“…passed, after a long and valliant battle with something or other…”

Eventually, people start getting weird at the breakfast table. If you’re under 60 or so years of age, you’re going to have to trust me on this; one day you won’t be able to put down your coffee cup and head out the door until you’ve finished reading the death notices in the morning newspaper.

There are all kinds of reasons for this, many of them social.

What if Harry's now a corpse?

At a certain stage of life you don’t want to ask Harry’s wife how good old Harry is feeling if there’s a chance Harry dropped dead from fatal stroke yesterday. What does it say of you if you commit a major faux pas simply because you were too lazy to check the death notices?

Even later in life, reading the death notices is a way of keeping up with your friends.

Personally, I got into reading the habit of reading death notices in my early 40s. It started after I called my insurance agent to ask why he hadn’t responded for more than a week to some request I’d made. His sister growled at me over the phone, “Our father just died, that’s why.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling – pardon the expression – mortified, “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you not?” she snarled, “It was in the New York Times!”

Since then I’ve regarded reading death announcements a requisite act of citizenship, sort of like voting and paying my taxes.

The language of death

So it’s amazing that in all these years I never took particular notice of something until it began bugging my beautiful girlfriend. I’m talking about the curious language of death notices.

“Passed, after a valliant battle with cancer,” is a typical phrase. So is “after a courageous struggle” and even, “a lifelong fighter who fought his disease to the very end.”

As the beautiful girlfriend points out, you don’t and can’t battle a disease. You go to a doctor. He radiates your tumor. Or cuts it out surgically. Or gives you a transfusion of the latest chemotherapy agent. Or you get moved to a home where people feed you oatmeal with a spoon after Alzheimer's renders you so helpless that you can’t even remember who you are. Then they change your diapers.

Dying – or getting cured or treated to prolong your life for a while – is by its nature a passive experience.

What’s brave and what’s not?

The 105-pound little old lady who fights off a 6-foot, 250-pound mugger with her umbrella – she just had a brave battle. The little old lady who lies there while they start an intravenous drip is just lying there because the doctor said to lie there.

Having survived an often-fatal form of cancer (at least so far), I can crankily boast that I was neither brave nor a fighter. I went to the doctor and he said, “Here’s what you have to do.” I said, “Okay.” I wasn’t brave. I was numb with fear. I lay down on the operating table because I was ordered to. When I woke up a few hours later, the cancer was out. That was several years ago. So far, so good.

Incidentally, I’ve also noticed that in some small town newspapers dead people “respose.” For example, “He is reposing at the Ajax Funeral Home on Main Street.” What this is intended to communicate is, his corpse is lying there in a box and you can go there to see it and offer sympathy to his family. Nobody in the death business says what they mean.

The passing of gas

While I’m on the subject of death notices, what’s with the euphemisms for death? Why is it that animals die, but people “pass?” Pass what? And why does anyone say that someone else “passed away?” Where is away? And what do they do while they’re passing there – turn the steering wheel? Hit the brakes? Stomp on the accelerator? Do they use hand signals or their blinker lights?

I’m in no rush to be dead, but when I die I’d like people to say of me, “He died,” and not that “He passed.” First of all, I went through life trying to get more than a passing grade. If you tell people I passed, they might get the idea that I nearly failed.

Don’t even get me started on New Age phrases like, “He moved on to the next stage.”

If society keeps on going with ridiculous euphemisms for death, pretty soon simply saying that somebody died will become politically incorrect, a paranoiacally perceived insult to those who believe in life after death, or life with 72 virgins after death, or life after removal from a cryronic freezer after death.

We have turned into a world of people who fear to say what we mean, whether in matters political, religious, ethnic, racial, or sexual. Why did people who used to be one sex or another now have to be one gender or another? But I’m getting off the topic of death here.

A personal death pact?

Personally, I’m thinking of making a cranky pact with my beautiful girlfriend: Whomever drops dead first will put on the other’s tombstone, “Died after a valiant battle with hyperbole.” Except that I’m also thinking of not having a tombstone. If I get cremated, my ashes can be distributed and everybody can have a piece of me. Some people have been wanting a piece of me for years.

