About two weeks ago, an interview with a member of the group “Fear Factory” included the news that the group’s new album includes a cut titled “Final Exit.” Below is an excerpt from the interview with group member Burton Bell:
KNAC.COM: “Final Exit” is a suitably grim note to end the album on, is that Jack Kevorkian’s voice in the talking snippets?
BELL: That’s actually Derek Humphry, the writer of the book Final Exit and a member of the Final Exit Network. It’s some dialogue from his Web site. The statement for “Final Exit,” it’s not a negative comment on the organization, it’s a statement about society and how it’s gotten to the point in the world of medicine where instead of trying to find cures they’re just not helping people at all. And this is a resort people have to take, assisted suicide to end their suffering.
Final exit is supposed to be an answer for people to relieve the pain. The organization is there to help people who are in extreme pain, debilitating pain, pain that they cannot bear to live with and that there is no cure for. To quote Chris Rock, “there’s no money in the cure.” The money’s in letting people linger, not matter how bad their quality of life has gotten. The message of the Final Exit Network is “we will help you. You have a choice.”
Well, no one ever said that an ability to engage in critical thinking – or even coherent thinking – was a quality necessary for success in the entertainment field. No one trying to find cures? Evidently Bell has managed to miss the Labor Day Telethon during his lifetime – probably hasn’t heard of “Autism Speaks” either. He also doesn’t seem to know a lot about the Final Exit Network (FEN) itself and just how broad the the group’s eligibility criteria is in terms of who it will “help.”
But that isn’t really the song I want to talk about. Since the FEN surfaced, with its helium-based suicide guidance and assistance, I have believed they already had an organizational song.
OK, maybe not – but I found the perfect song for a bunch of whacky, goofy, “special” folks like the ones who make up the membership of the FEN. This song would be perfect – and would require the FEN members to sing while taking tokes off of their own helium tanks – led by Derek Humphry, looking something like the hookah-toking caterpillar in “Alice in Wonderland.” (I’m not usually this visual – but the cinematic picture I get of this is like something out of one of the movies by Mel Brooks.)
So I’d like to share my selection for the theme song for the whimsical folks at FEN, with a link to an mp3 recording of the song “Helium” by John Forster:
Click to access mp3 of “Helium.”
For those who cannot access the mp3 for whatever reason, here are the lyrics from Forster’s website:
Cocaine Bill & Morphine Sue–
Get out the way. Here comes Helium Hugh.
Helium [inhale]…runnin’ round my brain.A ten buck bottle on the street
Gets you about a hundred fifty cubic feet
Of helium…running round my brain.I’m all through with blow and boo,
Bourbon, cigarettes and airplane glue.
I no longer waste my breath
Crying “Give me Librium or Give me Meth.”Breathe it in/ Up ya go.
Nice and slow/ When you’re done
And down ya come/ Cause helium
Is really um-believable stuff.Float in space, your mind’s a blank.
The only pressure is in the tank.
Nothing can upset this tranquil mood.[Break: Kazoo on helium]
Father James says all the monks
Got helium hoses in their bunks.
“Et com spiritu tuo helium”Crack is bad and smack is bad
And so is LSD.
And I vaguely recall that pot
Does…something bad to your memory.So when I die, Oh please don’t skinp.
Bury my body in the Goodyear blimp
I got to got to have that helium…runnin’ round my brain.
Yeah, it’s a little sick – but let’s get real. What’s really sick is a bunch of folks who devote themselves to arranging and managing the suicides of total strangers.
I believe in treating them with all the respect and dignity they deserve. 😉 –Stephen Drake
Just so you know, Stephen; my planned “method” was not helium, ever since about a year after I joined the Final Exit Network, and that was back in 2006. There are better ways than helium, in my opinion. Besides that, I actually found the song amusing, and maybe even a bit appropriate for the occasion. Although, I almost can guarantee you that not a single member from the FEN will respond to you, besides me. Go figure…
Artists by definition comment on stuff that other more direct messengers would be shot for i.e. “don’t shoot the messenger.”
Music, canvas or poetry are seen as media to make observations from a safe distance. Of course, artists are also tolerated by institutions of public interest because their renditions are obscure and most often glossed over by the general public. Try saying something directly: it doesn’t go over very well!
This band obviously tried its hand at social conscience. These lyrics are heartbreaking when actually looked at. They accomplish the task of making pain and suffering a deeply personal matter as opposed to the stuff of organizations. I hope more people read them and I commend you for writing them out here. We have to use well what we do have.
Still, I don’t think that the group is mentioning the Final Exit Network, but more specifically, Final Exit as a name recognition, in relation to the right-to-die, which is a fair association in itself, considering how the Final Exit book is a bestselling book about the subject.
Kurt,
There are at least two reasons no FEN members will respond.
One reason is that they do their best to pretend NDY and disability activists in general don’t exist.
The second is that they just aren’t a bunch of people who can take a joke – or even make that many, for that matter.
