In an interview here on Sunday, two days after his release from prison, Mr. Kevorkian, 79, let loose a rush of fierce words about a nation that did not pass any new laws allowing assisted suicide while he was in prison. Again and again, he called the government “the tyrant.” He called the public “sheep.” He called some of his harshest critics “religious fanatics or nuts.”
Mr. Kevorkian says he assisted with more than 130 suicides in the 1990s, when he drew national attention to questions about what rights people have when it comes to dying. Asked whether he would turn away a gravely ill person seeking his guidance now, he said gruffly, “I can’t help them.”
Mr. Kevorkian, convicted in one of those 130 cases of second-degree murder, has agreed in his parole provisions not to help anyone else commit suicide. “Sorry,” he said. “Don’t blame me. Blame your government for passing the laws.”
Mr. Kevorkian seemed gloomy, too, about whether laws allowing assisted suicide would ever expand much beyond Oregon, the only state that has legalized the practice under certain circumstances. Of the United States becoming one of the countries to allow it, he said: “It’ll be the last one, if it does ever. It’s a tyrannical country.”
Ah! The rehabilitative power of prison!
Kervorkian is one of the Autumn People that Ray Bradbury writes of in Something Wicked This Way Comes
“…Beware the autumn people…For some, autumn comes early, stays late, through life, where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring or revivifying summer.
For these beings, fall is the only normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.
Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No, the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks through their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.
They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud al clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks.
Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.â€