Fall arrived last night shortly after I retired, exhausted after doing nothing all day. With the breeze in the late afternoon, I decided to wear a light jacket when I went out, and on the voyage of exploration this morning, I found the temperatures settled down into the 40s.

Imagine that- wearing a jacket in the dying moment of summer in Washington, DC! Astonishing thing, and I don’t think it bodes well for a temperate winter. For the moment I am going to make my contingency plans around heading towards the warmth this season, rather than waiting to see if the warmth is going to come to us.
I was puzzling through the wreckage of what passes for world news looking for portents of what is to come. Between the Climate Conference at the UN and the emergence of a hitherto unknown cabal of al Qaida terrorists in Syria significant enough to rain cruise missiles on yesterday, I don’t know what to think.

These are the same cruise missiles that got zeroed in the Navy budget last year. I confess I don’t know what to think. If this new organization- the Khorasan Group- posed an immediate threat to the homeland, it was news to me. The name sounded more like a Washington Defense contractor than an al Qiada offshoot, so go figure. I don’t know whether to be more or less concerned than I was when the end of summer was the issue de jour, but that was yesterday, and the vague feeling of dread remains.

I saw in the morning mess of messages that India, China, Canada and Australia are not going to be attending the big climate summit at the UN today, and had to wonder what that means. There were 310,000 protesters in New York over the weekend, brought by 500 buses. I wondered about that, too. People seem to get bused to a lot of these things, whether it is protests over more money for flipping burgers or whatever, but never mind. China and India produce about a third of all CO2 emissions, so without them I am not sure exactly what the UN is going to do.

But never mind- the scientists are reporting that the Pacific warming is actually part of a century-long cycle of winds, and maybe CO2 isn’t quite the big bogeyman we have been told. If the temperature actually starts to rise again, maybe we should take this seriously. I mean, the temperature is up almost a degree and a half in the last century, so we could be at the tipping point of having a more comfortable winter.

But the whole climate thing seems to be a symptom of something else, something that caught my attention. It is about a way of thinking that I find deeply troubling, which is about the nature of the human experience, and something profound about the species.

You know the Emanuels, right? They are a very talented family. Rahm is the Mayor of Chicago, and not doing that well with it. Probably not his fault, some things are too large to be managed with well-meaning theories. Ari is incredibly successful as a power Hollywood agent. Ezekiel is a medical ethicist, White House insider, and one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act.

They are high-performing brothers with justified confidence in their abilities. Rahm may be the most visible of them, and the most profane in expressing his views, but heck, if you are sure you are right, why not?

Zeke made some news this week himself in the pages of the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/

I had cancelled my subscription to the Atlantic a few months ago after they published a paper advocating the idea of reparations being paid today for the wrongs of a society committed generations ago. I am generally opposed to windfall profits, unless they are coming my way, and wrote them a cordial note to terminate our relationship. It saddened me- I have been a subscriber for most of my life.

Zeke’s article was something I dismissed as a self-indulgent hallucination. He avers that 75 is the age at which he prefers to die. He is 57 this year, though I don’t know his birthday. He does, and thinks that gives him 18 years left on the planet. By his math, he is giving me twelve.

It was a thoughtful article, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I share some of the opinions- not all, of course, but many. Here is the nub of his argument:

(Productivity as opposed to Age. Chart from The Atlantic Monthly.)

According to Zeke, these may be the last words I contribute to Western Civilization. I better hurry.

It did make me think, though. Folks in my family have lived well into their eighties- a few into their nineties, like Grandma. The men seem to lose their grip on mental acuity in their early to mid eighties. Mom kept it together to the end, though she had the same gentle dementia that Grandma demonstrated in her last few years.

Doctor Emanuel makes some astonishing postulations in the article. He cites his own father, a physician and former Zionist guerrilla fighter, who had a heart attack at the age of 77. Despite a degradation in his general performance level, he claims to be still happy and living with Zeke’s Mom in their own house.

I can only deduce that somehow Zeke thinks that is not right.

He even allows as how some people are productive even beyond the age of 75. Would he be suggesting to Mac Showers that the productive use of the almost two full decades he lived beyond 75 is useless? That his independent living was a poor use of the resources he generated through his long life? That he was in complete control of his faculties right to the last decision- his- to go the hospice route?

There is so wrong on so many levels in Zeke’s article that it reminded me of the largest accomplishment in his professional life: the intricate continuing experiment that is the Patient Portability and Affordable Care Act.

The jury is still very much out on whether the thing will ever work, since they haven’t finished even building the web site. But I understand where he is coming from, and recognize anyone would want to find something new and exciting with which to challenge the public imagination.

It actually strikes me as a return to the old and discredited ideas about euthanasia.

In the article, he says he is just going to sit out the preventive procedures that would prolong his life- a passive approach to the last part of life, letting nature take its course. I completely support his personal position, and I am not far from it myself.

But it is also a very fine line between a philosophical opinion about the utility of life and the compulsion to do something about it. I am thinking along the lines of the National Health System in Britain, in which access to care- an admittedly finite resource- and use of a formula by non-medical people to determine the Quality of Life as an outcome. They call it the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) and is used as a tool to assess the value of expending money on medical intervention based on the number of years of life that would be added by the intervention.
Elder patients are routinely denied care, which is essentially what the opponents of the ACA were calling “death panels.”

Call them what you want- if it is a decision by some bureaucrat that you don’t get medical care because of your age, that is precisely what they are. Thank God Mom and Dad were never absorbed into the hospital system and went when the time came- together.

Zeke would tell you he is opposed to assisted suicide and the rest, but his ideas could have some logical consequences that I consider to be fraught with peril.

I don’t know- I think I am keeping a realistic eye on my shelf life, planning for worst case living until I am 85. I could go much sooner, of course, and we just buried one of my most alive friends at 67.

But the thing about the line that Zeke espouses was used by a politician in Berlin to actually do something about getting rid of people he didn’t consider useful to society. It is not far from a suggestion, to a nudge, so something truly monstrous.

I dunno. Maybe I am worked up about nothing but there are certainly some curious ideas floating around these days.

In the meantime, I am interested in the Khorasan Group. They seem to be a more proximate threat than either Zeke’s ideas or Global Warming. I wonder what they thought they were going to do?

(Zeke Emanuel, in 2009, when he had 23 years to go. Photo Wikipedia).

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303