Highbrow Magazine - death https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/death en Welcome to Mongolia: A Great Place to Die https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/10723-welcome-mongolia-great-place-die <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Tue, 07/07/2020 - 05:23</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1mongolia.jpg?itok=e4b3AAVa"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1mongolia.jpg?itok=e4b3AAVa" width="480" height="300" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p>What comes to mind when you think of Mongolia? My answer, probably like many people’s, was vast empty space, those signature round white tents (which Mongolians call gers, not ‘yurts’ – a word brought in during the country’s period under Russian and Soviet influence) and Genghis Khan.</p> <p> </p> <p>One thing you might not think of is ‘a good place to die’. Yet Mongolia is punching above its weight in palliative care, the branch of medicine that supports people with terminal or complex illnesses. Palliative care takes a magpie approach, borrowing from other medical disciplines and addressing a whole range of issues at once, ranging from pain and other symptoms to spiritual, social and psychological support.</p> <p> </p> <p>In a 2015 survey of global palliative care, the UK comes top, Australia second and the USA ninth. And while the richest Western nations lead the pack, Mongolia appears notably high up, especially considering that it’s well down the economic rankings. (It comes 28th in the palliative care survey but ranks 141st for gross national income (GNI) per capita.)</p> <p> </p> <p>In fact, when it comes to palliative care, Mongolia is performing far better than any comparable economy, and is ahead of several European states with much more developed healthcare systems and greater spending power, including Greece, Hungary and Lithuania. It also eclipses several big economies, including its two giant neighbors, Russia and China.                                                         </p> <p> </p> <p>A ribbon of snow marks the dark hilltops from an overcast sky. The wind bites at the canvas folds of the Tumurbat family ger, their dome-tented dwelling. A few lambs – almost fully grown, too late to be sold – huddle together in a wooden pen nearby, the remnants of a once 100-strong flock. As his aunt and two doctors come into the yard, 18-year-old Dorj Tumurbat stands by the gate, foot up on a kennel. The dog jumps for the visitors, held back by its chain. But Dorj stays put, not even turning his head as they cross the yard and then duck inside the ger. Inside, his father is dying.</p> <p> </p> <p>Tumurbat Dashkhuu has late-stage liver cancer. Although his illness is incurable, there is something the physicians can do: grant him a death that’s as peaceful as possible.</p> <p> </p> <p>The materials for making a ger have evolved – canvas is increasingly being used for the outer walls rather than animal hides – but they are still constructed to the same basic design. A typical family ger is built around two central wooden pillars (larger ones have more), symbolizing the man and woman of the household in harmony. It is bad manners for any visitor to stand in this central, sacred space.</p> <p> </p> <p>But when Dr Odontuya Davaasuren and her colleague enter the ger, everything is off balance. Enkhjargal, Tumurbat’s wife, is holding back tears, clutching a sheaf of prescriptions and other medical papers. The stove is going out. A pool of water is collecting on the linoleum floor, spilling from a washing machine on one side of the tent.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2mongolia.jpg" style="height:450px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Next to the washing machine is a large fridge-freezer, and wires strung across the tent’s wooden frame lead to a television, DVD player and other electricals. The ger is situated in a capacious fenced compound, with a platform built for a second tent.</p> <p> </p> <p>The family had been doing well from its livestock business, shifting between the pastures in spring and summer and hunkering down during Mongolia’s harsh winter here on the outskirts of the capital, Ulaanbaatar. But with Tumurbat unable to work, they have had to sell almost all their sheep. Enkhjargal has had to take a part-time job in a local abattoir to make ends meet. Diagnosed late, barely a year ago, Tumurbat’s cancer has upended their lives. And he is in agony.</p> <p> </p> <p>The light from the doorway picks out his face, which is stiff with pain. He sits back across a bed, leaning on a stack of tightly folded blankets. He rests his hands delicately on the source of his torment, a bloated, fluid-filled abdomen, a typical symptom of late-stage liver cancer.</p> <p> </p> <p>The comforting evidence of family surrounds him. At one end of his bed there is a large wooden board propped up on a table and tied to one of the ger’s rafters. It’s covered with color photos of big groups of adults and children. To the side, there’s a small altar with a little figure of Buddha on top and several brass water bowls below, part of a Buddhist ritual to ward off negativity.</p> <p> </p> <p>I fail to find any immediate positives in this example of palliative care in action. Tumurbat struggles even to answer questions from Odontuya and her colleague Dr Solongo Surinaa. “All I want is to be without pain,” he whispers.</p> <p> </p> <p>Solongo is in charge of palliative care at the nearest district hospital, looking after both in- and outpatients. Odontuya asked her to make this home visit during my trip so I could see how palliative care works for those without medical services on their doorstep.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, and distance is one of the biggest challenges to delivering any service there, including healthcare. It is just under an hour-and-a-half’s drive from the hospital to Tumurbat’s home, which is in a semi-rural hillside area – although it is still part of the Ulaanbaatar capital city region. (The Ulaanbaatar region – treated as a province in Mongolia – has a population of barely 1.4 million, but covers an area nearly three times that of Greater London and five times that of New York’s five boroughs.)</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/3mongolia.jpg" style="height:400px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Tumurbat is being hit by surges of what is called ‘breakthrough pain,’ which burst through the 60 mg/day of morphine he has been prescribed. Two weeks earlier, I am told, he had come home from hospital in a stable condition, his pain under control. The oncologists said the best place for him was here with his family. The local clinic would provide outpatient support, including his weekly prescription of morphine tablets – all covered by Mongolia’s national health insurance scheme.</p> <p> </p> <p>But Tumurbat’s condition has worsened in recent days and, as Odontuya and Solongo learn more, it is clear he and his family have not been sure how to react. Enkhjargal has not bought an additional drug, dexamethasone, that had been prescribed to reduce the inflammation around her husband’s liver and thereby temper the pain.</p> <p> </p> <p>And crucially, Tumurbat was not aware that he could take additional, so-called PRN doses (from the Latin pro re nata, meaning ‘as the circumstance arises’) of morphine beyond his daily prescription to deal with the surges of breakthrough pain. If he were to go beyond four PRN doses in 24 hours, then his prescription would be recalculated and updated.</p> <p> </p> <p>On this visit, Odontuya – the more senior doctor – acts as a trouble shooter, explaining how to respond to the pain surges, gently soothing both Enkhjargal and her husband, and providing an impromptu class in spiritual care, advising her how to prepare for his impending death. Enkhjargal is distraught as the two doctors make to leave. Outside she breaks into sobs and buries herself in Odontuya’s shoulder. It is a moment some doctors would struggle with, but Odontuya lets her cry before gently pulling back, and then, holding her arms, urges Enkhjargal to prepare for the end.</p> <p> </p> <p>The doctor’s most direct advice concerns Enkhjargal’s son Dorj, who was due to start his military service the following week. The family has to talk to the relevant authorities to delay his enlistment, Odontuya tells them. “It is so important that he is there when his father dies,” she tells me as we drive back, “to avoid complicating his grief.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Odontuya is more than just a conscientious doctor – she’s also largely responsible for Mongolia’s rapid progress in palliative care. Spurred by her own father’s traumatic death from cancer, she’s made it her life’s work to campaign for better treatment for people with incurable illnesses.