David Pierson - Breaking Bad

It seems just so obvious to Skyler that the reasonable option is to get medical treatment because that would, she believes, ensure that Walter would live longer and thus allow him to be with his family for more time. Likewise, Walt Jr. cannot fathom why anyone would refuse treatment. Even if the treatment is unpleasant, as medical treatment usually is, in his mind it cannot be any more unpleasant than any other medical treatment that people have undergone and survived. In his mind, his father’s behavior is simply dumb.

But Walter is well aware that his chances of surviving lung cancer are practically nonexistent. He simply has, as far as he is concerned, too few choices and the only future that medical treatments will provide is one of debility, dependence and weakness. This imagined future self, though having a longer life, is living a life so repulsive to him, that he would rather die sooner than to live as a “dead man.” Walter’s greatest anxiety is the nature of the legacy he will leave his family: he is desperate that his legacy be financially and emotionally sound. He does not want to leave his family financially vulnerable or with tainted memories of him, memories of him sickly and repulsive. The idea that they would remember him ill is so abhorrent that he would rather forgo anything medicine has to offer.

Without explanation, Walter does agree to receive medical treatment. Yet his attitude toward cancer and being in control does not change, as revealed in this conversation in the episode “Cancer Man” (2/17/08), which takes place about a year later after his surgery and his cancer is in remission, with a fellow cancer patient while they both wait for a PET/CT scan. The other patient explains to Walter that getting cancer has changed his life and has taught him to give up control of his life. Walter scoffs at this mealy-mouth advice referring to it as crap. In response, he offers his own insights, which is that one should never lose control of one’s life. The other patient immediately sees the flaw in Walter’s logic, after all, “cancer is cancer.” Some people survive cancer and some people do not. That is just the way it is and there is not anything we can do about it. Not Walter. He tells cancer it can go to hell. Strong words, indeed. But believing one is in control does not mean one is in control. And there is little evidence, other than Walter’s words, that Walter is in control of his life. [6] Mike refers to Walt as a ticking time bomb. Walter promises Jesse that there will be no more killing. But Walter’s promise of no more killings is as patently absurd as his proclamation against cancer—bold words, but implausible in running a successful meth business. And there are more dead bodies, a lot of them. Walter orders the deaths of Fring’s men because they could lead the DEA to him. Walter also kills Mike because Mike would not give him the names of those men. As Mike bleeds to death, Walter has an uncharacteristic, albeit brief, moment of regret. He admits that he could have forced Lydia to give him the names of the men. Mike interrupts him asking him to let him die alone. Not only does Walter kill, he kills people he does not even need to kill.

The concept of normalcy pervades our society (Dudley-Marling and Gurn 2010; Snyder and Mitchell 2006). Every aspect of our bodily experience is analyzed in terms of normalcy and abnormalcy. Given the ubiquity of normalcy, it may seem surprising that this term did not appear in English language until 1840 (Davis 2010). It was the French scholar Adolphe Quetelet who first applied the mathematical concept “norm,” which was then used by astronomers, to people, and developed the notion of l’homme moyen , “the average man.” Quetelet hypothesized that l’homme was also l’homme moyen morale (“the moral man”) and set out to with his measuring tapes, calipers and scales to prove it (Davis 2010, 5). Quetelet did not see the average man’s body as something mediocre, but as the perfect ideal. He wrote, “an individual who in himself, at a given time, all the given qualities of the average man, would represent at once all the greatness, beauty and goodness of that being” (Porter 1986, 102). The ideal to be attained was a nation entirely comprised of average men, for then we would have a bourgeois paradise. Quetelet was confident that because of the “error curve,” a term he coined, all bodily “defects and monstrosities” as well as “vice in morals” would eventually disappear, just as “errors” in mathematics “average out” (Davis 2010, 4-9).

Quetelet’s ideas were extremely popular in his day, not only in France but also throughout Europe and the United States. The use of statistics to study humans spawned the birth of many eugenicist societies, each created for the purpose of researching the improvement of the human species and human societies. [7] Francis Galton is usually credited with creating the first eugenicist scientific society in England. However, it was years later, in the United States, that large scale governmentally financed eugenics programs really got underway in earnest. President Theodore Roosevelt created the Heredity Commission. It was charged to investigate the genetic heritage of the citizens and to “(encourage) the increase of families of good blood and (discourage) the vicious elements in the cross-bred American civilization” (Bruinius 2006; Black 2003). The United States was the first country to past sterilization laws. Starting in 1907, Indiana was the first state to pass sterilization legislation. The states that sterilized the highest percentage of their residents were: Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California. California had by far the highest number of sterilizations in the United States (one third of all sterilizations nationwide). By the 1960s, over 20,000 patients per year in that state were being sterilized; almost 60 percent were considered mentally ill, just over 35 percent were considered “mentally deficient” (“California Eugenics.”). Eugenicists assumed that most physical defects and “mental defects” (which included traits such as laziness, criminality, drunkenness, and “imbecility”) were hereditary. It was also assumed that, just as with many diseases, some people were carriers of what were considered social diseases (Hubbard 2010). Cleansing society of such individuals became a national preoccupation. [8] Although referred to eugenicist (“good birth”) societies in the United States and Britain, the term “racial hygiene” ( Rassenhygiene ) was used in Germany but the idea is the same: preserving the good people and eliminating the diseased and defective individuals who are a corrupting influence on society.

Being normal in such an environment is no minor matter; it is everything. To fail to be normal is not merely to be ill or naughty or mischievous. Rather, you are a burden to your family, a scourge of the city, a source of ruin in the whole society. [9] Early in the twentieth century, statewide contests were established throughout the United States, funded by the Eugenics Records Office, such as the Better Baby Contest and Fitter Family for the Future. The purpose of these contests was to measure and rank babies and families for “fitness” (idealness) and to determine which ones were perfect models for future citizens. Winners won free medical treatment. Though one would think the losers would need medical treatment more, rewarding sickly individuals with medicine is exactly contrary to eugenicist logic. These contests lasted several decades, until the late 1940s (Selden 2005, 199-225). A physician cuts off a gangrenous leg to curtail the deadly threat to the patient and so, too, reasons the eugenicist, should we curtail the deadly effects that diseased and defective people have on the body politic. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” [10] Giving the majority opinion in Buck v Bell , the U.S. Supreme Court case that decided that states can sterilize “imbeciles” against their will and without their knowledge, Holmes writes, We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence . It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. [ emphasis added ] ( Buck v. Bell 1927) Tolerating social defectives is comparable to committing medical negligence. [11] Some eugenicists were not satisfied with sterilization measures and instead lobbied for euthanasia. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report recommended euthanasia as a solution to the problem of unfit individuals. An institute in Lincoln Illinois fed cognitively impaired patients milk laced with tuberculosis, obtaining an annual death rate of 30-40 percent per year. In 1931, The Illinois Homeopathic Medicine Association began lobbying for the “right to euthanize” “imbeciles” (Black 2003). Yet, as Hubbard (2010) claims, “health and physical prowess are poor criteria for human worth” (187). There is very little reason to believe that so-called normal people are morally good people and there is very little reason to believe that persons with deviant bodies are the worst citizens.