Death: the ultimate solution

Very recently, I came across several things that redirected my thoughts to an old, familiar subject: the finality of death. More precisely, on youth’s fixation with death as a mysterious, completely beyond-understanding and totally foreign aspect of their existence.

The first thing that prompted this focus was an article advising older people on how to prepare themselves for death (regarding planning in advance for that inevitable end-point event everyone ultimately faces). The second was an accidental visit to what I shall call a ‘heavy-metal, gothic-punk’ website. And the third was a rather routine visit to the commercial website of a major motorcycle accessories supplier. Seemingly unrelated catalytic singularities, they started my old mental cogitations rolling along a tangential track (I’m noted for that).

Written articles such as the first one, while helpful and perhaps quite useful, are to me depressing and even boring, but what really grabbed my attention was (in the instance of the second item above) youth’s obvious fascination with a concept totally beyond their most remote glimmerings of understanding.

In our highly insular, detached-from-reality manner of routinely ‘confused’ daily existence, we Americans suffer from the sort of contrived marketing high-fantasy that is the by-product of corporate business advertising, seizing vicariously at anything they toss out in front of us that titillates and psychologically shocks us towards that objective. Death and extreme violence do exactly that. Death therefore, something that is normally as remote from youthful awareness as the Earth is from the moon, provides a ‘safe’ symbolic means of emotional self-scarification that youth can indulge themselves in, feeling secure from any actual reality it may represent due to their total incomprehension of what it actually is…and the fact that it looms far enough ahead for them that they really don’t need to take it seriously. Think of it as sort of hanging your virtual nether extremity out over a blunted razor's edge, if that helps to conceptualise it.

Thus, a youthful fixation with the whole ‘vampire’ schtick, the ‘undead’ (zombies), other puerile fantasies of death and physical ruination and in general a fascination with the visual symbols and representations of death in general. Older individuals, who anxiously know all too well that infinity beckons and who accordingly feel varying degrees of uncertainty, anxiety and apprehension about their own upcoming deaths, are understandably not prone to capriciously revel in such narcissistic fantasies.

Centuries ago, given that sudden, violent and pain-filled death was a very genuine imminent possibility for individuals living prior to the age of modern healthcare technology, and owing to the fact that most people lived with the close proximity of death in the form of diseases, physical infirmities, wars, pestilence, et al, embraced death in a sort of ‘preemptive’ manner…as sort of pre shock-buffer against what promised to be quite unpleasant circumstances that lurked beyond every fork in the trail of life. This same attitude towards death is notably found in Roman-Catholic Mexico today, with its ‘Dia de los Muertes’ festival and related symbolic celebrations of death, viewed by them as a very real part of daily existence. Only in ‘highly advanced’ (believe me, I use that term here in a very ironic sense) societies such as ours, with our near-deified Western regard for science and technology, do we feel comfortable enough to distance ourselves from death until advanced age & maturity make it no longer deniable.

The practical effect is to encourage adolescent human beings (those under the age of 30, generally speaking, in accordance with recent neurological researches that suggest the human brain is not fully developed until about that age) to regard death principally as just another highly exciting, sensationally bizarre and grossly titillating fantasy to innocuously flirt and toy with.

My recent accidental visit to an internet Heavy-Metal/Goth-Punk website reminded me anew of this extreme conceptual chasm that yawns between purely symbolic nuances of death and its actual, awful and unavoidable reality. This is well observed in a huge selection of visual graphic objects (as T-shirts, decals, embroidered patches and artwork) depicting gruesome decay of physical flesh in commercialized consumer products. Skulls, skeletons, graveyard rot and purification, post-mortem details of human flesh and bodies long-dead are graphically illustrated in these commercial offerings to healthy youthful consumers. Tattoos also favor this subject matter.

It’s no accident that Goth-Punk fans favor black (the color of death in the West only, since in the Far East white is symbolic of death and it really makes more sense, when one thinks about funeral shrouds, loss of blood circulation, etc.) or that they regard representations of the human skull as the most favored Goth-Punk artefactual symbol (followed closely by bones and the human skeleton). Graphic representations of blood-dripping bodies and gore are almost passé at such sites. The obvious fascination with violence and death found at these venues is hard to ignore…and yet the adherents of all this stuff are generally speaking immature, youthful individuals barely old enough to shave their faces (and/or their pubes, as gender and the case may be).

