Planning one’s death at the end of a long illustrious life

Conductor Edward Downes and his wife Joan decided to end their lives on their own terms:

He spent his life conducting world-renowned orchestras, but was almost blind and growing deaf – the music he loved increasingly out of reach. His wife of 54 years had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So Edward and Joan Downes decided to die together.

Downes – Sir Edward since he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 – and his wife ended their lives last week at a Zurich clinic run by the assisted suicide group Dignitas. They drank a small amount of clear liquid and died hand-in-hand, their two adult children by their side. He was 85 and she was 74.

Many people feel that suicide necessarily cheapens one's life. In many cases, I don't agree. I do think that the choice of when and how to die belongs to each person individually, as long as the decision was not made impulsively or under the influence. If the day comes when I decide that I can't bear the pain, or that I no longer find joy in my life, I would hope that I wouldn't need to travel all the way to Switzerland because inter-meddlers think they know better than me about the meaning of my own life.

Continue ReadingPlanning one’s death at the end of a long illustrious life

The Missing Past and Short Attention Spans: A Space Odyssey

Stan Lebar worked for Westinghouse in the 1960s. He led the developmental team that produced a state-of-the-art camera for NASA---the camera that was taken to the moon on Apollo 11 and recorded the first moonwalk. Most people have seen those images, many times---grainy, fuzzy black & white pictures of something that looks kind of like an astronaut slowly descending something that kind of looks like a ladder on the side of a large object that we are told is the lander. Whatever. We suffered through these scenes, probably many of us annoyed at the quality, impatient that better pictures weren't available. (Better still pictures became available, shot with specially-made Hasselblads, that remain absolutely stunning in clarity and detail, so made up for the sub par video, at least for some of us.) After all, even Hollywood, using by today's standards primitive technology, could create vastly superior space vistas---compare the images from the 1966 film 2001: A Space Odyssey with the NASA footage from a few years later and you grasp the disappointment. (It has long been my opinion that support for the space program waned because NASA managed to take something as exciting and sexy as space exploration and turn it into the equivalent of a lecture on statistics. The late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein chastised NASA at Congressional hearings for not doing more P.R., better P.R. When he was told that the government didn't do P.R., he had further things to say about campaigns and such like and then pointed out "NASA has a press department, doesn't it? That's the job of the press department." Anyway...) The camera built by Mr. Lebar's team was far superior to the poor images we all saw---and continue to see. The recording medium, however, was incompatible with broadcast television at the time.

Continue ReadingThe Missing Past and Short Attention Spans: A Space Odyssey

Guest sums it up colorfully and the new anchors apologize

Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler, urging that we should investigate secret operations of the CIA, describes the situation the same way that smart people on the street would describe it. Then, the anchors fall all over themselves allegedly apologizing for Wheeler and allegedly apologizing for themselves. This is pathetically sanctimonious.

Continue ReadingGuest sums it up colorfully and the new anchors apologize

What is St. Louis like?

People from my town of St. Louis are going ape-shit thinking that the national spotlight will come to our city along with the All-Star Game. It's really sounding like mega-insecurity to me. If you're really proud of your city, then be proud. You shouldn't need some sports announcer to say a few nice things about one's tourist attractions between pitches in order to feel validated. And if that sports announcer's opinion is so important, let's make sure that he takes a tour of our decaying city schools before the baseball game so that he can give the national sports audience an informed opinion or two on that, between pitches. And, really, what's more important if you had to choose between having first rate tourist attractions and a first rate school system? But my ambivalence leads to an important question. What is St. Louis really like? I've lived here all my life, and there is much to like about our city (as well as many things that need much improvement). Rather than write my own lengthy description of St. Louis, I'm going to refer you to this well-written balanced account by Alan Soloman of the Philadelphia Inquirer. What should we be thinking about St. Louis as the All-Star Game approaches? Here's Soloman's ominous opening, although his article eventually veers to many of the positive aspects of my river city.

The Gateway Arch, symbol of the place, and the museum beneath it represent the nation at its swaggering best, symbols of a Western expansion that would define us in so many ways. That we're talking about St. Louis - a city that's seen its share of rough times and that, like the country, isn't exactly in swagger mode right now - in a way adds particular power and poignancy to this year's celebration.

For another angle on how St. Louis is doing, check out this article in The Riverfront Times, where the author asks whether the recent efforts to beautify St. Louis amount to "putting lipstick on a pig."

Continue ReadingWhat is St. Louis like?

Conspiracies, Fiction, and New TV

Time out for a bit of pop culture. Indulge me, this is only marginally serious. I just finished watching the new show on SyFy called Warehouse 13. I enjoyed it, it was a good ride, even though they clearly went after the X-Files crowd with this one. It could be worth a few hours to see where they go with it. They took the endless warehouse from Indiana Jones, added some National Treasure grace notes, stirred in a dollop of Muldur and Scully, and introduced a bit of humor. That last is very important, because when you have a premise that is this borderline, taking it too seriously is risking alienating a lot of audience. The main reason the X-Files worked was the mood, the color, the textures that Chris Carter wove into it, and he played the conspiracy theory game like a master. But for me, it got very old very fast. The problems with the X-Files were manifold and manifest. The biggest one was Scully. She was the dumbest "scientist" I'd ever seen on television or read in fiction. To remain so obdurately unseeing through all that she was put through required zero imagination in the character, zero sense of humor, and probably some sort of serial fixation or related pathology. If they'd played that up it might have worked, but for pity's sake she was just dense. And therefore unbelievable. Not to mention, of course, that much of the "science" in X-Files was atrocious. But that's a charge that can be leveled as many shows on television, many movies, and quite a few novels. (It would seem to me, though, that when a show is based supposedly on science, even fringe science, an attempt would be made to Get It Right. It wouldn't take much in most instances, just someone on staff who could say "That won't work" and then offer a way that it would. I understand some shows have such a person, but he or she is more often ignored than heeded, probably because the recommendations wouldn't be dramatic. But I often wonder if the real reason they're ignored is because the assumption is made that putting in valid science would make the audience feel stupid---since clearly it makes the producers of the shows feel stupid!) The other problem with it was the profundity of the secrets ultimately being kept. It worked well when Muldur was just going through a bunch of old case files no one wanted to tackle because they led to bizarre places. Kept modest like that would have allowed the concept to work on the fringe, where it started out, and could have been very entertaining. But when it became this all-encompassing, "the aliens have been here and we are in league with them" kind of schtick, it became ridiculous. Because they were trying to keep it consistent with mimetic fiction.

Continue ReadingConspiracies, Fiction, and New TV