</p> <p> </p> <p>The treatment Tumurbat and his family are receiving is a long way from what Odontuya was taught when she trained to be a doctor in the late 1970s. Growing up in Mongolia’s socialist years, when the country was a satellite state of the Soviet Union, she studied in what was then Leningrad. She speaks fluent Russian. It was excellent tuition, she says, “but we were told simply to treat patients, not to treat them as people. There was no compassion.”</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/4mongolia.jpg" style="height:338px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>The way her father died changed her outlook forever. He was diagnosed with lung cancer the same year she began her studies in Russia, and in Mongolia’s health system at the time, he was effectively condemned to a painful death. Not only did palliative care not exist, but it was impossible to get hold of morphine or other opioid-based painkillers.</p> <p> </p> <p>Less than a decade later, her mother-in-law was struck down by liver cancer, and Odontuya says she too died in extreme distress. What she calls the “psychological pain” of witnessing a loved one in such a state affected everyone in her family, she says.</p> <p> </p> <p>It was a trauma that many more families have gone through since, because of a steady increase in cancers nationwide over the past two decades, especially liver cancer. The underlying cause was Mongolia’s already high incidence of hepatitis ­– dubbed a “silent” hepatitis epidemic by the World Health Organization – which was exacerbated by frequent needle sharing in the poorly resourced socialist healthcare system.</p> <p> </p> <p>Government policies made things worse, according to Odontuya and other doctors I speak to, by handing out free vodka. In the economic turmoil that followed Mongolia’s independence (after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), the authorities were forced to introduce food rationing. But one thing they had plenty of was vodka, and they added it to every ration. “Each family got two bottles a week,” says Odontuya, shaking her head. “It was a very stupid policy.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Mongolia was already a country of heavy drinkers, and alcoholism became even more common in those early years of independence. Precisely how much impact this had is hard to determine, but with already high rates of hepatitis infection, Mongolian doctors believe the increase in drinking contributed to the rise in liver cancer.</p> <p> </p> <p>But it was this same cancer crisis that helped make the case for developing palliative care in Mongolia. Odontuya started lobbying for the introduction of palliative care in earnest from 2000 onwards. But first she had to come up with the right words. “[In Mongolia], we didn’t have any terminology for palliative care,” she tells me as she gives me a tour of the country’s first palliative care ward, established in the early 2000s at Mongolia’s National Cancer Center.</p> <p> </p> <p>The initial reaction from officials was scorn, she says, as they dismissed palliative care as an “activity for charities.” “They asked how they could justify spending money on ‘dying’ patients, when we don’t have enough money for ‘living’ patients.” She answered with her own question: “Would you say this to your own mother, if she gets cancer or some other incurable condition? And I told them, these are still ‘living’ patients.” Even at the end of life, she says, people have human rights.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/5mongolia.jpg" style="height:398px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>None of the former health officials I contacted responded. That Odontuya encountered resistance is hardly unique. Palliative care advocates elsewhere have also faced skepticism regarding its value – as much from medical professionals as from bureaucrats. For instance, one US study reported oncologists being reluctant to refer patients for palliative care because it “will mean the end of cancer treatment and a loss of patients’ hope”.</p> <p> </p> <p>And for many doctors, palliative care chafes against their default philosophy. As Simon Chapman, director of Policy and External Affairs for the National Council for Palliative Care, a UK-based umbrella charity for people involved in palliative and end-of-life care, puts it: “There is still a view among many clinicians that [a patient] dying is a professional failure.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Today, Mongolia still has the highest incidence of liver cancer in the world. Many people are diagnosed late, when the disease is advanced and doctors can do little to stop it spreading.</p> <p> </p> <p>The Songino Khairkhan district hospital on the west side of Ulaanbaatar has a solidly Soviet feel. Built in Mongolia’s socialist period, its walls are so thick they look like they would stop a tank. And the signs around the building add to the atmosphere, written in the Cyrillic script the Russians bequeathed the Mongolians.</p> <p> </p> <p>Behind the locked door of the hospital’s main dispensary for morphine and other opioid painkillers, I am firmly back in the present. There is an air of efficient calm as two staff members work at computers, updating the database on recent prescriptions, while their boss Dr Khandsuren Gongchigav gives me a short tour of their workspace. The security is necessary to meet local and international laws aimed at combating drug abuse, and here they distribute only opioids. There is another pharmacy in the hospital for everything else.</p> <p> </p> <p>Against one wall is a bulky metal security cabinet, its shelves filled with neat stacks of boxes of tablets. Some contain morphine, the strongest of the opioid family of drugs. It’s used for severe pain, including breakthrough cancer pain, because of its fast and powerful effects. There are other stacks – of tramadol, a less potent opioid for what specialists call moderate to severe pain.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is a lot more to palliative care than pain relief, but experts agree you can’t have a successful palliative care program without it. That means having an effective system for distributing opioids, which both meets patients’ needs and satisfies concerns about addiction and abuse. Reforming Mongolia’s approach to morphine was an early priority of Odontuya’s campaign.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/6mongolia.jpg" style="height:411px; width:600px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Before the government agreed to reforms in the early 2000s, the rules were highly restrictive and counterproductive. Only oncologists were allowed to prescribe opioids and at a maximum of 10 tablets per patient – enough for just two or three days in most cases. As a result, people with cancer often died of “pain shock” when their dose ran out, says Odontuya, leading to a widespread myth that the drugs were killing people. Making morphine more readily available has helped educate patients and doctors about its benefits and reduced what she calls “morphine-phobia”.</p> <p> </p> <p>Opioid medications still require a special form, as in most countries worldwide. But a much wider range of professionals can now prescribe them, including oncologists and family and palliative care doctors. This has led to a 14-fold increase in their use in the country from 2000 to 2014, according to Mongolian Health Ministry figures. Khandsuren is an oncologist by training, and now oversees opioid prescriptions for all the hospital’s outpatients. The majority are still people with cancer, but non-cancer patients have become more common.</p> <p> </p> <p>Every district hospital in the country now has a pharmacy like this one, allowing patients to visit weekly and get all the medication their doctor has prescribed. Nonetheless, in a country so large and so sparsely populated, that still means long journeys for patients in areas beyond Ulaanbaatar or other towns and cities.</p> <p> </p> <p>Beyond the store cupboard, Khandsuren shows me into a room where they keep garbage sacks filled with empty blister packs. Patients have to hand over the used strips before they can get their next dose. “We do everything here according to guidelines from the United Nations,” says Khandsuren, referring to rules drawn up by its specialist drugs control agency, the International Narcotics Control Board.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mongolia’s achievements have turned it into an example for many middle-income countries struggling with similar health problems but which, for a variety of reasons, maintain much stricter rules on opioid use. Doctors from former socialist states in particular have been coming to Mongolia to learn from its experience, their mutual past ties to Russia giving them a common language and training background.