I was reminded at that particular moment of REAL death and violence, the nature of which is so incomprehensible to youths that it defies their keenest understanding, something perhaps best represented not by modern and efficiently-treated casualties of the Southwest Asian War theatre (read: Middle East ‘war on terror’), but by the abject and horrific mass carnage of the First World War. That war, in which many millions of men were virtually (and needlessly) slaughtered by the newly introduced precision weapons of German heavy artillery, machine guns and toxic gasses, was one of the worst imaginable. And yet, given the short-lived memory of human beings (and a contemporary trend to remain totally oblivious of even the most common vestige of recent history), one hundred years later any mindfulness of all that carnage and mass extreme violence is for all practical purposes entirely forgotten. In my case, as both an amateur historian and writer, I was reminded of the terrible events of that war in the course of a rather excellent book I am reading, titled ‘Into the Silence’ (a lengthy and highly detailed account by Wade Davis of the fascinating events leading up to the (unsuccessful) early ascents of Mt. Everest.

The author of that book (which is some 667 pages in length) painstakingly details many of the shocking losses suffered by the naïve and ill-prepared English troops as they blithely marched up in ordered ranks against the fearsome German weaponry (a circumstance enabled largely due to the broad ignorance of modern warfare on the part of the highest British commanders, General Haig included), explaining that the massive social shock of that conflict was such that redirecting public attention (by the government) towards an Everest ascent was conceived to be an effective a way of psychologically diverting public attention to the disproportionate (and utterly needless) losses suffered by English soldiers in devastating engagements such as the Ypres and Somme actions.

The author’s accounts of some of this excruciating carnage almost defies the ability of the English language to adequately convey such abject horrors (and it is probably a substantial testament to his Oxfordian erudition and scholarly literacy that he is able to do so as concisely as he does), but it instantly renders any modern sensibilities of what extreme death and dying are actually all about completely dysfunctional. World War 1 was real mass death, destruction and near-unbelievable suffering of the worst sort. Modern injuries on the battlefield by contrast, even in the case of amputations caused by terrorist improvised explosive devices, are relatively clinical and cut-and-dried events by comparison; modern battlefield survival rates are exponentially greater than they were in 1915, thanks to such innovations as rapid air-evac. Of course youth not only have no understanding of any of this, they are completely incapable of fathoming the difference between their play symbols of fanciful death and the real thing. Death for them therefore effectively constitutes merely another ‘toy’ to amuse themselves with, a hypothetical state safely removed from reality by the video-game fantasy mindset that inures adolescent brains to what actual pain & suffering really is.

Thus we have all the ‘scary’ symbolic presentations of a concept that lies totally beyond the grasp of today’s youthful mind. Sadly, given the fact that far too many among us are physically aged but still possessed of adolescent awarenesses (i.e. immature despite years), when you factor in the deficit basic intelligence that so many (youths and adults) ALSO suffer from, you have the perfect setting within which death becomes merely a sanitised abstract concept that has no actual meaning in their lives…until circumstance and/or fate hits them directly in the face with an unignorably real gobsmack.

Another aspect of the ‘Into the Silence’ book is the author’s mention of the effects of extreme battle shock on soldiers who have been exposed to battle forces that exceed the human body’s ability to rationally and mentally reconcile, a syndrome we know today as ‘PTSD’ (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). While the human brain has (as I have mentioned in my other articles on the importance of head-protective gear in extreme physical activities (flying, motorcycling, skiing, sky-diving, et al) certain absolute physiological limits in its ability to contend with blunt force trauma, so too does it have limits to its ability to reflectively confront and fully cope with the psychological forces that exposure to extreme trauma often bring with it.

In view of the fact that we are inarguably limited in our ability to handle all of these physical & mental ‘insults’, the basic argument for adequately protecting the human brain gains renewed impetus (or should, at least) in all who think logically. Of course, for those who (again) lack the proper reflective facilities (lack of basic intelligence quotient, etc.), such arguments amount to a very, very teeny-tiny fart in the midst of a cosmic storm of unimaginable size & impact.

