Link salad: Death, Japan, etc
Sep. 6th, 2009 00:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyThanks to my recent and relatively recent experiences with my mother and grandmother, respectively, I've been thinking a lot lately about death and dying. I'm not sure I have any more of a grasp on death than I did before, at least in any sense beyond the immediate, but I've definitely become a big fan of palliative care. Whenever I see that someone with cancer died in the hospital, I always have the immediate reaction that the person wasted a lot of money and probably put themselves and their family through a lot of ultimately unnecessary physical and emotional pain--which, to be clear, is absolutely their right if that's their choice, but I can't help think that a certain reticence to talk frankly about death as well as lack of awareness about palliative care contributes to unnecessary suffering. Be like Ted Kennedy and my mother; die at home. Anyway, I thought that this article in the Times about palliative care, and doctors who practice it, was flat-out excellent. It makes a lot of points about dying that just aren't made often enough. If I were a med student, this is the kind of medicine I would go into.
On the other hand, this article in the Times about the patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Katrina is absolutely blood-curdling. The palliative care doctor who helped Anna Pou did the opposite of palliative care but apparently has no guilt whatsoever about it; aside from the fact that those nine patients were more or less murdered, the impression one gets from the article is that Pou not being indicted by the grand jury was entirely a result of politics rather than evidence. Aside from the fact that the medical professionals apparently chucked the Hippocratic oath right out the window (which is not to say that the oath doesn't take on a different meaning in an end-of-life context, but these patients were not in an end-of-life situation), there are skeevy racial currents running through the article--the palliative care doctor makes some eye-buggingly racist comments (and the last patient to die was black), while the young black internist whose objections to evacuating the patients with DNR orders last was apparently one of the few black people on staff--were his objections ignored because he was young or black or both? The article is also a commentary, albeit obliquely, about how human beings function in a crisis--one of the senior physicians decided even before the storm struck that patients with DNR orders would be the last out, for no discernible or defensible reason, and this arbitrary choice on his part became an ironclad rule for the staff as they struggled to cope; they clung to it. And apparently Pou is now on the lecture circuit advocating that medical personnel should be immune from lawsuits over their actions in crisis situations. Yikes.
Anyway, in happier news, Japan's Liberal Democratic government (which, as the old Asian Studies joke goes, was actually neither liberal nor democratic) fell last weekend, for only the second time in 60 years, but for good this time since it happened at the ballot box rather than in the Diet. The prospective Prime Minister is nicknamed 'Space Alien' and has allegedly never ridden a subway (which is absolutely mind-boggling for someone in Japan, let me tell you), while his wife claims to have visited Venus via astral projection, and the electorate desperately wants the government to repeal most of Koizumi's hard-won economic reforms, which have impoverished a lot of people while not actually doing much for the economy. For what it's worth, my own read on the situation is that the liberalization of the economy didn't go anywhere near far enough, while the neoliberalization of the workforce went way too far (much like neoliberal reforms are impoverishing people in America, actually), but I don't think that distinction is one that's being made. And we thought Abe and Aso were interesting! "You ain't seen nothing yet, folks."
And thanks to a muck-raking documentary, the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in an isolated cove in Kansai, Japan has been delayed, possibly for good. This makes me glad.
Finally, also from NPR, Guy Raz does his best to nail Paul Wolfowitz on his views on the war in Iraq, with only limited success; but it was a refreshing change from most NPR interviews, which completely and disgustingly softball the interviewees. James Fallows opined afterward that Wolfowitz' current article in Foreign Policy is dead wrong (which I agree with) and that he's now the Robert McNamara of the Iraq war, which, hey, tough beans, that's life in the big city. The fact that he can still say that Iraq was a "dangerous country" when we destroyed it in 2003 is nothing short of incredible.
ETA: The Beatles Rock Band scored a sort of eyebrow-raisingly rapturous review from the Times; and this story merely confirms my suspicions that Spike Jonze is something like a genius, and that "Where the Wild Things Are" is the movie I most want to see this fall. Also, fur-covered novelization by Dave Eggers? Sign me up! There aren't enough fur-covered books in my life, that's what I say.
On the other hand, this article in the Times about the patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Katrina is absolutely blood-curdling. The palliative care doctor who helped Anna Pou did the opposite of palliative care but apparently has no guilt whatsoever about it; aside from the fact that those nine patients were more or less murdered, the impression one gets from the article is that Pou not being indicted by the grand jury was entirely a result of politics rather than evidence. Aside from the fact that the medical professionals apparently chucked the Hippocratic oath right out the window (which is not to say that the oath doesn't take on a different meaning in an end-of-life context, but these patients were not in an end-of-life situation), there are skeevy racial currents running through the article--the palliative care doctor makes some eye-buggingly racist comments (and the last patient to die was black), while the young black internist whose objections to evacuating the patients with DNR orders last was apparently one of the few black people on staff--were his objections ignored because he was young or black or both? The article is also a commentary, albeit obliquely, about how human beings function in a crisis--one of the senior physicians decided even before the storm struck that patients with DNR orders would be the last out, for no discernible or defensible reason, and this arbitrary choice on his part became an ironclad rule for the staff as they struggled to cope; they clung to it. And apparently Pou is now on the lecture circuit advocating that medical personnel should be immune from lawsuits over their actions in crisis situations. Yikes.
Anyway, in happier news, Japan's Liberal Democratic government (which, as the old Asian Studies joke goes, was actually neither liberal nor democratic) fell last weekend, for only the second time in 60 years, but for good this time since it happened at the ballot box rather than in the Diet. The prospective Prime Minister is nicknamed 'Space Alien' and has allegedly never ridden a subway (which is absolutely mind-boggling for someone in Japan, let me tell you), while his wife claims to have visited Venus via astral projection, and the electorate desperately wants the government to repeal most of Koizumi's hard-won economic reforms, which have impoverished a lot of people while not actually doing much for the economy. For what it's worth, my own read on the situation is that the liberalization of the economy didn't go anywhere near far enough, while the neoliberalization of the workforce went way too far (much like neoliberal reforms are impoverishing people in America, actually), but I don't think that distinction is one that's being made. And we thought Abe and Aso were interesting! "You ain't seen nothing yet, folks."
And thanks to a muck-raking documentary, the annual slaughter of thousands of dolphins in an isolated cove in Kansai, Japan has been delayed, possibly for good. This makes me glad.
Finally, also from NPR, Guy Raz does his best to nail Paul Wolfowitz on his views on the war in Iraq, with only limited success; but it was a refreshing change from most NPR interviews, which completely and disgustingly softball the interviewees. James Fallows opined afterward that Wolfowitz' current article in Foreign Policy is dead wrong (which I agree with) and that he's now the Robert McNamara of the Iraq war, which, hey, tough beans, that's life in the big city. The fact that he can still say that Iraq was a "dangerous country" when we destroyed it in 2003 is nothing short of incredible.
ETA: The Beatles Rock Band scored a sort of eyebrow-raisingly rapturous review from the Times; and this story merely confirms my suspicions that Spike Jonze is something like a genius, and that "Where the Wild Things Are" is the movie I most want to see this fall. Also, fur-covered novelization by Dave Eggers? Sign me up! There aren't enough fur-covered books in my life, that's what I say.