I plan to put out a couple more posts today if my energy holds out. There is a lot happening this week. I think the first order of business is the rolling media nightmare unfolding in regard to Tomas Young. (Apologies to all about the misspelling of his name – many folks writing on the net – like myself – just seem to have an uncontrollable urge to put an “h” in the name “Tomas.”) We shared some info and thoughts from two other disability writers on Monday.
Things have gotten much worse since Monday. Various sites have posted a “Last Letter” from Young that has been forwarded countless places on the web. Today, he was interviewed on “Democracy Now.”
Both Bill Peace and Stephen Kuusisto have written followups, and they’ll give you a little more info and some excellent thoughts and analysis on this death train.
First from Bill Peace writes on the misleading reporting on Thomas Young:
The Huffington Post published a story yesterday entitled “Thomas Young, Dying Iraq Veteran Pens Last Letter To Bush, Cheney on War’s 10th Anniversary”. Simply put, the article is dreadful and I will not provide a link. The Huffington Post article is superficial, devoid of analysis. It is spin at its best. I suspect similar articles will abound in the mainstream press in the weeks to come. The die has been cast, a formula has created. The spin doctors are hard at work. Proponents of assisted suicide will characterize Young as heroic and brave. Groups such as Compassion and Choices will argue in the absence of assisted suicide legislation the best we can do to help men like Young who is clearly suffering is VSED. Liberal anti war activists will use Young’s death to illustrate that war is hell and altruistic men like Young needlessly die. In short, Young has a veritable cheering squad behind him. He is a political pawn with much larger social forces packaging a story to meet their ends.
Stephen Kuusisto writes about how the media, liberal and otherwise, wants Tomas Young to kill himself:
I read this morning a new piece by Nick Wing over at the Huffington Post which repackages Hedges’ narrative frame, again without any critical irony. What seems to be emerging is a liberal cheering section for a veteran’s suicide, tricked out in the language of outrage against America’s war in Iraq. Fair enough: I belong to Poets Against War and have been opposed to American military interventions since Viet Nam–but I don’t have to kill myself in a glass box to make my point. Tomas Young is being rooted for–cheered to turn himself into a sacrificial martyr in a Kafka-esque display. Why is this okay? Why are people not lining up to tell Young that a paralyzed but imaginative life is fully worth living?
Me, I keep going back to one telling passage from Chris Hedges’ original article:
Young is not the first young man to be lured into war by the false sirens of glory and honor and then callously discarded by the war makers. His story has been told many times. It is the story of Hector in “The Iliad.” It is the story of Joe Bonham, the protagonist in Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel “Johnny Got His Gun,” whose arms, legs and face are blown away by an artillery shell, leaving him trapped in the inert remains of his body.
Hedges seems to have a problem with distinguishing between fictional characters and real people. Tomas Young is a real person. Hector was a mythical character in a story about a dimly-remembered real-life Trojan War. Bonham was a plot device. It’s telling that when Hedges wants to talk about people who are used and discarded, he conjures up fictional characters. Tomas Young is not a fictional character, but a real person. And if and when he kills himself, his death won’t be a fictional death, but the real thing. And media folks like Hedges will have used and discarded Young just as surely as Bush and Cheney did.
I wrote my reaction to Dem.Now and Tomas Young, right after the show aired this morning; it’s on the previous NDY blog entry,so I won’t repeat it. One thing here about Hedges: I couldn’t get to his article via the link (which didn’t bother me much; I don’t like listening to him- why, in a minute, and I was put off by the religious “crucifixion” as title— I’m an atheist Jew and it’s almost Easter, with its history of European hostility to Jews, see
“Constantine’s Sword” by James Carroll, a nonfiction history by a son of a general, who grew up sitting under his pa’s desk, so to speak,(he really did as a toddler), in the Pentagon in D.C. and he wrote a book about the Pentagon. “Constantine’s Sword” is a history of the Church’s behavior towards Jews, written by Carroll, who is also a former priest and antiVietnam War activist and friend of the late Howard and Roslyn Zinn.)
Hedges negatively sounded off on atheists in an interview I’d heard on the radio that I found bigoted and offensive. He is, I think he said, the son of a preacher. So, it is with surprise that he is a cheerleader for Tomas Young’s suicide-to-be. Because of the topic, I was willing to read his article. I have trouble with the website the article is on; it freezes for several seconds when I go to it, that is the link, so I was relieved when it froze and I could avoid reading Hedges.
Given the fast slide down the slippery slope of euthanasia in Europe, I suspect the US will slide even faster.
But then, the groundwork was laid by “medical ethics” experts in the 1980’s, and few now in that field have the moral vocabulary to oppose it. One of my friends, a teacher of medical ethics, was practially ostracized by his collegues in Harvard medical school in the late 1980’s; so beware of any physician trained after 1990, when the Hastings center, the NEJM and other esteemed medical journals started to openly pushing the pro death agenda talking points.
As a side issue: Hedges never has read Homer: Hector was not “seduced” into fighting. I suspect Hedges vaguely remembers Achilles telling Ulysses in the Oddesey he regrets dying for “glory”, but the entire Iliad was about why he made that decision.
And “Johnny got his gun” was written as an “anti war” tirade written to discourage America from helping England at the very time Stalin had made a pact with Hitler to divide Eastern Europe and have “peace”.
are you guys able to reach out to Tomas Young and give him what for and talk to him about his options? does he have contact info posted? feel like he might listen more to you guys than just some random TAB person…
I think there are probably people trying to reach out to him, and doing it in a low-key and under-the-radar way. This means we won’t be hearing about any folks from our community having made contact with him until sometime after the fact, if then.
Stephen, Maybe someone who knows a lot of people should be “working behind the scenes” to check that some of us are “reaching out” to Tomas Young. It’s possible people think other people are doing it and not happening at all. I was reminded of when I was living in NOLA in 1965-67 and there was a story in the news about a guy standing on a ledge of one of the few tall buildings in downtown NOLA. He was standing on the ledge, contemplating jumping, and people gathered below, looking up at him on something like the 8th floor. Several yelled “jump”, then a whole chorus of “Jump Jump” and he jumped. I don’t think he could hear anyone yelling “Don’t jump”. I’d hate to think we’d find out later no one was talking with Tomas Young, urging “Don’t jump”.