Since I am concerned with protective gear & equipment devised to limit the damaging effects of physical force on the human anatomy (particularly to the head) and as a life-long motorcycle enthusiast, I routinely pay close attention to things like protective jackets, footgear, gloves & helmets. It’s somewhat like being John the Baptist, out wailing in the god-forsaken desert wastes, in allegorical terms…

When it comes to protective gear used for motorcycling, I find myself recurrently bemused by the popularity (among youths) of symbols representing death, violence and mayhem as reflected in items of this sort. In past years, one of the most interesting applications of personal protective technology (best summed up in the phrase ‘see and be seen’) has been in the area of visual safety. A very large number of studies have been undertaken over the years of the effect of so-called ‘high-visibility’ factors in roadway safety, particularly as applicable to motorcycle safety. Among the chief objects of these studies has been a desire to investigate and document exactly to what extent highly visible colors enhance roadway visibility (i.e. of motorcyclists, but also of roadway workers, etc.). One of the favorite assumptions going into these studies has been the argument that the more highly visible the color, the safer things are for the wearer. Interestingly, the actual findings do reflect that assumption in its broadest sense, but what is most interesting is that other factors actually seem to play an equal part in the safety process. These other factors have more recently included (joining DUI driving, youthful inexperience and basic lack of road awareness) distraction caused by attention to devices such as cellphone and smart-phone texting on the part of vehicle drivers while operating on a roadway. Nevertheless, visibility WAS shown to play a significant role in somewhat lessening risk on the part of motorcyclists and reducing road hazards posed by 4-wheeled vehicle drivers; while somewhat less than anticipated, high visibility motorcycle helmets and jackets DO enhance road safety for two-wheeled vehicle operators.

Therefore, logic (an endangered quality these days) dictates that in order to be SAFER, a wise motorcyclist should try to wear a bright (‘safety green’ is perhaps best seen under all lighting conditions) colored helmet and an equally distinctive jacket (fitted with thermoplastic ‘armor’ in vulnerable areas, such as the spine, shoulders, elbows and sternum), right? Visit almost any commercial supplier of motorcycle accessories these days for an informative illustration of the effectiveness of that assumption at first hand.

Amazingly (to me, at least), the single most predominating color almost all motorcyclists’ helmets are commercially offered in is…ready for this?...dull black. Ditto for jackets, which are virtually all some sort of variation or another of the UBLJ (‘universal black leather jacket’). Even more amazingly is that helmets are now also offered in camouflage colors & patterns! When you consider the fact that ‘camouflage’ is conceptually intended to obscure or hide something, the implications are nothing short of astounding. Instead of trying to ‘stand out’, some motorcyclists actually think it is way cool to try to blend in better with the hazardous surroundings! Truly, this seems obvious and unignorable proof that the ability to make rational decisions is, if anything, diminishing in the general population these days.

OK. So instead of trying to stand out visibly in an incredibly hazardous surrounding, some questionably mentally endowed souls are actually aiming for the opposite effect! One can’t help but wonder about that, if the potential for extreme personal injury (or death, in all likelihood) posed to a motorcyclist by a 15,000 pound semi-truck & trailer has any meaning at all! Why is this?

As I understand it, the first factor here is (fairly obviously at that) adolescent lack of understanding about what death actually is and how easily it can occur in a moment’s misattention (as discussed above). The next factor that grabs my attention is our American pop-culture obsession with gangsters, rebels, misfits, misanthropes and criminal behavior of any sort (some of it undoubtedly a latent legacy of the so-called ‘lawless frontier West’). All of this is perfectly reflected in the garb that far too many motorcyclists think reflects a desirably ‘dangerous’ image, since it is considered way cool by adolescents (and arrested-adolescence adults) to pose as a rebel (again a symptom of youthful immaturity that has been studied to death…not to make a bad pun…by everyone from Freud to his modern counterparts). Rebellion as a sociopolitical statement has been a notable human activity since the rise of the first organised community of individuals, but today, thanks to Hollywood and the entertainment media industries (you have my permission to regard them as disgustingly callous ‘pimps’ in this context) just about any rude misfit with bulging biceps, a thick neck and an obnoxiously presumptive attitude may be commonly cast in the heroic mold (read: most ‘action hero’).

In this context, it helps to take a retrospective look at the post WW2 era, when returning soldiers, exposed to violence beyond the public’s imaging, and conditioned to a high level of nervous stimulation (the instant you lose focus in a war you die quickly, of course), sought relief from the ‘boring’ routines of peacetime civilian life in the pursuit of motorcycles.

Prior to that time, motorcycles had been the toys of either serious amateur (track) racers or very wealthy members of the upper classes, but with the war over, and with most economies totally devastated (most except the US economy, which because of geographical isolation and distance escaped loss of its social, economic and industrial infrastructure). This was particularly true in Europe and in the UK and small, two-wheeled personal vehicles like the motorcycle offered a cheap and readily available means of transportation for lower-class youths.