</p> <p> </p> <p>The National Cancer Center recently hosted some doctors from Kyrgyzstan, one of the former Soviet states of Central Asia. They remarked on how “peaceful” the palliative care department was, says Dr Munguntsetseg Lamjav, one of the centre’s senior staff. In Kyrgyzstan, she was told, it’s much harder to prescribe morphine and patients are always crying in pain.</p> <p> </p> <p>One of the most striking contrasts with Mongolia is its giant neighbor Russia. So tight are the rules there on prescribing morphine and other opioids, I learn, that consumption has actually declined in recent years, according to International Narcotics Control Board figures.</p> <p> </p> <p>There is also a tendency among Russian doctors, many still influenced by their Soviet-era training, to see pain as a problem to be endured rather than treated. It is hardly surprising then that palliative care there remains very limited. But one result is frequent horror stories of people with cancer or chronic pain dying by suicide because it is so hard to get effective medication.</p> <p> </p> <p>In fact, many governments around the world remain nervous about making morphine more available – and with good reason. Take a look at the USA, which has an endemic problem with abuse and addiction to legally prescribed opioid painkillers. But there are far more Americans suffering chronic pain (at least 30 per cent of the population according to one study) than there are drug addicts. It is all about balancing priorities, Odontuya argues.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>This is an excerpt from an article originally published in </em></strong><a href="https://mosaicscience.com/story/surprisingly-good-place-die/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><strong><em>Mosaic</em></strong></a><strong><em>. This article is republished with permission under a Creative Commons license. Read the rest </em></strong><a href="https://mosaicscience.com/story/surprisingly-good-place-die/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><strong><em>here</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p><strong><em>Andrew North is a journalist and writer based in Tbilisi, Georgia, who also packs a sketchpad on his reporting trips. He previously worked for BBC television and radio, reporting from Delhi, Kabul, Baghdad and Washington, before adding drawing to his storytelling kit. He now contributes to <em>Foreign Affairs</em>, the <em>Guardian </em>and <em>Village Voice,</em> among other publications. </em></strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Highbrow Magazine                                                               </strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Image Sources:</strong></p> <p><em>--Kanenori (</em><a href="https://www.needpix.com/photo/891636/nomad-mongolia-sunset-bogatto-modernization" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><em>Needpix</em></a><em>, Creative Commons)</em></p> <p><em>--Christopher Michel (</em><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/34708670143" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><em>Flickr</em></a><em>, Creative Commons)</em></p> <p><em>--Sgt. Ben Eberle (</em><a href="https://www.marforpac.marines.mil/Photos/igphoto/2000705222/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><em>USMC</em></a><em>, Creative Commons)</em></p> <p><em>--Dan Nevill (</em><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dnevill/48810814631" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><em>Flickr</em></a><em>, Creative Commons)</em></p> <p><em>--Prince Roy (</em><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/17352537@N00/30432301345" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><em>Flickr</em></a><em>, Creative Commons)</em></p> <p><em>--</em><a href="https://pxhere.com/en/photo/819894" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><em>Pxhere</em></a><em> (Creative Commons)</em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mongolia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">mongolia</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/ulaanbaatar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ulaanbaatar</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mongolian-health-ministry" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mongolian Health Ministry</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/cancer-patients" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">cancer patients</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/dying" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">dying</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/funerals" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">funerals</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/hospice" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">hospice</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death-mongolia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death in mongolia</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mongolians" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">mongolians</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/soviet-union" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">soviet union</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/society" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">society</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/family-traditions" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">family traditions</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/healthcare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">healthcare</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/longevity" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">longevity</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Andrew North</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Tue, 07 Jul 2020 09:23:14 +0000 tara 9666 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/10723-welcome-mongolia-great-place-die#comments Celebrity Deaths in the Age of Google and Facebook https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/4028-celebrity-deaths-age-google-and-facebook <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Mon, 06/02/2014 - 10:26</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3mayaanglou.jpg?itok=oq_hNGW3"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3mayaanglou.jpg?itok=oq_hNGW3" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p>From our content partner <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2014/05/maya-marquez-mandela-the-disease-of-fakebook.php">New America Media</a>:</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Commentary</strong></p> <p> </p> <p>I have never read a book by Maya Angelou.</p> <p> </p> <p>However I must confess when Maya Angelou died I immediately felt I needed to Google “inspirational quotes Maya Angelou.” I knew my social media timeline would be flooded with them and I didn't want to be caught empty-handed with my cultural pants down as it were. How could I post a picture of my dinner in Kolkata on Facebook while the world was RIPing Angelou? What would they think of me?</p> <p>                </p> <p>For the record the Google search yielded 513,000 results in 0.27 seconds. That's a lot of Maya Angelou to choose from even for the most Angelou-ignorant.</p> <p> </p> <p>Once when a legend died, the problem was what to say if you hated him. But to have an opinion, good or bad, about a legendary literary figure you had to read her. Now for instant and innocuous insight you can just Google her. Once you faked sorrow. Now you fake familiarity.</p> <p> </p> <p>Of course a few of us forget to do even that and trip in our haste to be the early mourner at this virtual wake. A good friend confessed she routinely confused Maya Angelou with Toni Morrison. Even worse others on Twitter thanked Angelou for refusing to sit in the back of the bus so people could be free today. I am not sure if Rosa Parks would have been shocked or amused.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>But most of us do our due diligence - at least one Google search. My social media feed is flooded with Angelou quotes. I have no idea how many of my friends have actually read Angelou. Or like her. Or for how many of them an Angelou quote is just a social media must-have fashion statement. In the virtual world it's almost impossible to tell the real from the pretender. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez died last month, it was much the same. Everyone wanted a piece of the Nobel prize winner to claim as their own.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1google.jpg" style="height:351px; width:625px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>This is part of what The New York Times calls “faking cultural literacy”. “Data has become our currency,” writes Karl Taro Greenfield. “What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists - and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.”