Redux™

A friend of mine read my latest posting on Verizon and drug ads and commented that the drug ads can mention some significant side effects—death. After all, life is the leading cause of death, and taking the wrong medication might just hasten it along.

It got me thinking. What if there was a medication to take to reverse death, bring you back to life so you could keep taking the pills (and therefore keep paying for the pills) you were taking? What if there was a drug called Redux™, meaning of course brought back, revived.

As with any new medication, there are a mountain of ethical and marketing problems to solve, let alone how much to charge for it, how to administer it to a dead body, will it be a pill, capsule or an injectable? The list can go on and on.

And who gets it? Do you have to arrange for its administration before you pass away, or can your heirs make that decision for you? And how soon after death is it effective? Will convicted felons be eligible for it? Even the most despicable person on earth might have at least one person who would be happy to see alive again. It's a tough call.

The upside to it is that the good people can be brought back. You know, the ones who are described to the police as "having no enemies."

Think of Jesus, Billy Graham or Mother Teresa being able to stride on earth again. Make a list of those you would like to see again.

Life insurance companies would probably love the drug, because if you're not dead they won't have to pay off on your life insurance policy. They can take the money back if they paid it out. You're no longer dead. 

Redux™ is probably a long way off. I'm not even sure anyone is working on it right now. The absolute biggest question will be: will it be covered by insurance? 

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I Just Wanna Be...

How can there possibly be any unemployment in the United States when every time I look up there's a mob of people who must have just gotten off an overcrowded bus appearing in a Verizon ad, happy as hell and holding a slim electronic brick in their hands?

All the happy healthy people who used to appear in HMO ads have now migrated to being happy, healthy people holding phones, getting unlimited talk, text and data for a song. I just wanna be a Verizon extra.

Russell Baker once pointed out that everyone he saw in ads was younger than him. Mr. Baker passed away in 2019 at 93, and it's still true. Even people in the multitude of drug ads all seemed to have been cured. None of them are suffering from anything and are fit, smiling and playing pickleball on what might have once been bad knees. I just wanna be in a drug ad.

No luck there. I do not have Type-2 Diabetes, (or Type-1), therefore whatever my A1C is it doesn't need to be paid attention to. I do not have Plaque Psoriasis, therefore Otezla is not for me. Likewise, no Rheumatoid Arthritis, therefore no Aspercreme goes flying off the shelf and into my CVS basket. I do not have Bipolar 1 or 2, so nothing needed there either. I do not have COPD either. Sorry Trelegy.

I do have some medication needs, but none of them seem to be what they advertise for. Is that a good thing? Should I worry?

A year or so ago I was taking something and I finally heard an ad for it on the evening news. I felt tremendous. I was part of a vast population that needed the drug. I wasn't alone.

However, I was taken off that drug and put on something else for which I have never seen an ad for. No happy, healthy, smiling people are taking what I'm now taking. Is that because it doesn't work and they can't be shown because there are no happy, healthy people taking what I'm taking? Should I worry? What, me worry? Is there something for people who don't worry?

How do you get in those ads? Are there open casting calls printed in the trade magazines and Variety asking for people to "come on down" and bring their phones and prescription receipts? Is it like "Antiques Roadshow" where you wait in line at the convention center or armory and have someone talk to you and see if you qualify for the next level of consideration?

Can someone get back to me? I just wanna be acknowledged.

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The Obit Writer

I don't know much about Clay Risen, but I do know he scored a rare obituary byline hat trick yesterday when three! of his bylined tribute obits appeared in yesterday's edition of the New York Times. There are probably no official statistics kept on these things, but when they occur the obituary aficionados like myself take notice.

The obituary writer is tasked with writing about the deceased who have gained notoriety from a wide variety of endeavors. Take yesterday's trifecta. It required Mr. Risen to write with authority on Paul T. Kwami, 70, who gained fame as the director of a choral group that specialized in singing African American spiritual music.

From there he segued to write about Kevin M. Cahil, 86, a physician who was a tropical disease expert who was credited with being one of New York's first doctors to warn of the AIDS crisis.

And a few page turns later, a Clay Risen obituary appears on the back page of yesterday's first section on Lowry Mays, 87, a businessman who by circumstances found himself the owner of a failing radio station that he parlayed into creating Clear Channel Communications, an industry juggernaut that eventually was the parent company for 1,200 radio stations nationwide.

Think of the subjects Mr. Risen became sort of a one-day expert on: a subject who became famous for leading a choral group in winning a Grammy Award for Roots gospel singing; a subject who became an expert in humanitarian medicine who worked in 65 countries, in addition to helping to resuscitate the Irish Historical Society in New York;  a subject who reluctantly became a owner of a failing radio station who pivoted from being a petroleum engineer to the CEO of a massive company that controlled 1,200 radio stations nationwide. They played it, we listened.

Mr. Risen's style is pretty straightforward, with few cute flourishes. He does somewhat sneak them in when he describes Dr. Cahill's speech as being a cross between a Gaelic brogue and "Noo Yawkese." To me, speech like that is better than a cut glass, plummy British accent.

Mr. Risen comes to the obits page from being a historian on Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, that's where I first encountered his name when I saw a book he had written on TR. My daughter Susan is a big TR fan, as I am. I think when I was six years old or so my mother and father took me to his birthplace on East 20th Street in Manhattan to tour the museum. My father, born in 1915, was born not that far from TR's home into a family on 32nd Street and 2nd Avenue that was certainly distinctly different from TR's. I've also been to Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, another TR homestead, several times. All good takes.

Mr. Risen has the look of a youthful history professor, who may or may not wear jackets with patches on the elbows. I can certainly see him striding through a leafy Ivy League campus on his way to his next class carrying a few books in a knapsack, perhaps even being mistaken for a student.

My hope is that Mr. Risen remains an obituary page byline fixture. He was raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and with enough presence at the headquarters of the NYT on Eighth Avenue, he will eventually gain a "Noo Yawkese" speech. 

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September 16

The dates on the stones let you measure the time

Of the lives that lived in between. 

The bracketed years reveal to the current 

The joys and the troubles they've seen. 

On any given day a person is born 

You can record the date of their birth. 

And on any given day a person can die 

And you can record that they've left this earth. 

And the morning we made our dusty descent, 

An accomplishment undiminished, 

We learned of the others and their bracketed date, 

And our own, that remained unfinished. 

So it is incredible to believe the end can be met 

At the hands of someone we knew. 

He put an end to life, he put an end to himself, 

But he didn't put an end to you. 

------------------------------------------------------------

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the murders of Vincent LaBianca and Isabel Munoz, my manager and co-worker at Empire BlueCross Blue Shield at the hands of our Assistant Vice President, who thankfully committed suicide immediately after. He saved all of us a lot of legal proceedings.

The first three stanzas were written about 9/11, an event we survived by safely getting down from the 29th floor of Tower One the morning of 9/11. The last stanza was added after the murders.

As I've done on other milestone anniversaries, I've taken out an In Memoriam sentiment in the NYT to appear in their In Memoriam section on the obituary page.

It's a simple 10-word sentiment, lifted from a Carnegie Hall program that I think is a Danish sentiment:

No one ever dies who lives in hearts left behind. 

Still true, after 20 years.

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