You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (72 page)

With our current era’s fixation on longevity and productivity, happiness advice often focuses on a “happy life.” This type of guidance deals with discipline and long-term planning. Ecstasy is ignored. Ecstasy is intense and unforgettable happiness.
³⁶
It is rare almost by definition. The frequent pursuit of ecstasy can lead to acclimation and interfere with the responsibilities necessary for a “happy life”; however, to have none at all is just as tragic because ecstasy is one of life’s sweetest offerings.

Historically, there have only been four common types of ecstasy—sex, drug, religion, and festival.
³⁷
Frequently all four would overlap into majestic orgies of joy in honor of a god. Some of these included the ancient Greeks’ festival of Dionysus, the ancient Romans’ Liberalia, and the medieval Catholics’ celebration of carnival. These public celebrations involved everyone and included dancing, costumes, music, drug use, nudity, and sex. The annual occasion of unrestrained glee enriched peoples’ lives.

Two of the four classic types of ecstasy are now trammeled by taboo and criminal laws. Due to this, these festivals now seem dangerous and irresponsible. The drug Ecstasy, which is used in modern festivals by young adults, was criminalized for everyone due to a handful of deaths out of tens of thousands of users. Despite it being less dangerous than horse riding,
³⁸
the public debate centered on the fatalities. The merriment and pleasure it provided were ignored. Americans fought the Revolutionary War to establish a country based on the principles of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is now run on the principles of “health, safety, and the avoidance of death.”

According to existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, living authentically means cultivating risk and danger. Kierkegaard called those who do not take risks cowards. Nietzsche called them slaves. How would the participants in those ancient festivals view us? How do the citizens of Amsterdam view us? We have become an anal country—trying desperately to protect ourselves from the accidents of life and the danger of death.
³⁹

1.
        Michael Bartalos, ed.,
Speaking of Death
(2008), pp. 6–8.

2.
        Lynne DeSpelder and Albert Strickland,
Last Dance
(2005), pp. 185–186.

3.
        The sequestration of the dying has been greatly ameliorated in recent decades by the hospice movement.

4.
        DeSpelder,
Last Dance
, p. 6.

5.
        The morbid imagery of the 2010 Haitian earthquake was an exception and it caused controversy for being offensive. Arielle Emmett, “Too Graphic?”
AJR.org
, Mar. 2010.

6.
        After five years of the Iraq War there were fewer than six graphic photographs of dead U.S. soldiers found in media searches. Michael Kamber and Tim Arango, “A Sanitized View of the Iraq War?”
NYTimes.com
, 26 July 2008.

7.
        Jacqueline Sharkey, “Al Jazeera Under the Gun,”
AJR.org
, Oct./Nov. 2004.

8.
        Adam Saeler, “Unreality TV,”
Civic Column
(Mercyhurst College Civic Institute), June 2011.

9.
        Karen Frost, Erica Frank, and Edward Maibach, “Relative Risk in the News Media,”
Am. J. Public Health
, 1997, 87, p. 842.

10.
      DeSpelder,
Last Dance
, p. 23.

11.
      “Cost of Dying,”
CBSNews.com
, 3 Dec. 2010.

12.
      Par. from Daniel Callahan, “Death and the Research Imperative,”
New Engl. J. Med
., 2 Mar. 2000, p. 654.

13.
      Dalie Sussman, “Poll: Elbow Room No Problem in Heaven,”
ABCNews.go.com
, 20 Dec. 2005.

14.
      Jennifer Hecht,
Happiness Myth: Why What We Think is Right is Wrong
(2007), p. 17.

15.
      
Memento mori
is Latin for “remember you will die.” It can refer to any object reminding one of death, and is also a genre of artwork with that theme.

16.
      George Gurdjieff, quoted in Alan Watts,
Book
(1989), p. 39.

17.
      Hecht,
Happiness Myth
, p. 46.

18.
      Darrin McMahon,
Happiness
(2006), p. 330.

19.
      Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan,
Mean Genes
(2000), pp. 122–124.

20.
      Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims,”
J. Pers. Soc. Psychol
., Aug. 1978, 36(8), p. 917.

21.
      Richard Layard,
Happiness
(2005), p. 30.

22.
      Ibid., p. 43.

23.
      Bronnie Ware, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying,”
HuffingtonPost.com
, 21 Jan. 2012.

24.
      Layard,
Happiness
, pp. 32–33.

25.
      David Burns,
Feeling Good
(1980), pp. 341–345.

26.
      Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(1990).

27.
      Hinduism parts taken largely from Huston Smith,
World’s Religions
(1991), and Alan Watts,
Book
(1989).

28.
      Watts,
Book
, pp. 124–125.

29.
      Hecht,
Happiness Myth
, p. 53.

30.
      Christopher Panza and Gregory Gale,
Existentialism for Dummies
(1998), p. 180.

31.
      Anyone who cannot understand this has never hung out with an ostrich, much less taken a good close look at one.

32.
      Jostein Gaarder,
Sophie’s World
(1996), p. 196.

33.
      Ware, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying.”

34.
      Living authentically is similar in concept to Simon Gibson’s life theme, Abraham Maslow’s self-actualization, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s noble individual.