</p> <p> </p> <p>It's not unique to our age. But it's never been such a pandemic. And that's largely because it's never been easier to fake it. At one time it might have been embarrassing but unavoidable if we had to admit we had not read anything by an Angelou or a Garcia Marquez. We could try and save face by talking about a film based on their work if we happened to make that connection. But there was no easy way to pretend. But now that “pastiche of knowledgability” is so temptingly close at hand, we can search it on our phone and be instantly able to nod our head and add our two bits to the conversation. Of course those are the only two bits we know. And we didn't know them two minutes ago. But they will suffice for the brief period we need to stay culturally afloat as the Angelou wave washes over our social media timelines.</p> <p> </p> <p>It's in fact almost a waste of time to actually read Maya Angelou since most of us will only need her for that one status update.</p> <p> </p> <p>But oh, the pressure to make that status update count. It has to be the most profound. The most poignant. The most throat-catching one. And it certainly has to be a rare gem, the one that will demonstrate to our friends and followers that our knowledge of Maya Angelou is not just Wikificial. A little knowledge is no longer a dangerous thing. It is a good thing. An essential thing.</p> <p> </p> <p><br /> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1marquez.jpg" style="height:349px; width:625px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>The barrage of information that assaults us from all sides has exponentially increased this pressure to always seem on top of it. As a journalist you don't want to be caught in an editorial meeting clueless about the story everyone else is discussing knowledgably. So you nod along as you desperately and covertly search on your annoyingly slow PDA. When a legendary figure dies, everyone has to have their Nelson Mandela tribute handy whether or not anyone has asked them for it.</p> <p> </p> <p>But Mandela, at least was a political figure. His life was writ large before us. We did not have to read books about him to be impressed and moved by him. Cultural figures however require a level of homework that no one needs to do anymore. I don't know how many of us had actually read Chinua Achebe but we all RIPed him with enormous feeling when he died as if in our own worlds things had just fallen apart as well.</p> <p> </p> <p>It's the relentless performance anxiety of being on social media that forces us to have an opinion on everything important.</p> <p> </p> <p>Except of course the more we do it, the more we are trapped in some hologram version of ourselves. Each bit of cultural literacy we fake gets added to the make-believe intellectual gravitas of our persona. And it makes confessing ignorance the next time around that much more difficult. He who mourned Achebe cannot be clueless about Angelou.</p> <p> </p> <p>And so we tweet on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into our dissimulation.</p> <p> </p> <p>As Angelou said... Actually I don't know what she said. I'd have to Google that first.</p> <p> </p> <p><em>A version of this story appeared on Firstpost.com.</em>             </p> <p> </p> <p>From our content partner <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2014/05/maya-marquez-mandela-the-disease-of-fakebook.php">New America Media</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/celebrity-deaths" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">celebrity deaths</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/nelson-mandela" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nelson Mandela</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/gabriel-garcia-marquez" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gabriel Garcia Marquez</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/maya-angelou" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">maya angelou</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/facebook" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Facebook</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/google" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Google</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/status-update" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">status update</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Sandip Roy</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Wikipedia Commons; Google Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Mon, 02 Jun 2014 14:26:31 +0000 tara 4777 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/4028-celebrity-deaths-age-google-and-facebook#comments Only the Good Die Young: Remembering Ill-Fated Icons https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2837-only-good-die-young-remembering-ill-fated-icons <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Thu, 09/26/2013 - 10:05</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1sylviaplath%20%28Wiki%29.jpg?itok=i4nOX8Lt"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1sylviaplath%20%28Wiki%29.jpg?itok=i4nOX8Lt" width="480" height="255" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> It has been 50 years since Sylvia Plath killed herself. As the decades go by and we become further removed from her death, the enchantment surrounding her life and work only increases, as if it were a time-release spell on the popular imagination.</p> <p>  </p> <p> There has always been something highly conspicuous about our obsession with the macabre deaths of famous people. There is the aforementioned Sylvia Plath bowing into the oven, playing Gretel to the wicked witches in her head; Kurt Cobain and all the conspiracy theories casting a gaseous haze around that sinister shotgun; even Anna Nicole Smith, who has been immortalized, paradoxically, because the narrative of her life seemed so destined to end in sordid, premature death. The artists, musicians, and ersatz celebrities whose lives end in magnificent denouements of anguish and abjection are the ones we remember, cling on to, beatify.</p> <p>  </p> <p> My personal morbid fascination has always been with Layne Staley, the lead singer for Alice in Chains in the 1990s. After the band released just two albums and a couple of EPs, Staley barricaded himself in his Seattle condo, indulging in a dark, secret, lonely world of crack and heroin use. In 2002, he was found dead, his body a rotting heap of drug-riddled putrescence. Sure, I liked Alice in Chains' music, but Staley's life and death got under my skin. The sonorous fatalism of his voice and lyrics; his scheming, vagrant father, who used his son for quick fixes; the incredibly drawn-out demise, in which Staley turned his condo into a wanton drug den/solitary confinement/grotesque playland of painting, video games, and crack pipes for five years.  Why Staley's story and fate enthrall me I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that is has something to do with Sigmund Freud and one of his less popular theories, the death drive.</p> <p>  </p> <p> There are any number of reasons why the deaths of famous people pique our interest. Schadenfreude quickly comes to mind. There is also, in the case of those who die young, the opportunity to remember an icon at his or her most picturesque. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe have a sense of immortality because they were never subjected to the ravages and vicissitudes of time. Starlets and matinee idols like them were never dragged through old age and imperfection, tainting their immaculate portraits and spoiling the loftiest dreams of posterity. But in contemporary American society, celebrities loom even larger. We treat our stars and luminaries like the Romans treated their gods, living vicariously through the visceral extremes and glimmering extravagances of their love, lust, jealousy, and solipsism. And if, when they die, we deem them martyrs, we remember them, mourn them, and fetishize their anguish. Beneath this surface infatuation, we are projecting our own unconscious desires on the actors, poets, musicians, and painters we adore. What people never consider is that one element in the heterogeneous constitution of those desires that we project—sex, adoration, wealth, greatness—is the death drive.