Running from Crazy (movie review)

I was never a big Hemingway buff and I don't admire bull fighting as a sport.  However, the Hemingway grandchildren are generous in sharing their story and lives with us and I join Oprah in thanking them for sincere public service.  I was reminded of Prodigal Sons which features a grandson of another famous celebrity, the actor Orson Welles.

Is the problem with the English language?  The word "suicide" is freighted with so much assumption, as to what the surrounding language game must be.  If we decide to have corporate personhood, a kind of legal puppet show, then why not give corporations a perfectly honorable way to go.  Call it dissolution or self erasing if you like, but people will hear those as euphemisms after awhile and find avoidance of the S word distasteful.  Fine, but don't force the humiliation card.  That's the issue.

Oregon as a state recognizes honorable suicide.  Just getting the information that so and so chose to take his or her own life, nothing else said, does not give me the right, or the need, to judge X.  It's OK to not judge.  Too many people don't learn that in time.  When you get information, don't assume you're called upon for an opinion.  How refreshing to not have one sometimes. It's not always a case of trying to get life insurance or remorse for committing a murder, and even then the devil is in the details.

I watched a retrospective on Sex Ed films around the same time and heard a lot of women express the abject fear they inherited from adults around normal physiological functioning, such as a women's period.  Moms would "freak out".  We need to stop freaking out about suicide.  Let many voices have the floor.  Don't be control freaking the script.

I was also reminded of confusions about "race".  There's no single gene that constitutes anyone's "race".  Sure, patterns appear everywhere you look, but they're not super simple patterns.  The idea that some ancestor took it into his head to commit suicide is not evidence of any specific biotum getting passed down in the cells.  Protestant predestination dogmas hijacking genetics just to scare children is what that sounds like to me.  Too many such prophesies are self-fulfilling.  "Race" as a concept is not there to help science.  It's the tool of control freaks, another way of playing Facebook or one of those.  Let people opt out if it seems too stupid, like FarmVille.

Look how Interfaith Holy Landers, various species of Godder, gang up against "atheists" (whoever doesn't believe as they do) in favor of some Apocalypse scenario.  Planetary suicide would be just fine with them, as long as it involves lots of crosses and gnashing of teeth and other special effects ala God of the Bible (a subdivision of Hollywood Enterprises).  Talk about faux!  If you've been hanging out with Holy Landers and feel suicidal sometimes, don't blame yourself.  Find the eject button and escape from that cult!  Deprogram.  Get help.