It wasn’t long before a youth cult quickly grew up (in the UK) enabled by motorcycle use. This just as rapidly morphed into what we now regard as the classic English ‘café racer’ era (late 1950s & early 1960s), wherein radical performance modification of motorcycles abetted dangerous pastimes consisting of street racing for kicks, by low-wage earning youths in their off-time. The social benefits associated with the resulting English café-racer groups (clubs, gangs or whatever you wish to call them) were also appealing and given the wide-spread availability of war surplus materiel at war’s end items like aviator high-altitude boots, fleece jackets and gloves were soon adopted. Helmets largely didn’t even exist for motorcyclists at that time (late 40s & early 50s) in the UK, although by 1960 some companies that made vestigial protective helmets for auto racing began to market them to the young cyclists. The earliest iterations were essentially simple fiberglass ‘bowls’ that covered the upper half of the head and featured a leather suspension with chin strap to hold them on. Popularly known as pudding basins, and owing to the high incidence of fatal accidents caused by ‘ton-up’ (Note: reaching speeds in excess of 100 mph on roadways) racing from café to café (that constituted the main sport of the time), these barely adequate helmets soon yielded to more substantial open-faced, three-quarter coverage helmets. Before long, the simple black leather jacket that had been the common protective torso covering of both pre-war motorcycle racers AND WW2 aviators also caught on and it wasn’t long after that that civilian suppliers, recognizing the rising wage-earning ability of industrially employed youths, began offering purpose-made motorcycle jackets.

Soon the ‘standard’ motorcycling jacket assumed a particular style that has thereafter been forever identified in the mind of the public as a ‘motorcycle jacket’. This jacket featured an offset frontal zipper, a waist belt, various small zippered pockets and bilateral epaulets. It was made only in black leather.

Across the Atlantic, in the United States, a similar youth movement was underway, with returning US GI servicemen also seeking compensatory dissipation for their war-conditioned nervous energy, except that in America the favored ‘bike’ was not a BSA, Royal Enfield, Velocette, Norton or Vincent, but the ubiquitous Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

In 1953, the Marlon Brando film ‘The Wild One’, borrowing from the real-life Hollister (CA) American Motorcycle Association ‘Gypsy Rally’ disruption of 1947 and also from a growing idealized image of the ‘outlaw biker’ gang as social rebels, permanently fixed the stereotype of that black leather jacket in American culture, permanently establishing and forever associating the ‘biker gang’ image with the black leather jacket look. The image was exponentially reinforced by actor Henry Winkler’s ‘Fonz’ character in the TV series ‘Happy Days’, who was rarely seen without his (it now resides in the Smithsonian, by the way). To the average citizen of those innocent days, any youth wearing one was immediately regarded as a delinquent and treated as a potential law-breaker.

Since those days, and at least partly furthered by the Japanese motorcycle invasion of the early 60s, the image of that black leather jacket has continued to vaguely symbolize youthful rebelliousness for many, although the broad economic affluence of American consumerism has resulted in the usual overwhelming superfluity of gear choices that now include all styles of jackets (leather and synthetics), colors and helmets.

And yet…the typical American motorcyclist STILL prefers to dress entirely in black, with drab black helmet, black leather jacket, etc. All choices that, while perhaps telling the world in a very puerile manner that the wearer considers himself a ‘bad boy’ (he wishes!), contribute exponentially to increasing the risk a motorcyclist runs on the highways as potential Mack-truck roadkill.

It helps further, in trying to understand this ‘bad boy’ image so many youths (although not necessarily Blacks, as they have cultivated other idealised peer image ideals for themselves involving the drug culture) try with varying degrees of desperation to cultivate, to understand that in our post Frontier, post Manifest Destiny nation, the cult of the social rebel and/or lawless outcast is still associated with macho masculinity, male chauvinism and rough-tough behavioral excess; in that context, this is still (I am certain unconsciously) reflected in the choices made for protective clothing worn on motorcycles. In particular, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, after trying briefly (and largely unsuccessfully) to compete with the precision prowess of Japanese high-tech technology, finally gave up and opted to reluctantly ‘whole hog’ embrace the ‘bad biker’ image that was forced upon it by America’s obsession with ‘outlaw bikers’. Today, that obsession with bad boy imagery has risen into the stratosphere, with the result that real ‘bad boys’ can no longer afford the $22,000+ Harley-Davidson machines. Such breathtakingly expensive (if largely still technologically obsolescent) American bikes are now the exclusive purview of only the very wealthy (i.e. doctors, lawyers, hedge-fund brokers, etc., many of whom derive great pleasure from leaving the office on weekends to don their all black, bad-boy uniforms and roar off into the hills like they imagine real Hell’s Angels would). Sigh.