In any case, we’d all better do something about this death hyperbole business fast. This means you, pal. Because, as the beautiful girlfriend – a medical doctor who therefore has some authority in these matters – often reminds me, “Nobody’s getting out of here alive.”

When they execute an innocent man for murder on Tuesday, the real murderers will be the cops, prosecutor and appeals courts from Georgia to Washington

Barring a legal miracle, the state of George is about to stick a needle into an innocent man, paralyze his nervous system so that he cannot breathe, and then stop his heart.

His name is Troy Davis. That's him at left. When he was put on trial, there were witnesses against him, but most of those witnesses now say they were bullied by the police into falsely testifying against Davis.

The truly horrifying part of the story is that thanks to something bizarrely named the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the courts have refused to review this new evidence and grant Davis a new trial.

This act of Congress prevents the courts from reviewing fresh evidence even when a state is about to execute an innocent person. Of course, the Supreme Court could declare that the law is unconstitutional, but don’t expect it from the cast of right-wing characters sitting on the Roberts court today. (We also ought to brand as murderers every member of Congress who voted to prevent reviews of fresh evidence that could prevent an innocent person from going to his death -- or spending more time in prison for a crime he did not commit.)

Oh, did I mention that George Bush could grant the guy clemency, too? Whoops sorry, President Bush uses that only for political operatives like Scooter Libbey facing five years for a crime they really did commit, not for innocent men about to be put to death.

You can read a summary of “legalized” murder by the state here: http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/11470.html

Somehow, this all brought to mind a little ditty I wrote in a cranky moment well over a decade ago. It had to do with the electric chair, but it works just as well for any form of capital punishment.

It was meant to be sung, to an upbeat banjo twang. Just in case you like to twang one.

Enjoy, while you think of the murderers in Washington positions of power – and the innocent guy they’re going to kill to keep the death penalty “effective.”

They are bolting down the death chair
To the concrete prison floor
And they're checking all the wires out
A dozen times or more
And they're testing out the switches
And they're trying out the fuse
They are gonna fry a kid tonight --
The story's in the news.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.


Meanwhile, just outside the prison gates
They're starting to drink beer
They've got noisemakers and banners
And they're full of vengeful cheer
Some are here to mourn and others toast
The final muffled cry
Of a guy the prosecutor framed
And justice says must die.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

Watch them drag him down the hallway
Weak and trembling, full of fright
Just a kid without his mother
In the middle of the night
See him cuddled in the rough embrace
Of leather, wood and steel
Now they jam a gag into his mouth --
It's all part of the deal.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

Then the warden reads the sentence
And the priest he reads a prayer
Next the whining of a generator
Fills the stagnant air --
Then upon the stroke of midnight
All the power of the state
Flows through shiny copper cables
With a final surge of hate.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.
.
Now the young kid lurches forward
'Neath the straps his body strains
While his blood and liver boil
And smoke gushes from his brains
See the writhing torso twitching
Muscles fracture every bone
Underneath the flaming leather mask
There comes a final groan.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

Smell the room fill with the stink of
Urine, vomit, burning skin
Hear the clamor in the prison
As the inmates raise a din
And a hearse's purring engine
As it carts off the remains
Of another hapless victim
Of the justice system's games

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

Now the mob outside the prison
Breaks into a joyful shout
And the guileful prosecutor prays
No one will find him out
And the justices in black robes
Cooly dine and sleep quite well
But if there's really any justice
They will surely fry in hell.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

Just a kid, you high court buzzards
Couldn't vote or take a wife
But in our kinder, gentler nation
Young folks have no right to life
In the death room with ammonia
Now a trusty mops the floor
But who'll clean up the piece of filth
You've handed down as law?

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

You can fry 'em you can hang 'em
Or squirt poison up their veins
You can gas 'em you can even
Shoot a bullet through their brains.
Can't afford no fancy lawyers
So they must deserve to die
Execution's as American
As Mom and Apple Pie.

Yes, it's good to deep fry people
The Supreme Court says, Well hey,
'If we do not cook all the Accused
They'll just get in the way.
Too damn bad they had bad lawyers
And let's cut out those appeals
For we're busy and it's lunchtime
And it's torture missing meals.

C) The New York Crank