It’s been a bad week for suicides. First fashion designer Kate Spade, now celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain — why is it that people with a lot to contribute check out, while all the people with the best reasons for doing themselves in pass on the opportunity?
I mean, most people who have been exposed as human slime the way, for example, Scott Pruitt has — not just crooked, but small-time, two-bit crooked, a laughingstock-thief — would see that as a reason to at last disappear from public view. A boxed-in schmuck like Michael Cohen — does he seriously think every day from now on won’t be worse than the last? Same for Paul Manafort. If all you have to look forward to are prison or being stalked by Russians, wouldn’t self-murder start to seem a more appealing outcome?
The odds for these people are 99-1 against, but truly shitty people never see it as a reason to throw in the towel. If they thought the normal rules applied to them, they wouldn’t be the shitty people they are in the first place.
Instead it’s people like Spade, who worried that getting treatment for her depression would destroy her brand’s happy-go-lucky image. Bourdain had enough personal demons to stock a full circle of hell, but he had managed to overcome them to reinvent himself as an ambassador for the universality of food culture. Did one escape to torment him again?
With that in mind, here’s a story with more red flags than a May Day parade: An architect who worked on Trump projects in former communist countries was contacted by a reporter working on Trump’s business deals in that part of the world. She couldn’t get hold of him, but within hours of her phone call the architect closed his media accounts, closed his business and has dropped from sight. No, not suspicious in the least.
The rest of the news is the usual hash of “Trump said/tweeted” and sundry torments enacted by Trump’s throng of Heironymus Bosch goblins. America made this hell, but we think the normal rules don’t apply to us.
*A link to the song as it appears in the opening credits to M*A*S*H. The music is by Johnny Mandel, the lyrics to what director Robert Altman wanted to be “the stupidest song ever” by Altman’s son Michael, who was 14 at the time. Years later the elder Altman revealed that he had been paid $70,000 to direct the movie, but Michael had made over $1 million in royalties from the song.