I happened to hear Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” on the radio the other day. I hadn’t heard it for a while....it’s a cool song. What I especially like is the middle instrumental part---full of drama and turmoil---that climaxes with a single sustained guitar note. That note strikes me as a musical beacon of sorts, signifying a new dawn, or a way out. It takes the song back into the final verse, and the final resolution.... “and then we started to fly.”

When I was in junior high school there was a girl a year older than me---I didn’t know her, just heard about her---who killed herself by jumping off a freeway overpass. Apparently a bunch of guys had phoned her one night and told her that they had decided that she was the ugliest girl in school.

I’ve known a few other people (or known of a few other people) over the years who have done themselves in. A couple of guys in high school hanged themselves. My cousin’s fiance killed himself. A guy at work who I didn’t really know killed himself (in fact I’m not sure if I ever met him, I just heard a story about how he showed up at work one day and was unusually serene, and was dead by his own hand shortly after).

Suicide is kind of a taboo subject, yet it features fairly prominently in human storytelling, usually as a defiant way out. The Jews on Masada, Romeo and Juliet, Thelma and Louise.

So how come we glorify it on one hand, and condemn it on the other?

I think the reason people fear it is because it is in many ways the ultimate weapon. Someone who is ready to kill themselves has nothing to lose, and that makes them dangerous. Take any murder/suicide situation you can think of. L’ecole Polytechnique, Columbine. Without the willingness to die, the willingness to kill may well not have been there.

The Catholic church countered the suicide-as-weapon idea by making it a cardinal sin. Kill youself and you forfeit salvation. Radical Islam, ingeniously and diabolically, has reversed that notion. Kill yourself in the service of your religion, and you guarantee youself the sweetest possible afterlife.

I just finished reading a piece by Noam Chomsky on how we have nothing to fear from Saddam Hussein, even if he does have ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ because his using them would be suicide. So the real weapon is not the weapon, it’s the suicidal impulse. This was also the premise of the Mutual Assured Destruction theory that held sway during the Cold War. If one side attacks, they will be destroyed. Therefore they won’t attack. All of these theories become useless once you throw the possibility of a suicidal leader (eg. Hitler) into the mix.

I’ve always been disturbed by teen suicide. For one thing, kids sometimes attempt (and succeed at) suicide to get attention. But killing yourself to get attention is a flawed concept. As Freddy Mercury wryly advised in one of his songs, “nobody gives a damn.” People have to get on with their own lives. The other thing is that the ‘solution’ is arrived at in the absense of any perspective. Kids don’t know how young they are, and how quickly things can change.

Or that sometimes things change over time.

Recently I came across the story of a musician named Danny Gatton.

Gatton, according to a biographer, was a guitarist who “explored a musical backwater of his own invention.” He referred to his music as “redneck jazz.” He was short, pudgy and self-effacing, the antithesis of the typical rock star. Nonetheless, he toiled away in the Baltimore/D.C. area for most of his life. He gradually came to the attention of other players, and made a few independent records. His perseverence paid off when became “one of the first, perhaps the first act in what can loosely be called rock music to make his major-label debut at age forty-six.”

Holy cow.

It didn’t really work out; he was “not a product of major-label culture.” Nonetheless, to invent your own scene, get a brief stint in the big leagues, then go back to making independent records as you approach the age of 50 is no mean feat. Today young players cite him as an influence, and you can even buy a Danny Gatton signature model Telecaster guitar.

A perfect example of the no hope misfit who hung in there.

Well....maybe not.

He killed himself with a shotgun just after his 49th birthday.