Mark Crispin Miller: Why In The World Would Suicides Be Up In The U.S. Under Bush/Cheney?

[Hissyspit]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/31163

Why in the World Would Suicides Be Up in the U.S. Under Bush-Cheney?
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2008-02-19 17:16. Media
By Mark Crispin Miller

Today's New York Times includes a front-page article on the odd spike in suicides
among the middle-aged. It's an awesomely myopic piece of work. According to it,
all those suicides are purely individual cases of "depression" bearing no relation,
somehow, to their common history, or the world around them--the world that
those departed simply couldn't bear to live in anymore. Rather, they all killed
themselves for reasons that were "personal" (i.e., not historical), and/or because
it's so darned easy to acquire prescription drugs these days. (Formerly, of course,
you couldn't get your hands on any lethal substances.)

That all those suicides may be a desperate mass response to what America has now
become--no, that sort of thinking is forbidden. Only when there's been a wave of
suicides in other countries have we rushed to just that sort of judgment: in the Soviet
Union (they couldn't bear life under communism), or in Sweden (they couldn't
stand their welfare state, or free love), and so on. Here it is unthinkable that lots
of people, burdened with the memory of, and old hopes for, a better nation, would
rather check out early than go on; for this is, of course, the best of all possible worlds.

What follows, before the Times piece, is a devastating comment on it from
Jonathan Simon, who posted it on nytimes.com (along with many others in the
same vein):

Let's see, what happened between 1999 and 2004 that would cause a spike in suicide among those born in the years when JFK was president, America was a functioning democracy oozing promise, and Rupert Murdoch did not yet own the New York Post? Could it possibly be the "election" of George W. Bush and the demise of the democracy and the America those 45-54 year olds thought they knew? Could it be the cruel and cynical hypocrisy of the mainstream media, "entertaining" us into submission, uncritically passing on (or making up) lies and covering the hard truths? Could it be the same perception of ignorant decline that caused David Walker to resign as the head of the Government Accountability Office, after likening our nation to near-endstage Rome?

Speaking as a 51-year-old who grew up believing in America (though fatally taking its democracy and immunity to disease for granted), I can tell you that I have contemplated suicide several times since November 2000 and it has had nothing to do with the "easy availability of prescription drugs" nor with any of the aspects of my personal life. It has everything to do with America's descent into corporate fascism and a dark age of swollen, fear-based empire. It has everything to do with grief and rage at our loss and at what terrible and cynical evil has been done and is further contemplated in our name. And it has everything to do with the unwillingness of such supposed guardians of the truth as the Times to fulfill their mission and sound the alarm.

We of middle age, who learned history before it was dumbed down to a cartoon, feel alone and abandoned, while the band plays on and the Good Ship Lollipop goes to the bottom. Those who believe that the only griefs are personal or romantic are wrong. I grieve my country and the world it is endeavoring to cast in its tired image. I am to a degree responsible for it and there are times when I feel that responsibility is more than I can bear.

I am still here because there is so much work to do and because all visions of the future, bright or dark, are illusions. I don't hope, as I did when still a child, for silly, unrealistic things like world peace, equality of opportunity, mass enlightenment. I don't hope for an idyllic future. I simply hope to make it better; I hope to restore honest, noncomputerized elections and live to see Americans not just willing but demanding to serve that one hour per lifetime needed for the citizens themselves to hand-count the votes in federal elections; I hope to restore the balance in the flow of information between the people and their government, currently so distorted that the Regime operates in virtual secrecy while the private lives of the public are laid bare in vast corporate and governmental databases for ready use, when push comes to shove, against those who would dare to dissent; I hope to see democracy restored to America and communication liberated from its corporate captors.

Yet there are days, months when even these most basic hopes seem beyond our reach and power--maddeningly so--and days, months when my outrage at this sinks into a chronic despair and depression. I can well understand how it all just grew too dark for many among that spiking percentage of our middle-aged cohort, delivered unwilling and unwitting into the nightmare that is George Bush's America.--Jonathan Simon

February 19, 2008

Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers
By PATRICIA COHEN, New York Times

Shannon Neal can instantly tell you the best night of her life: Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003, the Hinsdale Academy debutante ball. Her father, Steven Neal, a 54-year-old political columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, was in his tux, white gloves and tie. "My dad walked me down and took a little bow," she said, and then the two of them goofed it up on the dance floor as they laughed and laughed.

MORE

[BrklynLiberal]

1. It is a very, very sad situation....

[applegrove]

3. Very sad indeed. That what "social engineering" will get ya. Thank

gosh the neocons have less influence.

[ixion]

2. If I check out early, it will be for what we have become

and what has been in done my name, with my tax dollars.

I was raised in a very different America, and know I cannot live under corporate fascist rule.

Since I refuse to take pharmaceuticals, relying on holistic remedies, the easy availability of prescription drugs has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

[jazzjunkysue]

4. I've heard Mark speak and read his book. He's always right, and relevant.

And clear-headed. He's not a knee-jerk librul. His eyes are open to everything.

He also thinks long-term. This little 8 year republican/12th century experiment has gone down in flames. The so-called Moral Majority has either withered on the vine or slithered back under whatever rock it hides under. Either way, anti-pluralism (government sponsored narrow-mindedness) has been sent back to where it belongs: The margins of society.

Mark is reminding us of the real human costs here at home.

He leaves out the fact that deployed soldier suicides are up of late, and also leaves out all of the Iraqi casualties. But that's to get his voice out there. He remembers them in other pieces.

We'd all be better off if we could keep Mark's voice around as often as Rush's or Bill O'Reilley's.

[Fly by night]

5. Emile Durkheim (Suicide, 1897) said it well ....

"Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces, though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without..." (p. 109)

Suicide, Durkheim's third major work, was his first serious effort to establish an empericism in sociology, an empiricism that would provide a sociological explanation for a phenomenon traditionally regarded as exclusively psychological and individualistic. Durkheim drew theoretical conclusions on the social causes of suicide, which he theorized was caused by an imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation.

The Smirking Chimp years have brought us social disintegration and moral relativism. No wonder people are killing themselves. Now me, I would be more likely to commit homicide rather than suicide as a consequence of the same forces.

Maybe that's why our homicide rates are also rising.

[Hissyspit]

7. If I recall correctly, "The Tipping Point" uses copycat suicides in a Pacific culture

as an example of the author's theory on social and individual 'tipping points.' Been a while since I read it, though.

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. You'd have to be a moron not to know hwy.

The transition of the Bush years created chaos that changed the rules for everyone. The ones most aware of those changes, were the middle aged. And there was no one to help them make the adjustments during the Bush years. It was a temporary grab fest. You were either in, or you were out.

[OneBlueSky]

8. never forget that one of the goals of the ruling elite is to reduce world population . . .

dramatically . . . suicides, warfare, plagues, natural disasters, and nuclear weapons may seem horrific to those of us with a conscience . . . but to some, they are merely means to an end . . .

[truedelphi]

9. Life in an oligarchy is only sweet for thems

Thats got the getting.

The rest of us are on the edge.

Unless we have already fallen off.

[marions ghost]

10. kick

n/t