Taking Life by the Neck; or, Say It Ain't So, Henry!

I've been trying not to write more about Robin Williams's suicide, but then the other day the sf writer John Scalzi denounced Henry Rollins for his piece in the LA Weekly attacking Williams.  Rollins has since apologized; Scalzi approves of the apology, I don't -- but I don't think Rollins had anything to apologize for.

Start with Rollins's attack on Williams.  It's headed "Fuck suicide", typical boy-culture stuff.  (I've been even more annoyed by all the "Fuck the Police" stuff I've been seeing in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown.  It doesn't mean that these fine, radical thinkers love the police and want to give them pleasure, perhaps to teach them that love is better than hate; it means that they think fucking is degrading and debasing to the person who is fucked.  Women, pay attention to what the straight boys you're marching with are saying about you.)

But on to the article itself.  I shared Rollins's alienation from the popular and media reaction to Williams's suicide.  He went on to praise Williams as a performer, and for doing USO shows as Rollins himself does.  And then:

But I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves.
How in the hell could you possibly do that to your children? I don’t care how well adjusted your kid might be — choosing to kill yourself, rather than to be there for that child, is every shade of awful, traumatic and confusing. I think as soon as you have children, you waive your right to take your own life. No matter what mistakes you make in life, it should be your utmost goal not to traumatize your kids. So, you don’t kill yourself.

I think that first quoted sentence says more about the limitations of Rollins's understanding than it says about Robin Williams.  As far as I can tell, Rollins is not himself a parent; nor am I.

I agree that suicide can be an expression of hostility towards others, as witness the childish line "You'll be sorry when I'm dead."  (Even better when it's combined with "... and I'll be laughing." No, they won't.)  But I think Rollins was cheating here a little bit.  Williams's youngest "child," Cody, was born in 1991, which makes him 23 now.  That doesn't mean he's too old to be traumatized by his father's suicide (or death from any cause), but it does mean he's old enough to understand that it wasn't about him, that his father was suffering terribly -- as everyone seems to agree Williams was -- and chose to end it because he didn't want to suffer anymore.  Cody is also old enough that his parents aren't obliged to "be there" for him at every moment anymore: they have feelings and needs and lives of their own, and so does he.  (Many parents have the same difficulty understanding that everything their children do isn't about them.)  Which is not to say that Williams's children aren't or shouldn't be hurt by his loss, only that at a certain point in life the feelings of offspring no longer trump the feelings of the parents.  It might be that Williams hung on for as long as he could -- he was 63, for heaven's sake, and had apparently been miserable for most of his life -- and finally decided enough was enough.

I can't think about this without also thinking of something I touched on in my previous post, the denial of mortality and of death itself.  The last year of Nelson Mandela's life brought this home for me.  For years before that, he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health.  2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital.  At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest.  But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what.  They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else.  Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.

This kind of selfishness is evident in much of the public mourning for Robin Williams, needless to say, yet hardly anyone seems to have criticized it.

I don't mean that suicide should be committed lightly.  But Rollins, like so many people, seems to take for granted that Williams took his life casually or lightly and certainly for the wrong reason, even when they blame his decision on "depression." (Yeah, Fuck Depression.)  I don't know, and no one probably knows, exactly what chain of feeling and thought led up to Williams's final decision.  For that reason, a becoming humility should be evident in any judgment of that decision, and such humility has been conspicuous by its absence in most of the commentary I've seen.

Nor do I mean that parents and children shouldn't remain close and mutually considerate throughout their lives if they want to.  But once the offspring are adults, the obligations involved change.  It would be nice if a suffering person -- like Williams, say -- could consult with his or her family and reassure them that his or her decision to die was not meant to hurt them.  I don't think this would work in our society as it is, though.  Especially someone like Williams, with a long history of substance abuse and depression, would risk being forcibly committed for treatment if he confessed the wish to end his life.  Which might not be so bad if psychiatrists could accurately distinguish between a passing morbid suicidal impulse and a reasoned decision to die, or if "treatment" would actually help, but there are reasons to be skeptical on both counts.  Williams made sure his family was provided for, leaving generous trust funds to his children (who, being adults, could take care of themselves even if he'd died penniless); he apparently didn't leave a note.  But I see no reason to assume that his suicide was impulsive.

In any case, I don't see that Rollins said anything here that was worse than what many others had said without being attacked for it, except for its bluntness, even though I disagree with him.

I don't feel that way about the rest of the piece, which is kinda embarrassing.

When someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind. I have many records, books and films featuring people who have taken their own lives, and I regard them all with a bit of disdain. When someone commits this act, he or she is out of my analog world. I know they existed, yet they have nullified their existence because they willfully removed themselves from life. They were real but now they are not ...

I have life by the neck and drag it along. Rarely does it move fast enough. Raw Power forever.

