituary. I feel that we should all get what we deserve, which, in the case of public figures, is an accurate assesement of our life. I would have no problem with an obituary that denounced me as a shallow, often mean, individual with too little appetite for empathy. I'd perhaps like my final balance sheet to carry that I also cured cancer, but hey. I respect obituaries that let the dead have it--no sacred cows here. If someone was an unforgivable bastard, they should be remembered as such. If they were decent, with faults, they should be remembered thusly. It was, then, with great dismay that I realized that dear Christopher Hitchens had really pulled his punches on the madman Hunter S. Thompson. Fortunately, William F. Buckley did not.

This obituary is in the same vein as some of Hitchens' best work, though lacking in invective. Buckley is a patient stylist, one who writes as if he has all too much time (and, from what I hear of his yacht habit, perhaps he does).

If what was before the house was just the formal news bulletin, a famous person who had left Earth for other bournes, then OK, let him go with conventional solemnities. I once attended funeral services at which the rabbi didn't remember the name of the deceased, so that he mourned the passage of Priscilla, remarking the good she had left behind in her lifetime — never mind that the lady who lay in the coffin was called Jane; never mind, the incantations were generic.

But Hunter Thompson would never be confused with anyone else, and when his wife was led through the police cordon to his room, she reported to the press that “he did it (fired the .45-caliber pistol) in his mouth,” leaving “his face beautiful. It was not grisly or gruesome by any means. He lived a beautiful life.”

He didn’t. What he did do was inspire devotional encomiums from people who included blood relatives (my son), and superstar mentors (Tom Wolfe). Wolfe spoke first of his stylistic achievements. He wrote “in a style and a voice no one had ever heard before.” And Wolfe found in Hunter’s life an originality perversely appealing. It was “one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman’s term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties.” What he wrote was “‘gonzo.’ He was sui generis.” “In the l9th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century’s greatest comic writer in the English language.”

Buckley begins his obituary by focusing on the generic nature of death--this is a superb point, and nastily nihilistic in a fashion that National Review might not approve of. Priscilla, Jane, whatever, it is all generic in the end, boilerplate to be said over any old corpse that has been stripped of a name before internment! Enough of the introduction, what of Thompson?

Thompson had a gift for vitriol. All — everything — was subsumed in his exercise of that art. Consider one entire paragraph on Richard Nixon. “For years I’ve regarded (Nixon’s) very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.”

We were asked to believe (by the San Francisco Chronicle) that in reading Thompson we are reading the work of a hero of an entire generation of American students. Concerning that claim a little skepticism is surely in order. After all, an exhibitionist can be spectacular, and even lionized, in the Animal Houses. Hunter Thompson elicited the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral. Here is a passage from Thompson, in which he seeks amusement by recounting the end of a long day with a visiting British friend, identifying himself as “the journalist”:

“The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger (the visiting Brit), who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with the beer he’s been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild choking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger’s side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: ‘Bug off, you worthless faggot! You twisted pig-(expletive deleted), all the way to Bowling Green, you scum-sucking foreign geek.’”

One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry, surely, that he stopped writing.

How understated! How brutal! We now see what Buckley was doing with his initial annectdote, the loss of specific identity in death. Buckley is tearing Thompson's identity from him just as the rabbi (do WASPs go to Jewish funerals?) snatches Priscilla, I mean Jane's, last shreds of selfhood as he mumbles rituals above her animal matter. There's a nasty symmetry to the piece, a casual elegance to the quotation, revealing Thompson's art as nothing but epithet-laced hooliganism, a pointed denunciation of the man as a vessel of vitriol and nothing more. Ouch.

Maybe I should write my own obituary...