How the Mighty Have Fallen

This is starting to become old news, but this past week we learned that Lenny Dykstra had to sell his 1986 World Series ring for $56,000 to pay off his many creditors and also that a technician at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryogenics facility in Arizona, is alleged to have taken swings with a monkey wrench at Ted Williams’ frozen head.

Needless to say, I am once again experiencing some serious schadenfreude. Lenny Dykstra always something of a red-neck putz during his playing days, and the allegations that came out of the collapse of his business were ugly, replete with allegations of racial slurs and sexual harrassment by Dykstra as well as claims of fraud and bilking investors.  His brothers are among those claiming fraud.

As for Ted Williams, I can’t very well commend someone for abusing the remains of the dead, although more for concern over the feelings of the deceased’s relatives than for the deceased him- or herself, but cryogenics is such a ridiculous concept that I can’t really feel too sorry for anyone who somehow thought it would be a good way to cheat grim death.

With technology moving as fast as it has for the last fifty years, you can understand why there would have been a cryogenics boomlet a few years ago.  It sounds like such a great idea: as soon as you die, we freeze your body (or only the head; it’s cheaper!) and in the future, when they’ve found a cure for whatever you died of, we’ll bring you back to life!

Of course, it really just takes advantage of the gullibility and fear of death that many people with too much money and not enough sense have.  Needless to say, they don’t put you under cryogenic freezing until you’re good and dead already, otherwise, it’s murder.  Once you’re dead, you’re dead.  Re-animating  the dead body of any organism as complicated as a human being is unbelievably complicated.  Mark my words: the human race will send a man (or woman) to Mars and back long before it will be able to bring back to life the severed head of Ted Williams or anyone else who’s been cryogenically frozen.

In the meantime, what do you do with all these cryogenically frozen idiots?  Say, for instance, it only takes a 1,000 years before science can bring these knuckleheads back to life.  Where do you keep a frozen head stashed for 1,000 years?  Will any of the corporations now in the cryogenics business be around in 1,000 years?  Probably not, when you consider that corporations have only existed as a concept for the last 400 years.  Who’s going to keep a head frozen for 1,000 years unless they’re being well paid to do it?  Who’s going to pay good money every year or so for a 1,000 years to preserve some long-dead knucklehead’s frozen head?

I’ve been to cemeteries where tombstones little more than a hundred years have fallen over and no one’s bothered to set them right again.  I’m sure you have to.  Once the relatives get tired of making the payments, your remains are on their own.

This, by the way, is essentially the problem they have with all the nuclear waste being turned out by nuclear power plants.  The stuff is dangerously radioactive for 10,000.  Where do you store something toxic safely for 10,000 years?  The answer is essentially nowhere.  Even in the desert under Nevada (the Yucca Mountain site), it’s believed to be only a few thousand years at most before groundwater rusts through the metal containers the waste would be stored in.  The hope is to stick the stuff somewhere where it’s relatively safe enough that people will forget about it and leave some future generation to deal with the problem, most likely when it becomes a crisis.

Anyway, back to the lab tech taking some batting practice on The Splendid Splinter’s frozen noggin.  It was just a matter of time before someone took those practice cuts, so to speak, given the length of time Williams’ head was going to sit there doing nothing, until enough time had passed when someone could just unceremoniously dump it somewhere when no one was paying attention.

When he was alive, especially as he got older, Ted Williams came across as a kind of hard bitten, reactionary John Wayne-type.  The all-American war hero who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and succeeded because of hard work work and determination.  All that American mythological bullshit.

It’s somehow appropriate to know that this war hero and supposed tough guy was so scared to die when his time had finally come (or, at least, too damn senile to stop other people from making this crazy decision for him) that he ended up with his severed head frozen in Arizona, where some bored 20-something asshole making $10 an hour could amuse himself by taking pokes at a legend.  Now, that’s an All-American story!