Reading this made me wonder what Rollins thinks of Ayn Rand.  Apparently he once called her a "cunt," which fits nicely with his use of "fuck."  Gotta keep the bitchez in their place, eh, Henry?  But he's not as far from her as he'd like to think, with that "I have life by the neck and drag it along" line.  Anyone who fancies him or herself to be in total control of his or her life is a self-deluding fool, even though I understand what could motivate someone to delude himself in that way.  Which, just to be clear, is not to endorse a total fatalism either.  It's like the nature/nurture, free will/determinism divide. Yes, we make choices, but the choices start from where we are, what we have.  We don't chose to be born, and we don't choose to be mortal either; you'd think Rollins would be more respectful of people who choose when to die.  They've taken life by the neck too.

Should he have apologized for this diatribe?  I can't see why.  "That I hurt anyone by what I said, and I did hurt many, disgusts me," he wrote.  "It was not at all my intent but it most certainly was the result." C'mon, Henry, you have life by the neck and you drag it along.  What you did was your intent. You can probably see why I don't share Scalzi's approval of the apology: it looks to me like the typical celebrity/public-figure nonapology, which is the same bilge regardless of nation, party, or political stance.  It's all about him: that he hurt anyone "disgusts me."  Who can help but sympathize with his disgust, it must be so painful for him.  I find it hard to believe that someone who's been performing and writing for decades could be unaware of the effect his words would have, especially someone like Rollins whose persona is built on blunt, straight-talking, fuck-this-and-that rhetoric.  His disavowal of responsibility here is at odds with his stated philosophy.

And what about the people who reacted to the original piece?  At least some of them must have been fans to begin with, who read Rollins for his tough, take-no-prisoners style.  (If they persist in reading him just to get the adrenalin rush of offense, they presumably got what they were looking for.)  Were they shocked! shocked! to find that Rollins didn't agree with them in every particular?  Were they fine with fucking capitalism but not a beloved media star?  Well, I don't know what was going on in his readers' minds either.  Maybe he should have apologized, but I don't take his apology seriously.  But maybe that just shows the limits of my understanding.

Taking Responsibility for Your Memes

Great Cthulhu's Ghost, the Stupid is strong in this one.  It was as if a million brain cells cried out in terror and suddenly were silenced.

Begin with the meme itself.  Assume that Col. Ritchie is correct about the numbers; she seems to be.  That doesn't surprise me.  I've known about some suicides that involved alcohol and a gun, and it's true, it wasn't accidental.  The people involved were not regular drinkers.  They wanted to kill themselves, so they acquired a firearm, got drunk deliberately to lower their own inhibitions, and then shot themselves.   The way human-service professionals talked about these cases, it seemed that they believed that the suicide was caused by combining alcohol and a gun, like some kind of chemical reaction, and that's the vibe I get from this meme.

One of the suicides I know about was a conflicted gay man in his mid-twenties.  I don't agree with his decision, but it was influenced much more by having grown up in a ferociously antigay society than by the juxtaposition of alcohol and a shotgun.  He didn't get drunk one night, just happen to find a shotgun at hand (in his dorm room!) and spontaneously stick the barrel in his mouth; those who knew him said he'd been very unhappy for a long time.  Whether he sought other kinds of help I don't know, but I think he had, and they were not able to help him.

Col. Ritchie is evidently talking about suicides among combat veterans, where it should be even more obvious that it isn't only "two things" they "have in common" -- there's at least a third, namely the trauma caused by horrific experiences in combat.  It's a bit disingenuous for her to leave that one out, don't you think?

Now, this meme came into view through a couple of intermediaries.  At the first stage there was a page called Everytown for Gun Safety, who attached this information to the image:

Over the last decade, the U.S. military has endured an epidemic of suicides among active-duty troops, and more than two-thirds of these deaths involved firearms.

Military commanders determined that these suicides could be prevented by talking with soldiers about whether they had personal firearms in their homes and removing guns from those most likely to hurt themselves. Despite this, in 2010 NRA backed a law prohibiting commanders from asking at-risk soldiers even basic questions about service members’ privately owned guns.

Fortunately, the military fought back — and prevailed. Working with suicide prevention advocates and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group of retired generals and admirals lobbied Congress to remove the dangerous gag order, and it was rescinded in 2013.

Fair enough, and it's probably a good thing that the gag order was rescinded, though I wonder how effective the intervention really was.  I also remember a young man, a cousin of an old friend, who was nearly killed when his motorcycle went off the road into a barbed-wire fence, injuring and disfiguring him severely.  I don't know if alcohol was involved in that accident, but it definitely was some months after he'd 'recovered' from the first 'accident' and drove himself into a tree.  While I sympathize with the emotional pain that drove him to this extremity, my main reaction was: At least he didn't take anyone else with him.  It has long been suspected that many single-vehicle accidents are really suicides.  I wonder how many veterans, deprived of their guns, will find other ways to escape their combat-induced misery.  The reason why so many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are killing themselves is not that they own guns or are drinking; the third factor must not be ignored. And as with the young gay man who killed himself, I wonder how much can really be done for them, other than hoping the pain will diminish over time if they can be kept alive.

The second stage of transmission was through a page called Armed Democrats, who added this text above the meme:

Armed Democrats supports the 2nd amendment,
We also expect people to be responsible for their actions.

They aren't!

Hence, the need for regulation.

If you stupid son-of-a-bitches would stop shooting people,
including yourselves, we wouldn’t be talking about guns.

