Essays in Idleness

For a pragmatic solution to the innumerable practical problems with Canada’s new court-ordered euthanasia regime, flagged in yesterday’s Idlepost, we might look to the Jinguan Auto Company of Chungking (now spelt “Chongqing”) in the People’s Republic of China. The company, which makes a wide range of specialty products, including bullet-proof limousines and executive command vehicles for Communist Party officials and the new rich, also makes China’s popular mobile execution chambers. And they are eager to develop new export markets.

These vehicles are a showpiece of modern engineering and design, a miniature surgical station and organic disposal unit on wheels, all fitting onto the standard chassis of their largest mass-market microvan. Each of the several hundred now serving China’s national and provincial authorities carries a professional team of four, who can be raced to any location along the country’s autobahns at a handsome 80 miles per hour.

Once the paperwork on your unwanted granny is done, and she has been thoughtfully sedated, staff in the nursing home need no longer trouble themselves. The “mercy van” team can be scheduled for same-day arrival. They tie your granny onto their own gurney, and roll her to the van for quick, painless despatch. Better yet, even before leaving the nursing home parking lot they can harvest granny’s organs, pack and refrigerate, then compact the leftovers for cremation. The van then races to a state hospital to drop off the organs, and deliver the “bio-hazard” to the same incinerator as the aborted babies go into. Alternatively, as I was told by a researcher for the Falun Gong, the latter package can be recycled as a valuable high-protein ingredient in Chinese pet food, thus completing a perfect environmental recycling loop.

Not only do you save estate money on granny’s funeral home expenses and cemetery plot (a modest memorial service will help with “closure”), but as her assigned heir you might be entitled to a cut from that lucrative organ trade, which has proved a big revenue earner in China itself. Ailing but wealthy “organ tourists” fly in from all over to benefit from the country’s reliable supply of human body parts.

At around $125,000 a pop, plus shipping and sales tax, these vans would be a bargain for hard-pressed Canadian medical bureaucracies. They can pay for themselves many times over. Here is a cost-effective solution to what might otherwise become an incredibly complex euthanasia service, with multiple redundant local execution facilities; and the vans can serve remote communities where the costs would not otherwise even be considered.

I should mention that the vans include fixed video cameras so the authorities may check that everything is done tickety-boo: sodium thiopental to make granny unconscious, pancuronium bromide to stop breathing and finally, potassium chloride to finish her off.

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In yesterday’s post I also mentioned the many forward-looking contributions of Germany’s hyper-progressive Nazi Party, before and during the last World War. Mobile gas chambers were among their high-tech inventions, with sealed stalls into which carbon monoxide was pumped from the van’s own exhaust pipes — a triumph of efficient engineering and environmental concern. After testing a small prototype, I gather on Jewish children from a psychiatric hospital in Poland, a larger model was developed which could carry and process up to fifty customers at a time, while driving to the nearest freshly opened mass grave. Organs could not be profitably harvested in those days, but some valuables could still be had from stripping the prisoners before loading, plus field dentistry on gold fillings, and so forth.

As every progressive knows in his heart, technology is constantly improving, and there is no social problem to which we cannot find a technical solution, provided that we are willing to think “outside the box” of oppressive, traditionalist moral constraints inherited from the Middle Ages.