By Dave Andrusko

Part Two is an entry from Wesley Smith's blog, always worth reading. Please send your comments on Parts One and Two to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me on www.twitter.com/daveha.

Jack Kevorkian

You can watch the interview for yourself–the latest appearance of Jack Kevorkian on network television–so I don't need to go into great depth here.

The interviewer asks "Dr. Death" if that appellation bothered him. Naw, Kevorkian says, it's a handle he got years ago back when he was a medical student doing "research." (That "research" was watching how people looked at the moment of their death.) "The nurses coined that phrase," Kevorkian said, and his friends call him that now.

The media's on-again, off-again fascinating with Kevorkian is something that will provide the raw material for a raft of Ph.D. theses. Before he was convicted of 2nd degree murder in the death of Thomas Youk, Kevorkian reached his celebrity "peak," (according to bioethicist Wesley Smith) "the night he was wined and dined at Time magazine's 75th anniversary party, where mega-celebrities such as Tom Cruise rushed up to shake his hand."

Why he was on cable news now, I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps it's because the interviewer wanted (and secured) Kevorkian's opinion on the circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Jackson. Perhaps it was to chuckle about the fact that Al Pacino is playing Kevorkian in an HBO movie. ("He looks exactly like me," Kevorkian said. "I thought that was my photograph.")

Maybe it was to remind the audience that Kevorkian "didn't get a penny" for any of the suicides he assisted in; or that "You live a simple life. You're not a rich man."

Whatever the motives it was hard to miss how bitter and angry Kevorkian remains. ""How can you be against a legitimate medical service [presumably assisted suicide] that was widely practiced in ancient Greece and Rome," he said. "Why would you suddenly make it a crime?" Of course it wasn't "suddenly" made a crime, but I suspect that's a mere detail for him.

Reminded that even some of his supporters may have thought Kevorkian went too far when he turned an American flag around to reveal a Swastika, Kevorkian was unrepentant. "Well we've a lot of traits of fascism in this country," he said. He referenced somebody who's found 14 traits of fascism–"and America fits all 14 principles."

Kevorkian added, "We're done as a free country," which is not surprising because, in his opinion, "most people are sheep."

The interviewer concluded by asking him why Kevorkian became a pathologist, and then volunteering, "You liked helping people live, right?"

Kevorkian paused and then answered, "Well, no, not really. You just help the doctors who are helping the people." Pathologists, he said, are just a "highly specialized technologist."

Okay, so how would you like to be remembered? Doesn't care

"Doesn't matter at all," Kevorkian said. "When I'm dead, nothing matters."

Part Two