If you’re not stupid, you’re sick. The ACA covers that.
If you’re not sure what the ACA is, you must watch Fox.

The ACA covers that too. (same insurance plan)

It was this version that inspired the post I'm writing now.  Addressing miserable, traumatized combat veterans -- hurt in wars that the Armed Democrats may well have supported at the beginning -- as "stupid son-of-a-bitches" and adding, "If you're not stupid, you're sick" is bad politics, as well as inhumane, stupid, and vicious.  "The ACA covers that" -- meaning, the second time, watching Fox News -- boggles my mind.  The ACA isn't an "insurance plan" to start with, any more than it's "health care"; but that's the least of it.  Veterans shouldn't really need the ACA anyway, since as veterans they're entitled to various health benefits, though there are plenty of horror stories about the inadequacy of the services veterans have been able to get, thanks largely to budget cuts enacted by the people who sent them off to be chewed up in the first place.  But is there any effective treatment for PTSD?  The Veterans Administration says yes, but I'm skeptical. The mental health professions have been throwing drugs at their patients for the past thirty years, with inadequate results.  "Talk" therapy has fewer harmful side effects, but its effectiveness is also dubious. 

Telling a traumatized vet to see a shrink is just plain stupid.  Chances are he or she is already doing so, or trying to.  Armed Democrats are playing politics with other people's misery as surely as the Republicans, and with as little real concern for the problems of real people.

Memorial Day

I was just walking out of Incheon Airport last night, following my hosts to their car, when one of them asked me if I'd heard the big news story. "Noh Mu-hyeon committed suicide today," he told me.

Things had unfolded in an amazingly short time. Early Saturday morning, the former president of South Korea had gone hiking near his home -- climbing up mountains is a popular pastime of the elderly here -- and then thrown himself off a cliff. He must have done it virtually in front of the bodyguard who was with him. At 9:30 a.m. he was pronounced dead at the hospital, and within a few hours the country was in mourning. It was reported that he'd left what amounted to a suicide note on his computer at home. In the early evening his coffin was brought back home and carried to the Town Hall by aides and family members. (Photo above from the Hankyoreh.)

Rather than quote the obituaries I've seen online, let me quote this article by the historian Bruce Cumings, which appeared in The Nation in 2003:

In December [2002] the South Korean people broke decisively with the existing political system, and the elites within it who date back to the Korean War, by electing Roh Moo Hyun. Roh is a lawyer who came up the hard way: Born into a dirt-poor family that could not afford college, he schooled himself in the law and passed Korea's notoriously difficult bar exam on his first try. In the 1980s, during the Reagan-supported dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, Roh defended many human rights and labor activists at the risk of his own career and life. Amazingly, for presumably anti-Communist South Korea, his wife comes from a family that was blacklisted for decades: Her father was a member of the South Korean Labor Party in the late 1940s, a Communist party outlawed by the US Military Government that ruled the South then; he was arrested for allegedly collaborating with the North during the Korean War, and died in jail. Roh's sharpest break with the past, though, is his constituency. His election was boosted mightily by a burgeoning movement among younger Koreans against the seemingly endless American military presence in the South, conducted in successive, truly massive and dignified candlelight processions along the grand boulevard in front of the US Embassy in Seoul. Routinely labeled "anti-American" by the media, these demonstrations were in fact anti-Bush--like so many others.

After he left office in 2007 charges of corruption were leveled against Noh, primarily involving large sums of money allegedly given to family members and to Noh himself. This prosecution was what evidently led to his suicide. It's hard to sort it out: I'm inclined to suspect a political element in the investigation, as are many Koreans, since the Korean Right like its American counterpart is big on getting back at political opponents. It doesn't diminish my suspicions to learn that the prosecution will be dropped in the wake of his death. I have the impression that despite the accusations of arrogance and self-righteousness that have been thrown at him, Noh quickly realized that he wasn't a very good president. His only real political experience was a brief term as Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries under his predecessor Kim Dae-jung. According to a rather blatantly biased Wikipedia article on Noh, his biggest success in office was a "free trade agreement" with the US, a move that wasn't going to meet with much opposition from either the local Right or the US itself -- his main political antagonists -- and was almost calculated to offend his core constituency, since South Korea has had hard experience with "free trade" in the past dozen years.

Now it looks as though his death may galvanize opposition to Lee Myeong-bak's administration, despite the predictable calls for reconciliation. Lee has been trying to stifle dissent of any kind at least since last summer's candlelight vigils, which nearly brought down his government. It hasn't been as easy as he must have hoped -- the courts just threw out arrest warrant requests for some labor leaders he wanted put away, for example -- but while his opponents have the numbers, Lee has the guns. (And like our own President Obama, Lee wants to focus on the future, not on the dead past.)

Last night in Seoul, "mourners clashed with police who seized their makeshift tents and cordoned off the memorial altar with buses to prevent them from holding rallies," as the Korea Herald reported it. (Photo above is from the Hankyoreh.) Of course any assembly of people the government doesn't like is now illegal, but it's hard to suppress public mourning for a dead recent president. Lee, and Korea, may face a long, sad, painful summer.