The Ways to Dusty Death 1 comments

By A.G. Harmon

At this point, most everyone has seen the evolutionist’s response to the iconic fish symbol, often glued to the back of car trunks: the fish, in the “pure science” retort, has sprouted legs. As if that weren’t enough to send the message, the word “Darwin” appears inside the body.

The Ichthys folks have answered the allusion with the symbol of a larger “Jesus” fish, swallowing the “Darwinphibian”—the fittest having survived after all. I suppose the counter shot will be launched soon, if it hasn’t been already, and so forth and so on. Darwin might not have picked this fight, but he’s ironically at the center of a duel being waged on the back of depreciated Ford Fiestas and Dodge Caravans, only a few years from extinction in the junk yard.

This is just the latest ironic use of the scientist, my favorite being the “Darwin Awards,” given out to the most creatively stupid ways people have found to get themselves killed over the previous year.

The motto of the awards is to “honor those who benefit mankind by removing themselves from the collective gene pool.” Put that way, the whole thing sounds pretty callous and cruel-spirited—but of course that never stopped me from reading further.

I’ve always gotten my laughs (and a longer stay in purgatory, no doubt), then entertained others with the litany of buffoons that have added ignominy to immolation: a man who crashed through a high-rise window by trying to demonstrate its unbreakability; a photographer who planned to film a group of skydivers, but jumped from the plane sans parachute; a guy who used a cigarette lighter to see if his fuel tanker was empty. And these are only the most humdrum of the lot.

The underlying charge against these award winners is: “What an idiot, not to expect such a thing”—or “What a fool, not to value his life more than that.”

Of course, when you look closely at these accounts of mortal folly, none of them really involve a failure to appreciate life’s worth. Actually, all of them—the hung, the eviscerated, the blown to bits—thought that they would live, despite what they were doing. They didn’t want to die.

So you have to come back to the first charge: “What an idiot,” not to “know the risk”; and a rebuke—“he got what he deserved then, if he didn’t have any better sense.”

Of course, “getting what we deserve” is a touchy business, and both art and object lesson have taught us about asking for such a thing, or wishing it upon others. Many of us have done some pretty stupid things in our younger days, and there but for the grace of God would we be, on the list—part of the late, great laughingstock.

Recently, I noticed a TV show that reminded me of the Darwin Awards—something called 1000 Ways to Die—which dramatizes bizarre deaths fit for News of the Weird columns. But the difference here is that, though many of the cases involve stupidity, a goodly portion involve tragic, freakish circumstances: a man running away from gunshots falls to the ground and gets bitten in the heart by a rattlesnake; a scuba-diver in a decompression chamber explodes after someone accidentally releases the pressure valve; the lacquered hairspray on a woman’s bee hive accidentally combusts and burns her to death.

The show seeks to offset this grisliness with a campy style and pun-rich episode titles: “The Chokes on You”; “Rub-a-Dubbed Out.” But they know that the real reason people watch is a gallows-driven fascination, a psychological pull that’s well-recorded and of timeless establishment.

The old explanation is that we laugh at death to diffuse and dispel its power over us. We also take comfort in the fact that if we have good sense, stay away from the wrong people, see the doctor and live wisely, “it” can only happen at a point when we’re good and ready anyhow.

Of course, that’s not true. And the thing is, there’s something strictly horrible about dying in such ways, by means of a lethal gag gift—springing up and catching the poor, dimwit soul, unawares.

You want a little warning, it seems. You want a little time and space; there should be roughly zones, right? Because who wants to be cut down like Hamlet’s father—unconfessed, unshriven, ripe in his sins—without a chance to set things straight. You want to make a brave end.

Maybe it’s always a shock, though. We can’t know now—though we’ll all find out one day—how many are taken aback regardless of when it arrives—stunned by what should have been no great news—by that which sent messages about its coming all our live long days.

And isn’t that a rare foolishness, too? One for which we can all share the prize? The candle is so, so brief. And that’s nothing to laugh at.