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In Freud's 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the psychoanalyst advances the idea that there are two opposing forces, or drives, that vie for supremacy over us. The first, Eros, is responsible for our desire for sexual reproduction, self-preservation, creativity, and productivity. Along with the libido, Eros is essentially our will to live. The second is Thanatos. Briefly, Thanatos is the drive towards death and the compulsion to return to an inorganic, inanimate state—the state before one was born. But Thanatos is far more convoluted and byzantine than that. One of the foundational concepts for the death drive is the repetition compulsion, a phenomenon observed by Freud in which individuals would habitually return to or repeat traumatic events or behavior from their past. Freud postulated that the repetition compulsion represented the patient's latent desire to bind with that unresolved trauma from the past. Using his experiences working with patients presenting the repetition compulsion, which was almost always in opposition to Eros, Freud developed the theory that there is an "urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things." That earlier state of things is, ultimately, the inorganic state before conception. Thanatos is, then, the drive to a., repeat and bind with the trauma of the past, and, b., to return to an inanimate, pre-consciousness state.</p> <p>  </p> <p> There can be no argument that Sylvia Plath is an inimitable icon. With all the biographies, journal collections, and new editions of her work, we keep her alive, permitting and compelling her to traipse through the corridors of our memory like an ivory specter. Is it really <em>The Bell Jar</em> and<em> Ariel </em>that keeps her so enchanting, so dazzlingly alive? </p> <p>  </p> <p> The truth is that many of the teenagers, quasi-feminists, and angst-dealers who worship Plath do so not because of her work, at least not primarily, but because of the aura and cult of personality that has been conjured around her for half a century. Plath has been so built up in the decades following her suicide that for millions of Americans her name has a charismatic connotative power. We think of filial heartbreak, mental illness, suicide, infidelity, and above all, an incredible, near-masochistic ferocity to endure life's legion of treacheries. Plath is remembered because she suffered. Her biography is at least as important as her artistic achievements in making her this indestructible, evocative phantasm that still transfixes academics, feminists, and quicksilver teens.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1aliceinchains%20%28Penquista%20Insomne%20Flickr%29.jpg" style="width: 435px; height: 650px;" /></p> <p> But we do not simply love her story because it is a sympathetic one; if that were true, there would be tens of thousands of other gifted artists throughout history vying for our enduring adoration. It is the trauma we are drawn to. As a culture we experience a collective repetition compulsion, pulling us to revisit Plath's meltdowns and heartbreaks, to keep the desolated one alive as long as we can so that we can bind with her trauma, and in some way become transformed by it.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Plath is only the most pertinent example of this need we have to sanctify certain artists so that we may revisit their traumas. Nirvana only released three albums while Kurt Cobain was alive, and yet it is he who is the undisputed melancholic prince of grunge music, and perhaps all of Generation X. Is this enormous legacy all because of <em>Nevermind</em>? No, it's because of <em>Nevermind</em> and the fact that Cobain was a sensitive, alienated kid who was not just fragile and combustible in his lyrics and performances, but was just that way in real life. Someone who suffered from bipolar disorder, was prone to crippling bouts of depression, and who succumbed to heroin addiction. Someone whose life was a short road of pain and suffering. We anoint him prince of an entire generation because we believe within him was the consolidated angst and disaffection of multitudes of kids who dealt with sh*t and lived in unhappiness belying their youthful age.</p> <p>  </p> <p> So Kurt Cobain is a symbol for all of that—so what? Well, he is a symbol, icon, and/or luminous force that we continue to return to precisely because he suffered so greatly. Millions of Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers (not to mention music labels, publishers, and untold slapdash outfits peddling Cobain merchandise) continue to relive his story. It is our Thanatos in vicarious form: moths swirling around the blue in the flame produced by the luminescent memory of pain and trauma. </p> <p>  </p> <p> It is not just ill-fated musicians and artists that inspire our death drive. Religious icons can too. Jesus Christ might be the greatest example of how the death drive and the repetition compulsion therein manifest themselves in human behavior. In his final days, Christ was betrayed, tortured, mocked, and crucified. When Christians look at the crucifix—in their homes and churches, under their shirts and on their flesh, hanging in their mind's eye like an apparition of their soul—it is Christ's suffering they remember. For all his miracles and parables, it is Christ's sacrifice that gives Christianity its potency. So while it may at first seem absurd to claim that Thanatos fuels Christian belief, the specifics are more persuasive. What is the Eucharist if not the repetition compulsion in the form of a religious sacrament? We accept the body and blood of Christ during Holy Communion so that we may return to the period directly preceding Christ's capture and death; so that we may bind with his trauma.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1kurtcobain%20%28Carlos%20Andres%20Restrepo%20Flickr%29.jpg" style="width: 650px; height: 511px;" /></p> <p> While Jesus Christ may be more than simply an icon of suffering for many, he is never less than one. After all, it is he who spawned the term “Christ-like figure” to describe someone who suffers endlessly and typically dies young so that others may be saved and inspired. Christ and all his real and fictional analogues have a spiritual charisma that beckons us to return to them. By habitually, even pathologically revisiting their agonies, we go against all the demands of Eros. The death drive, and more specifically the repetition compulsion, grows out of a need deeper and more enigmatic than procreation and self-preservation; it is a symptom of our search for salvation.</p> <p>  </p> <p>  You may say that Christ has nothing in common with Kurt Cobain or Sylvia Plath; that religion and art are completely separate, and comparing someone whom hundreds of millions of people consider to be the son of the Christian God to poets, guitarists, and those of their creative ilk is polemical whimsy. But they do have something in common: their martyrdom.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Whatever human institution they lived and died for—religious, artistic, political—it is the martyrs we always return to. We admire their courage, conviction, stamina, and willful subjection to affliction and suffering. But mere admiration is not enough to spur us to return to them, again and again, playing out their doomed lives in our hearts and minds like we were attempting some sort of futuristic memory transfer. Their martyrdom gives them that unmistakable spiritual glamour that draws us in, not because we want to die like them, or die at all, but because we secretly believe that dying young means living on. We return to and repeat the life and trauma of those talented, fearless, seraphic individuals because we wish to believe that a life of suffering, integrity, and self-actualization leads not to death but to transcendence. And when we remember and exalt them, we fulfill our own prophecy.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong><br /> <em>Mike Mariani is a contributing writer at </em>Highbrow Magazine.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em><strong>Photos: Wikipedia Commons; Penquista Insomne (Flickr); Carlos Andres Restrepo (Flickr).