Anonymous,
I’m confused. The only lyrics I shared were from the song “helium.”
I don’t think much of what you say makes a lot of sense in regard to “artists” – FEN and other pro-euthanasia activists get plenty of sympathy in the public.
You see them as “artists” – I see them as “entertainers” – and entertainers who have chosen to jump on a bandwagon.
Kurt,
the interview specifically makes reference to a group of people who will “help” you.
Stephen,
They don’t even take constructive criticism well, even when it is from another FEN member, nor do they trust in those who want to help them, as I’ve tried so much to do. I still believe in the right-to-die, but between them lying to me, scolding me, and their general lack of confidence in me, I’ve had enough in trying to make things better for them.
Regarding the song responses, you are right. They ignore NDY, along with their ignorance of non-terminally ill physically disabled people, because they think less of non-terminally ill physically disabled people. Otherwise, you’d see the FEN open up to discussions about non-terminally ill physically disabled people. The book “Final Exit”, doesn’t even address the non-terminally ill in its cover of the third edition. As it states, “The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying”. Like most book to movie conversions, the similarities between the book and the organization of “Final Exit”, are very few. Again in all fairness, there is very little
“organization” in the FEN, and probably much more so in the Final Exit book.
Fear Factory ought to come out making a clearer notification on what they meant the song for, if it encompasses the same message as of the Final Exit Network, or more specifically is about the Final Exit book itself, etc. Personally, while I like the song and some of its right-to-die messages, and those messages’ possible ties to some of the Final Exit book, I still wonder about why Derek Humphry endorsed the song on his blog, when the song contains lyrics which he doesn’t promote as a peaceful and painless method of death, “Like the knife that cuts through me
Stabbing uncertainty”.
Granted, those particular lyrics are still darkly poetic, especially in a general suicide matter, they supposedly do not reflect the message of the Final Exit book, of even the Final Exit Network. I mention this, because as I’m starting to see things differently regarding the FEN, primarily due to my having been very hurt by them lately, I do wonder what I don’t know about them, also because if they are going to hurt me, someone who has been trying to help them, along with their (at least Derek’s) endorsement of a song which describes a fairly gruesome way of death, then what really is going on in the FEN that we don’t know about, yet?
I’d like answers, but I doubt that I’ll ever get them directly from the FEN, except perhaps from their upcoming court case. Remembering this quote from the Chicago Tribune article which I was featured in,
“It’s going to kill us. There’s no question about it,” Dincin said. Perhaps that is what the song really is about; an organization doing everything that it can do, in order to die.
On “assisted suicide” (posting this on most recent article because it is so raw) and middle of the night radio:
I awoke around 1:30AM EST,Feb. 1, last night, in CFS/ME muscle pain, with sacroiliac “out” and making noise,too – and tuned my battery bed radio to BBC World News to hear the announcer introduce a tv person in England as someone pushing in the “growing surge” for “assisted suicide”, then the man, and the mother speaking, who was just acquitted in court of (killing) “assisted suicide” of her daughter, a young woman with my illness (ME named in England), living abed, severely disabled. I have taken peeks at the stories,on this case, as much as I could tolerate, wondering how this woman could be called “assisting suicide” not murder, when it’s her word, etc. “Helping” by putting lethal dose of morphine, I think, into her 30something daughter’s IV. To me, it’s murder.
The BBC host mentioned an online, sounded like, survey on
people’s attitude toward “assisted suicide” – data based on “those who replied” online. Not a scientific poll,
“for starters”, as they say in UK. It was around 56% for “family and loved ones” to give a family member who was in pain and terminal, “assisted suicide”. The number dropped sharply to 40something % when not
“terminal” illness. No mention of what the actual questions were.
( There was also mention of the case of another mother who was just convicted of murder of her disabled son)
My thoughts at 2AM (after “it’s murder, not assisted suicide”)were that a)there’s not much help for
carers (care givers are called
“carers” in UK), or families, and not much supports for people at home with severe illness/disabilities and b)not much for pain. I’d love legal marijuana.
Google/see Greg Crowhurst’s blog “A Carer’s Fight”. His wife,is my friend, in England; we met via networking. We both cope with CFS/ME in a society that doesn’t know what to do with us (me in US and she in England)aside from the branch of medical groups that want to make it “shrinkable” and trivialize this nasty neurological illness, CFS/ME. (Yes, I avoided saying besides
assisting us to death.)
There’s a steady propaganda campaign in England and the US to make “assisted suicide” welcome and legal. (It’s my job to state the obvious.) We’ll keep fighting for our lives…decent lives with supports from the gov’t and medical profession…
I’m doing my countdown to 7 0 end of this month – (birthday)
So, I got out of bed,2AM, turned off the BBC/radio, addressed a few envelopes for my newest piece of writing (xeroxes of),with art, for artists, ate some ice cream and went to sleep, not disturbing my spouse, who is my caregiver and has to get up early to go to work.