June 2008
NO PLACE FOR SISSIES
When God created the world, and donkeys, dogs, monkeys, and man along with it, he gave each a lifespan of thirty years. The donkey knew life would be hard, so he asked God to shorten it: God sliced off an eighteen-year chunk. The dog and the monkey had similar complaints, so theirs were cut short too, the dog’s by twelve years and the monkey’s by ten. But as for Man, he felt thirty years too few and asked for more. So God went ahead and gave the greedy one the years he’d taken from the donkey, the dog, and the monkey. Now greedy humans would live for seventy years. The first thirty years are the human years, the ones we enjoy, happy and healthy; then come the difficult donkey years, when we have to carry others, and receive only kicks and blows for our trouble. The dog years follow, the twelve toothless years we spend growling in the corner, with no teeth with which to bite. Finally, there are monkey years, the ten years we spend as old fools, mocked by young children.
The Brothers Grimm heard that story from a peasant and recorded a version of it as The Duration of Life. I read it (or something similar) when I was a child. My socialist readers were bursting with didactic stories, proverbs, puzzles, and other forms of oral literature. Naturally I’ve now forgotten all of them, but ever since I’ve had an aversion towards folksy aphorisms. I can’t stand those little pearls of wisdom you find in Chinese fortune-cookies either. I don’t like people who parrot folksy sayings; they’re usually old and half-senile.
Man is an insatiable being, and our haggling with God over the duration of our lives continues to this day. With all our might we try to usurp God’s throne, to take the question of our lifespan into our own hands, a tendency that goes on apace. There’s the pharmaceutical industry, the cosmetic industry, the self-help industry, not to mention the tons of products designed to both prolong our life and improve its quality. People spend enormous amounts of time going running, working out at the gym, dieting, frequenting health food stores, going to the dental hygienist, the sauna, meditating, cutting out stress and meat, consuming healthy fats, reducing unhealthy fats, cutting out sugar, working on their mental health, practicing work-out routines, relaxing, quitting smoking and drinking, gulping down water, having regular health checks, speed-walking, avoiding tomatoes, eating more tomatoes, carefully reading product labels, learning exercises to prevent wrinkles and firm the buttocks, starving themselves, steam-cooking, detoxing and botoxing. All told, were Hitler to today rise from the grave, it would warm his heart to see the millions-strong masses of potential Übermenschen, optimistic and disciplined, glowing with rude health and physical vitality.
Longevity is currently right up there on the ladder of our civilizational values. Flanked by the media, the Croatian President recently offered his personal congratulations to a woman who had just turned 104. Why? Because she is the oldest Croatian woman alive. Premature death, particularly if it’s due to terminal illness, is no longer seen as lucking out in the divine lottery, but as a personal failure, like a self-induced bankruptcy. The more benevolent treat untimely death due to sickness as a kind of genetic affliction, which is also seen as a kind of personal failure. We should have chosen forebears of better genetic material. Today life is like a marathon of uncertain duration, at the end of which — providing we aren’t disqualified by a higher power — the head of state might be waiting for us, a bouquet of flowers in hand.
By and large, in the past fifty years life expectancy has dramatically increased. Today every Tom, Dick, and Harry is eighty years old. There are experts who maintain that this increase in life expectancy will result in a tectonic global disturbance more dangerous and alarming than global warming. Yes, people are living longer, but their pensions are increasingly precarious, and when they do have one, it’s too meagre to live off. People are living longer, but a longer life means greater susceptibility to illness, and the health services in many countries often refuse to treat the elderly. People might be living longer, but their children are so overworked, struggling to support their own children, that they have neither the time nor money to look after their parents. In many countries, rest homes, just like prisons, are in seriously short supply, and the expensive private ones are raking it in as a result. The state is keen to see private rest homes prosper, but lacks the desire or means to monitor them. If we then factor in the global economic crisis, things look all the bleaker.
In many cultures euthanasia and geronticide were inescapable rituals. Such rituals were often innocuous (leaving the windows open so the draft would hasten death and allow the soul an easier departure, or sealing the house shut so the soul wouldn’t have anywhere to hide), but could also be quite pragmatic and efficient (murder, incineration, starvation, drowning, abandonment, being throwing off a cliff, etc.).
A Serbian newspaper recently ran a story about two sisters from the village of Lučica near Požarevac. The old women had no means of income and survived on scavenged scraps. When one died, the other apparently lay down beside her, took a sharp object, and began slicing flesh from the soles of her sister’s feet. Suspecting something amiss, the other village residents called the police. Asked why she didn’t declare her sister’s death, the old woman replied: “What would I have eaten then?” Other newspapers reported the story of a poor Italian family who hid their deceased grandmother in the fridge for months. They didn’t declare the old woman’s death, as doing so would have meant forfeiting her pension.
These kinds of stories probably fall into the category of sensationalist modern folklore, but they could also prove a bleakly comedic foreshadowing of the near future. Faced with the dilemma of feeding their children or their parents, that the poor will revive a form of geronticide can’t be ruled out. In wealthier countries, as a result of both expensive gerontological services and the general economic crisis, a different practice is in evidence. The practice is still very hush-hush, because people would rather keep mum about it. The Swiss and Germans pack their parents onto one-way flights to low-cost Thailand, where the Thai medical staff nurse them until their deaths. Funeral services are included in the package. In one hit, cash-strapped children combine the recreational and the functional, returning from holiday with parental ashes in their luggage.
Croatian entrepreneurs are on the ball. One is currently building a rest home for Swiss clients, while another apparently already has a contract with the Japanese. It turns out that it’s cheaper for the Japanese to send their parents to Croatia and visit them twice a year than to have them cared for in their exorbitantly-priced homeland. In the years to come, hundreds of elderly Japanese might make their way to Croatia. The Japanese will end their days looking out across the idyllic rolling hills of Croatia, slowly letting out their souls like little shriveling balloons. That is, until the day our overheated and overcrowded planet hastens things along.
April 2009
THE CONSOLATION OF THE LAST RESOURCE
On a grey housing-estate wall somewhere in the former Yugoslavia there’s a piece of graffiti that reads: My boyfriend’s so rich he doesn’t need to lick the lid of the Eurokrem jar! In the gastronomic consciousness of its citizens, Eurokrem is remembered as a) a cheap snack for children; b) morning-tea for soldiers of the former Yugoslav Peoples’ Army; and c) a hotel breakfast for budget-conscious pensioners, both local and foreign, who spent their “summer” holidays in Adriatic hotels in mid-winter.