Of course, any intelligent individuals know well enough that there’s a big difference between the upper middle-class posers and the legitimate article, but sadly enough immature youths lack the ability to gain that insight, hence the ‘all black’ motorcycle bad-boy look is just as popular as ever these days. Besides, young American women have been pop-culture socialized to prefer the bad boy to the more mild ‘good boy’ until it’s time to actually settle down, get married and have a family (a status that demands stability, a good job and socioeconomic reliability on the part of the male mate…all anathema to genuine ‘bad boys’).

Some inroads have been made to popularize a more colorfully visible and vivid presence on motorcycles, admittedly, which is all to the good, since these days it is not likely to be a motorcyclist’s fault that he has been hit or run over on a roadway. Increasingly large numbers of both immature motorists and ‘distracted’ drivers of all ages make riding ANY two-wheeled motorised vehicle on today’s jam-packed highways an exercise in near suicidal disregard for personal safety. If looking like a bad boy is more important to a motorcyclist than striving to be ‘seen’ by motorists, then I guess the gene pool is actually being more well-served by this trend than it would seem, as the dummies among us die off in increasing quantities. It helps to recall here that in the end, no one is smarter than good old ‘Ma Nature’ and genetic selection by processes of evolution are an unignorable b**h!

From my outlook on the subject, as a safety-concerned individual who is in no particular hurry to discover what lies on the other side of the Great Unknown Beyond, I think it’s all very, very interesting, of course.

It must always be remembered that in our modern culture, there is no longer such a thing as a simple, uncomplicated situation. Things always occur due to a juncture of contributing factors. This is perhaps best seen in commercial aviation accidents, wherein a crash is rarely ever caused by a single hardware or software failure, but rather by an unfortunately convergence of contributing elements (multiple system failures all occurring more or less simultaneously).

Naturally enough, and again given the limiting awareness factors that are consequent to being not fully mentally formed (i.e. immaturity), insights that are disallowed to youths normally come only after years of experience and exposure to the social & cultural dynamics that constitute our ‘normal life experiences’. And whereas youth may perhaps be best characterised as fooling themselves into vicarious flirtation with powerful forces beyond their remotest understanding (death, dying, physical pain & suffering et al) because they are constitutionally incapable of fathoming it (are thus so far removed from it), older, experienced and far more mature (hopefully) adults who are a LOT closer to their own pending deaths are all too able to come to grips with these things.

Thus, when I occasionally stumble across examples of puerile fixations on Zombies, or other youthful fascinations with symbols of death and extreme violence, I have to remind myself that there’s absolutely no hope that the status quo will ever change. The human life process that constitutes ‘becoming mature’ is a relatively certain (if contextually variable) one, biologically speaking. All we can do is strive to provide these immature young souls among us with unrelenting evidence of their all-too-real mortality and HOPE that some of it will take hold and modify their behavior before the inevitable occurs prematurely.

Regrettably, this sea-change in the safety paradigm can only occur and thrive in a society that places high priority on the soundness and health of its entire national ‘community’, a resolve that starts from within the individual parent and extends into the highest reaches of regional, state & Federal government. Saddled as we are by a soul-less, highly materialistic and commercialized consumer culture that instead prioritises corporate wealth, power, profits and earnings above the common good, the chances of a truly enlightened ‘social community’ EVER being achieved within the United States of America are about as remote as the possibility that any (immature) youthful individual shall ever fully understand and regard death with the sober respect it demands.

Oh yes, next time you watch a typical Hollywood ‘action flick’ that simply drips with gratuitous cruelty, brutal sexist violence and sadistically chauvinistic physical excesses, remind yourself that you are little more than a co-dependent participant in the greater problem unless you actively resist these trends. Change starts within the individual, but in order to have any chance of broader success, we all need to both set an example AND encourage others (particularly our own kids) to do the same (but without the PC fascism that presently contemporizes the puerile leftist liberal progressive movement, thank you very much).