35.
      John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty and Other Essays
(1998), pp. 71, 74, 89.

36.
      Jennifer Hecht,
Happiness Myth
(2007), p. 10.

37.
      Ibid., p. 257.

38.
      David Nutt, “Equasy,”
J. Psychopharmacol
., 2009, 23(1), pp. 3–5.

39.
      Ernest Becker,
Denial of Death
(1973), p. 32.

Albert Einstein
(physicist)—Einstein developed the Theory of Relativity and his name is now synonymous with genius. Einstein’s devotion to physics appears to have had priority over his marriages. He once wrote, “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire.”
¹

Einstein had an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, with his first wife, Mileva Maric. Einstein never went to see the child and she appears to have been raised by others before soon dying of scarlet fever. Einstein later married Maric but it was an unhappy union. Despite being a pacifist, Einstein’s first marriage was marred by violence, with Maric once appearing with a bruised and swollen face.
²

During a separation from Maric and their legitimate children due to World War I, Einstein visited them infrequently and instead moved in with his lover and cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. Within months of the eventual divorce, Einstein married Löwenthal (after being rejected by her twenty-year-old daughter, Ilse). He once said, “It is a sad fact that man does not live for pleasure alone.”
³

Henry Ford
(business leader)—Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Company. Despite being a “straitlaced guardian of sexual morals” and a traditional family man, it appears he kept a less-traditional family next door. A zesty teenage office worker at a Ford plant, Côté Wallace, attracted him. Thirty years his junior, Ford arranged that she marry one of his executives and built them a home adjacent to his with a secret stairway leading to her bedroom. Thirty years after Ford’s death, her son, John, wrote a book that exposed that Ford, not his mother’s husband, was his father.
⁴

Mahatma Gandhi
(nonviolent revolutionary)—Gandhi brought India independence from Great Britain through civil disobedience. He was married at the age of
thirteen and, at the time, saw it as merely the acquisition of a “strange girl to play with.”
⁵
He adopted celibacy in his mid-30s. He kept a long line of devoted secretary/nurses who would massage him, bathe him, and give him enemas. Gandhi also had naked teenage girls sleep with him (supposedly platonically) to keep warm.

Rudolph Giuliani
(mayor)—Giuliani was the celebrated mayor of New York City during its September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. He was first married to his second cousin for fourteen years. He had that marriage annulled and married his second wife, Donna Hanover, while mayor. This did not prevent him from having a public relationship with a “very good friend,” Judith Nathan.
⁶
In 2000 Mayor Giuliani sent the press into a fervor by marching with Nathan in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, and later told the press that he was leaving Hanover—before telling Hanover. At the divorce proceedings, Hanover said Giuliani had cheated on her prior to Nathan. Giuliani is now married to Nathan.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
(civil rights leader)—King was the Baptist minister who led the black civil rights movement. Due to the FBI’s unconstitutional bugging, explicit details of King’s adulterous ways are known. Some of the phrases he supposedly said during sexual forays were “I’m fucking for God,” and once at ejaculation, “I’m not a Negro tonight.”
⁷
King frequently enjoyed adultery. Although he only slept with black women,
⁸
the lighter their skin color the better.
⁹
King had used the motel where he was assassinated for a tryst the night before.
¹⁰

Mao Tse-Tung
(revolutionary)
¹¹
—Mao led a peasant army to create the modern Chinese state. Despite the fact that Mao refused to brush his teeth his entire life, he did well romantically after his first marriage. The first marriage was arranged by his father. Mao went through the traditional wedding ceremonies, but then to spite dad, refused to live with her, or even touch her.

His second wife was a fellow revolutionary, Yang K’ai-hui. When enemy forces captured her, she refused to renounce Mao and was therefore publicly beheaded. Mao was already living with another woman half his age at the time of Yang’s death. She became his third wife. The Long March, a 6,000-mile retreat that reduced his army from 100,000 to 5,000, was what arguably drove her insane.

His fourth and final wife was a scandalous actress who slept her way into
multiple roles. Her later political activity indicates she probably saw Mao as another career move. In his later years, Mao enjoyed weekly ballroom dances with a rotating bevy of attractive young women, some of whom he selected for private sexual activities.
¹²

Pancho Villa
(revolutionary)—A gifted guerrilla fighter, Villa helped lead the successful Mexican Revolution. He had a Robin Hood-like side but was also astonishingly ruthless. The United States sent six thousand troops and its first-ever airplane combat mission to capture him, but was unsuccessful.

Villa generously called himself a “son of a bitch with the ladies.”
¹³
He and his soldiers sometimes attacked towns to rape the women. Once Villa tied a father up and raped his young daughter in front of him. Another time, a Juárez pawn shop owner was bound and forced to watch Villa and his men gang rape his wife. They then shot the man multiple times and made the raped wife clean up the resulting gore.

Numerous women were still smitten by him and he married compulsively, perhaps seventy-five times. After he quickly bored of a wife he would simply gallop off on his horse. Ironically, he believed unfaithful women should be shot. When he was assassinated his last words were “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
¹⁴

1.
        Quote and most of Einstein sect. from Dennis Overbye,
Einstein in Love
(2001), pp. 92, 95, 260, 342–344, 349.

2.
        “Einstein’s Wife: The Life of Mileva Maric Einstein,”
PBS.org
, ret. 19 June 2006.

3.
        Irving Wallace, et al.,
Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People
(1982), p. 521.

4.
        Quote and Ford sect. from Ibid., pp. 454–455.

5.
        Quote and Gandhi sect. from Ibid., pp. 406–410.

6.
        “Giuliani’s Legal Dish Drenches Front Pages,”
Chicago Tribune
, 23 June 2002.