</strong></em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/sylvia-plath" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sylvia plath</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/layne-staley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">layne staley</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/alice-chains" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">alice in chains</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/kurt-cobain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">kurt cobain</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/nirvana" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nirvana</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/suicide" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">suicide</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/premature-death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">premature death</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mourning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">mourning</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/anna-nicole-smith" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">anna nicole smith</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/musicians" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">musicians</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/artists" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">artists</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tragic-death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tragic death</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Mike Mariani</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Wikipedia Commons</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:05:10 +0000 tara 3573 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2837-only-good-die-young-remembering-ill-fated-icons#comments The Tragedy of Self-Immolation: An Act of Protest No Longer Noticed https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2450-tragedy-self-immolation-act-protest-no-longer-noticed <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Mon, 05/20/2013 - 10:37</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2mediumsettingfire%20%28AK%20Rockefeller%20Flickr%29.jpg?itok=8vtmr64W"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2mediumsettingfire%20%28AK%20Rockefeller%20Flickr%29.jpg?itok=8vtmr64W" width="480" height="342" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> From <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2013/05/the-tragedy-of-self-immolation---no-one-cares.php">New America Media</a>:</p> <p>  </p> <p> Self-immolation isn’t what it used to be.  This ultimate form of protest became global news in 1963 when the venerable monk Thich Quang Duc set himself ablaze in the middle of Saigon, Vietnam, protesting religious oppression. Doused in gasoline, the monk sat serenely in lotus position and lit a match. A bird of paradise thus blossomed and bloomed, and quickly charred his body.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The photographer Malcolm Browne captured Thich Quang Duc’s fiery renouncement of the mortal coil, the image quickly becoming an icon of the Vietnam War era. The term “self-immolation,” in fact, entered into common English usage after his death, which led to a coup d’etat that toppled the pro-Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem regime.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Half a century later, to die by fire in protest registers little more than a media blip.</p> <p>  </p> <p> As of this writing, 117 Tibetans have set themselves ablaze since 2009 in a series of protests against Chinese rule. The most recent incidents came in April, when two young Tibetan monks and a lay Tibetan woman set themselves on fire. There was little coverage of their deaths.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Indeed, with the exception of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire and thus sparked what became known as the Arab Spring, self-immolation has by all accounts become a failed form of protest as an agent of change. Since Bouazizi, in fact, 150 more Tunisians have set themselves on fire in protest against the new government that took over after the downfall of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali's secular dictatorship.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Whether in Syria or Palestine, Greece, Italy or Vietnam, individuals continue to go up in flames as crowds look on.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “All the Tibetans who resort to self-immolation do so because they feel they have no other way to make China and the rest of the world listen to their country’s call for freedom,” Byrne-Rosengren, director of the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet, told Radio Free Asia last month.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Alas, China has turned a deaf ear to their cries, while the world media has averted its eyes.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Aristotle once observed that the plot of a tragedy should be so framed that, even without witnessing the events, simply hearing of them should fill one with “horror and pity” — even lead to insight and action. But the amphitheater of the 21st century has fallen into decay, scattered and fragmented into a multitude of media platforms. There are too many actors in too many theaters and their tragedies — overwhelming, lacking in context, incoherent, truncated or badly reported — have lost their grip on the human psyche.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Studies about desensitization of the modern mind are aplenty, but the general consensus is that over-saturation of images and narratives of violence have resulted in a collective numbness. A profound act of public death cannot hope to sway a world in which horror itself has lost its power.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumsettingfire.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 335px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> What we want instead is entertainment, and what we gravitate toward and react to, more often than not, is profanity.</p> <p>  </p> <p> A year after Bouazizi went up in flames in Tunisia, an unknown amateur filmmaker named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula,” aka “Sam Bacile,” inflamed the Middle East with incendiary video clips ridiculing the prophet Muhammad. His film turned the Arab Spring of 2011 into the Autumn Rage of 2012, resulted in the death of an American ambassador in Libya, and continues to be a bone of contention in Washington.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The cynic observer can’t help but wonder: If self immolation no longer works as an agent for change, then is it still worth the price?</p> <p>  </p> <p> At its most profound the act stands as the highest form of human compassion, a confirmation of life by giving up one’s own. At its most incoherent self-immolation becomes more expressive of the frustration of the powerless. The individual, enamored by death, possessed by anger, elicits neither horror nor pity but cynicism. After all, to burn with passion is very much different than to be consumed by rage.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Fire — this gift and curse to humanity — is a terrifying beauty. Contained, it hints at elegance, cooks our food and propels our world. Out of control, it engulfs body and soul. It seduces. It overpowers. And it destroys.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In a world where individuals leverage more power online than in the public square, it may be that to live burning with desire for change — regardless of the oppression and humiliation — is the real challenge to becoming actual agents of change in the world. So why not live instead? And find new paths that call attention to the suffering of one’s cause. Find a way to force the world’s attention once more back onto the stage — and evoke pity and horror in us all.</p> <p>  </p> <p> To burn with that desire, to call our attention and hold our gaze until we weep — isn’t that worth living for?</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> <em>Andrew Lam is editor and cofounder of New America Media</em>. <em>He is the author of</em> Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, <em>and most recently, a collection of short stories</em>, Birds of Paradise Lost.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2013/05/the-tragedy-of-self-immolation---no-one-cares.php">New America Media</a></p> <p>  </p> <p> <em><strong>Photos: AJ Rockefeller (Creative Commons); New America Media. </strong></em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/self-immolation" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">self immolation</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/setting-fire" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">setting on fire</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/act-protest" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">act of protest</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/protest" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">protest</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/war" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">war</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/politics" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">politics</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tibet" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tibet</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Andrew Lam</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Ak Rockefeller, Flickr (Creative Commons)</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Mon, 20 May 2013 14:37:56 +0000 tara 2881 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2450-tragedy-self-immolation-act-protest-no-longer-noticed#comments Cambodia’s ‘Death Tourism’ Escalates With Cremation of Sihanouk https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2116-cambodia-s-death-tourism-escalates-cremation-sihanouk <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Thu, 02/07/2013 - 10:24</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumsihanouk.jpg?itok=ku982LwC"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumsihanouk.jpg?itok=ku982LwC" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> PHNOM PEHN, Cambodia--The manager at the hotel in Phnom Penh was deeply apologetic. Norodom Sihanouk, the former king had died about a week ago and the royal palace was closed to ordinary visitors. But the Killing Fields were open, he said reassuringly, as was S-21 -- the school the Khmer Rouge turned into a grisly detention camp in 1975.