I had no idea that Ezekiel Emanuel was such a hardcore fan of the movie Logan's Run.
Actually, yes I did, and so did all of you:
ObamaCare architect Dr. Zeke Emanuel's jolting proclamation that 75 years is long enough for a person to live smacks of the twisted ideology of Nazi Germany, economist Peter Morici believes.
"I can think of other figures in history that had similar views of human life," Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV."
To talk about the optimal age to die, it's basically saying once you're past 75, you're costing too much to keep around and maybe you should just let go.
"The next step from that's going to be we'll help you let go. This sounds like Germany in the 1930s."
Think Mr. Morici is exaggerating? Let's judge for ourselves:
ObamaCare architect Dr. Zeke Emanuel explained on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" why he believed 75 years was long enough for a person to live, saying that's about the time health began to decline.
For some people, yes, it is. For others, that onset doesn't begin until years beyond that. My paternal grandmother was able to live independently until she was 83, and lived another fifteen years after that with no loss of mental function. She was lucid and had a mind like a steel trap (with the bossiness of every German lady who every lived) right up until she passed away of congestive heart failure. My maternal grandmother was independent and active into her late eighties, only beginning her precipitous slide into infirmity and senility after a freak fall that broke her hip (She had come out of a store, was rummaging through her purse, not directly looking where she was going, and misjudged where the curb was when she stepped off of it).
By contrast, my paternal grandfather, who smoked like a chimney his entire adult life, dropped dead of a heart attack at 63, and my maternal grandfather, beset by various physical infirmities his entire life, and after suffering a heart attack and three strokes in the immediately preceding years, succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the tender age of 59.
And then there are my parents, my mother having passed away at the age of 76, only slightly later than Dr.
If "Zeke" wants to off himself at 75 - assuming, of course, that he lives that long - he's free as the wind to do so. Although I suspect that when that day, now eighteen years in the future, grows close enough to become tangible to him, he will have belated second thoughts - especially if, as a result of the efforts he has and is expending now, that decision is no longer his to make.
Logan 5 ran, after all.
"I picked 75, when you think about the combination of physical decline, the rise of Alzheimer's, the loss of creativity. And I really say you need to think about what you're going to leave your children, your family, your community, the country," Emanuel said on Monday.
He picked 75 for himself? Or for everybody else as well? As to what we're going to leave our children, the federal estate tax alone guarantees that won't be much monetarily. But why do we "need" to think about what we're leaving our communities and country? Won't the feds already be plundering our estates? Why do we have to "leave" anything to them?
Actually, what we should think about leaving both our children and our posterity is a country better, more prosperous, more secure, and more faithful to its original founding principles than the one into which we were first born. Traditionally, that's what Americans have always done. Perfidiously, our generation has made that impossible for generations to come.
In an article in September's issue of "the Atlantic" provocatively titled, "Why I Hope to Die at 75," Emanuel spelled out his case for why longevity in life didn't necessarily translate to quality as people advanced in age.
"Seventy-five. That's how long I want to live: 75 years," Emanuel wrote in the article. "Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: Living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived."
Who decides what is "too long," Zeke? How is it a "loss"? Maybe you don't want to bother with the consequences of entropy, but perhaps some or most of your countrymen are made of sterner stuff, rugged individualists who are willing to bear aches and pains and surgeries and medicines and potions out of a pure love of life, and the dignity of being left free to choose to live it for as long as they can.
But that's the rub, isn't it? Just as Neo epiphanized when he met the Architect at the end of Matrix Reloaded: "Choice; the problem is choice".
And who gets to make it.
Emanuel told "Morning Joe" that it all boiled down to "the meaning and the purpose of your life," adding that Americans had a tendency to believe they were the "American immortal — they do everything to live as long as possible."
"One of the big American beliefs is this thing called compression of morbidity. You know, we're just going to be healthy, healthy, healthy, fall off the cliff, and we won't have any of this disability.
"The reality is, that hasn't been, in the last 25 years, the way it's gone. Disabilities increase every time we live longer. And then there's Alzheimer's. At 85, between a third and half of the people have Alzheimer's. Does that sound so desirable to you to live to 100?" he said.
What does it matter how it sounds to us, Zeke, when you've already made the decision that we're to be euthanized a decade sooner than that, ostensibly on public fiscal grounds, but really at its heart because you have arrogated that power unto yourself and those of like-mind who enabled you to birth your infernal creation into unconstitutional law four and a half years ago?
I, my friends, am far more eloquent than Sarah Palin could ever dream of being, but she is unparalleledly insightful. She coined the term "death panels" five years ago to describe ObamaCare's inevitable structural policy implications, and with each passing day, she becomes more of a comely, plain-spoken, khaki-wearing, moose-gutting prophet. And now comes an Ameriphobic "bioethicist" to vindicate her further, a man who would have murdered my grandmothers, my mother, and would extinguish my father in cold, sterile, bureaucratic bloodlessness, because he imagines himself worthy of the cosmic conceit that he is qualified and entitled to be the arbiter of life and death.
Except, Dr. Emanuel, that is not your choice to make:
And inasmuch as it is appointed [by God] for men to die once and after this comes judgment...
Or, if Hebrews 9:27 is too subtle for you....
I know this much: outliving Ezekiel Emanuel will be a unique and immense pleasure.
LORD willing, of course.
UPDATE: Video added.
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