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In Cambodia, death can sometimes get in the way of tourism and sometimes tourism is all about death.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>The 15-Storey Crematorium</strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> On February 5, after lying in state for almost four months, Norodom Sihanouk -- the king who abdicated twice, led his country into the horror of the Khmer Rouge and then out of that darkness -- was cremated on an ornate funeral pyre inside a 15-storey-high crematorium, while 100 guns fired a salute and 90 Buddhist monks, one for each year of his long life, chanted <em>shlokas</em> around his flower-bedecked coffin.</p> <p>  </p> <p> I was not a complete stranger to the spectacle of public mourning. I had seen photographs of the makeshift memorials of flowers and teddy bears outside Buckingham Palace for Lady Diana. There’s still an apartment building in south Kolkata with a painting of Indira Gandhi on its wall, dating back to an artistic tribute right after her assassination.</p> <p>  </p> <p> But in Cambodia, a country that’s lived through both monarchy and communism, mass mourning happens on a different scale altogether -- both grand and state-sponsored, as well as simultaneously intimate and personal.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In just 10 days in the country, we would stumble upon mourning everywhere -- a gathering of monks in front of the market, on the lapels of ordinary Cambodians going to work, in giant portraits garlanded with white chrysanthemums outside official buildings. Movie theatres were shut and the dance bars were closed. Bars, thankfully, were not.</p> <p>  </p> <p> One night we stumbled on a great public mass outside the royal palace. It was like a movie set bathed in a smoky halogen glow of thousands of candles. The palace was lit up as brightly as India’s Diwali festival. Mourning becomes electric here.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The place was awash in greenish lotus buds, the stems drooping like the necks of swans. Nuns and monks sat on the ground, their chants a steady hum rising into the night sky along with the smoke from thousands and thousands of incense sticks and candles that made our eyes water.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Mourning on the Plaza </strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> Yet there was also something unsentimentally clear-eyed about it all as well. Small children jockeyed with each other fiercely to sell black and white mourning ribbons. “You already have one,” asked one persistent little girl? “Buy another one for your friend. Only 50 rial. You want black, white or black-and-white?”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Families in T-shirts emblazoned with portraits of Sihanouk picnicked on boiled eggs. Mourning is brisk business. That’s only to be expected in a country where death has long become a tourist attraction.</p> <p>  </p> <p> At the boutique hotel in Siam Reap, the welcome note from the proprietor said he lost all but two of his family members to the Khmer Rouge. His mother was bludgeoned to death. Now many of those same Khmer Rouge killers have shed their old uniforms and quietly joined the government. You don’t know if the person sitting next to you on the bus could be your mother’s killer, our host wrote.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2nediumsihanouk%20%28HengReeksmey%20Wiki%29.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 366px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Then in almost the next sentence he invited his guests to take a drink from the bar up to the roof during sunset. It’s quite lovely up there, he wrote. A young woman at a museum exhorted me to buy a book detailing the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. It’s a terrible story she assured me, but her eyes were opaque, all emotion sanded out of them by the never-ending recitation of her spiel.</p> <p>  </p> <p> When I demurred, she moved seamlessly into trying to sell me silver jewelry.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>This is Wife Number 2</strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> Given Cambodia’s heart-rending history of genocide, making death part of commerce seems to be one way to pick up the pieces and move on. It’s only foreign tourists like me who pick gingerly through the shards of memory, posing uneasily against a backdrop of skulls and rusty bloodstains, squirming as if we are eavesdropping on death. The Cambodians are happy to chat on their cell phones inside the torture chambers.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Bou Meng survived the notorious school-turned-prison because he could paint portraits of Pol Pot. He and his group cheerfully interrupted his grilled-fish and rice lunch to talk to tourists and sign his memoir.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “This is wife number 2,” he said with a toothless grin, pointing to a middle-aged woman next to him, while posing ramrod straight for photographs. Wife number 1, he told me, died in the S-21 prison camp.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Cambodia is a very poor country,” said Brigitte Sion, who edited the book <em>Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape</em>, to be published in the United States in July. “The mentality there says I have to survive. I survived the genocide, and I have to survive the dire economic circumstances.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Selling the Killing Fields </strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> Even if that means handing over the hallowed Killing Fields where 17,000 Cambodians were killed, mostly with rifle butts and machetes and the sharp leaves of sugar-palm trees to save on precious bullets.</p> <p>  </p> <p> A Japanese company now leases the Killing Fields. It pays the Cambodian government $15,000 a year, maintains the grounds and the museum and pockets the revenues. “Some people say we sold the Killing Fields,” a guide told her tour group ruefully.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Sion said S-21 and the Killing Fields were never intended for Cambodians to heal their wounds. The real memorials, she said, are far away from the tourist track, in modest stupas and little shrines tucked away in remote villages.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “[S-21 and Killing Fields] were sites meant to attract tourists, attract foreign officials and show how Cambodia is in the process of acknowledging its past history. So it’s a façade,” she stressed.</p> <p>  </p> <p> That is why, instead of cremating the skulls found there, as Buddhist tradition dictated, they are now piled in a pyramid. It might break the karmic cycle but it makes for a good photograph. “It speaks to the very primal instance of visitors to see death up close,” said Sion. “And the survivor has a new role -- that of the tour guide.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> That was abundantly clear in the little tourist shops facing the Sisowath Quay, a stone’s throw from the plaza where Cambodians mourned their ex-king. The tour company offered up the attractions of Phnom Penh for $6. There was a picture of a pile of skulls from the Killing Fields and a painting from S-21 of a small baby being wrenched from the arms of wailing mother.</p> <p>  </p> <p> But this tour of heartbreak country came with one more attraction, one final stop -- a visit to a shooting range where you could try your hand at an assault weapon. On the poster a blonde woman posed with a rifle, grinning in front of a sign that said, “Don’t touch the gun.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Point-and-shoot tourism trumps everything here. It is the real king. Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Photo:</strong> <em>Image from the public mass for the late ex-king Sihanouk in Phnom Penh. (Photograph courtesy Bishan Samaddar from his album “Mourning Sihanouk.”)</em></p> <p> <strong><em>Additional photo:</em></strong><em> Heng Reeksmey (Wikipedia Commons).</em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/sihanouk" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sihanouk</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/cremation-sihanouk" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">cremation of sihanouk</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death-sihanouk" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death of sihanouk</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/cambodia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cambodia</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mourning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">mourning</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death-rituals" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death rituals</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Sandip Roy</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:24:15 +0000 tara 2324 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2116-cambodia-s-death-tourism-escalates-cremation-sihanouk#comments Are You Really Dead Until You Are Dead on Facebook? https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/are-you-really-dead-until-you-are-dead-facebook <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Fri, 12/09/2011 - 16:28</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumfacebook.jpg?itok=KfRz1d9o"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumfacebook.jpg?itok=KfRz1d9o" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> From <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/news/">New America Media</a> and <a href="http://www.firstpost.com/">FirstPost</a>: In the old days it was standard (if a slightly morbid) practice in major newsrooms to prep obituaries of famous persons. Elizabeth Taylor famously outlived her own <em>New York Times</em> obituary writer Mel Gussow by six years. … In the age of social media, obituaries have turned into a string of tweets.</p> <p>  </p> <p> And it creates the grieving lemmings phenomenon. When Steve Jobs died, millions of us became iSad. Before social media, his death would have just been front page news. We might have reflected on his accomplishments, talked about it over coffee at work, or as we plugged in our iPod, but would it have become our “status”? When Thomas Edison died, did everyone run around wearing RIP Edison or burnt-out light-bulb badges? Did the Jobs social media storm feed on itself creating days of wall-to-wall coverage on the front pages of so many Indian newspapers, for example,  a country where Apple had little footprint?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Perhaps it’s only to be expected. Social media has slowly been changing the way we live. So why not the way we die? And the way we are remembered?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Most of us noticed the change first on Facebook. I remember the strange feeling the first time I got a “friend suggestion” for a person who was dead. It was both creepy and weirdly soothing to know that in the eternal sunshine of Facebook’s mind, we could still become friends. Facebook sees dead people.</p> <p>  </p> <p> A few years ago, war photographer Ashley Gilbertson put together a moving photo essay of the bedrooms of young American soldiers who had died in Iraq. Those rooms were frozen in time, immaculately preserved by grieving mothers – the bed neatly made, the teddy bear propped up against the pillows, the sports memorabilia on the wall, the photograph of the high-school sweetheart.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Social media is creating its own versions of those bedrooms – preserved in the amber of Internet ether.</p> <p>  </p> <p> At some level, it is therapeutic. In today’s world where our friends are scattered across many time zones, where we know people but not their families, mourning loss is infinitely more complex. When an old colleague succumbed to cancer last week, I learned about her death through the Facebook status update of a mutual friend. I went to her wall and was touched by the tributes and memories shared on it. I could reconnect with long-lost colleagues from a pre-social media life by looking at that wall. There was something real about that shared moment of virtual coming together, that stopping by on the Facebook wall of a friend who died far away in New York.</p> <p>  </p> <p> But at the same time, when I clicked on a friend’s profile a year after his death, I was a little taken aback by the acutely personal messages, a sort of overly public airing of breast-beating personal grief, of letters and messages to the deceased, where remembrance had become performance. This was different from leaving flowers at a gravesite. I felt I was eavesdropping on a spooky session of online planchette. Facebook had become a ouija board.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The garlanded photograph or the gravestone is different from a Facebook page. The cemetery is deliberately a space that is separate from our daily lives. A social media profile erases that separation disrupting what one scholar calls “the continuum between the desire to remember and the right to forget.” We can see the quizzes they had taken (what kind of cartoon character are you). We can see pictures of their vacations, the videos they had posted on the wall. We can tag them in our photos. We can keep talking to them as if they were alive.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Lee Keyes, director of the Counseling Center at Harvard tried to draw the line. “If the person is engaging in dialogue on Facebook or Twitter as though the person was still alive, then that would be a sign of a problem,” said Keyes. Social media makes it easy to do exactly that.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Social media was never really meant to deal with death.</p> <p> Faced with mortality, Facebook hastily came up with privacy policies in 2009 that said they could “memorialize” a profile if the death is documented, for example, by a news article or obituary. Once that happens, only approved friends can view the profile and leave messages.</p> <p>  </p> <p> That raises its own quandary. My mother is not on Facebook. If anything happens to me, who gets precedence in my Facebook world – she or one of my umpteen Facebook friends ( many of whom are really Facebook acquaintances)? Do all of them suddenly become my next of kin?</p> <p>  </p> <p> And can these friends “unfriend” themselves if it gets too much, trapped in this virtual mausoleum?</p> <p>  </p> <p> After a friend was killed in an accident, his brother threw up his hands in despair wondering how on earth he would erase all his networks. Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, god knows what else. “This is worse than closing bank accounts,” he said. That just needed one death certificate. He said he was almost nostalgic for the old days when you all you needed to do was put in a little obituary notice in the newspaper.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Our social networking sites describe in great detail our life cycles. They now include a social media obituary. Should the relationship status also include ‘Deceased?’” wonders Julie Spira, author of <em>The Rules of Netiquette: How to Mind Your Manners on the Web.</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> Social media lets us live in many worlds. But it makes it tricky to then leave all of them at the same time. Get ready for the Facebook funeral.</p> <p> --<a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2011/10/are-you-really-dead-until-you-are-dead-on-facebook.php">New America Media</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/facebook" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Facebook</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/twitter" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Twitter</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/funeral" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">funeral</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/steve-jobs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steve Jobs</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/obituaries" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">obituaries</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Sandip Roy</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">New America Media</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:28:43 +0000 tara 306 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/are-you-really-dead-until-you-are-dead-facebook#comments