What's a Life Worth?

It's a tired question: What's a life worth?

Well, being the good Reaganites we all are by now, we leave most questions like this to the magic of the marketplace. So what will the market bear for my bones, my body, my dead self? There are dollar figures we can put on transplants for medicine and donations for research. Let's say I'll donate all my organs (the healthy ones), suppose all my blood will be drained and used; some college pre-meds can do weird experiments on various tissues while my skeleton may hang nicely in your daughter's high school science class. Some of these exchanges must have a relatively unassailable number we can put on them.

I'm sure there's a kidney transplant for someone in me, and I've got a lotta spleen. My liver can't be in the best shape, what with my late 1970s adolescence filtered through it, and lately just the steady stream of Advils for my middle-aged aches and pains -- so many toxins over the years.... Put my liver in the debit column, then, but still: we can do the math and ballpark my net value.

Maybe unlike me, you have led a relatively clean life, ate well, light drinker, no hard drugs... Right off the bat, you've got a competitive edge, I imagine. Besides the advantage in liver recyclability, your lungs might be better, your heart more robust. You are probably worth more dead than I am. Huzzah -- there's a good chance you're worth more alive, as well.

This market will no doubt value someone lower who has lived longer and had to endure more health *issues* as we say. For instance, when my wonderful old Daddy died a week shy of his 91st birthday, my Mother and I found ourselves on the 2 extensions of her phone, at opposite ends of her house, teaming up to answer questions from the man at the Arizona Center for The Advancement of Medicine (ACTAM). This fine organization runs a program where, if you donate your body to science through them, they take care of the entire cost of transporting the deceased from his final resting place and then magically bringing the "cremains" to your doorstep in a box -- after, of course, "harvesting" the useful bits (it's a word that always jarred me, called to mind the exact wrong associations somehow, of fecund earth and bounty, ruddy farmers stooped to happy toil -- not my image of the lab in Phoenix where my Dad's cold body was rolled onto the slab from the body bag it traveled north in, from the Tucson Heart Hospital in a minivan with the ACTAM logo painted on the side.... not really harvest imagery somehow).

Anyway, there are me and my Mom, flooded with grief and bereft as it gets, and the ACTAM guy on the other end of the line is doing his pre-harvest due diligence, asking about the reliability of my Dad's organs, checklist-style.

"Heart?"
"Quadruple bypass in 1989," my Mom replies.

"Stomach?"
I jump right in: "He had -- what , Mom, half of it out in that bleeding ulcer operation when I was a kid?"
"Yeah, at least half of it," she says.

We are starting to giggle. The prostate? Long gone. The bladder? Please. When we hang up and find each other from our separate corners of the house, we're laughing with the tears running down our cheeks. Tolling it all up, given the differential between what little his remaining tissue will fetch versus the going rate for cremation -- hell, just the gas money round-trip between Tucson and Phoenix, plus the cost of that little plastic box they put his charred old bones in -- we just may have pulled the heist of the century.

Anyway, my point here is simply this: We as a people tend to listen to the market. We believe, by now, there's little if anything that can't be privatized, commodified, weighed and slapped with a price tag in an amount that someone will pay. And if we apply that cold logic to a life, then we are left with the unescapable truth that SOME LIVES ARE WORTH MORE THAN OTHERS. If Sophie could have had Milton Friedman with her on the train to Auschwitz, her choice may have been easier to make.

So if the market seems like a crude way to measure the value of a human life, okay, there are other ways to judge these things -- and it's true, pegging our existence to the dollar does feel tawdry. What about the retibution factor, the value of a life weighed in a court of law? Is the playing field of justice a level one?

Well, no. Many states have the death penalty for those found guilty of killing a cop. But if you shoot a proofreader, you may get life without parole, or even find yourself back out in polite society after 15 to 20 years of hard time.

Further, if you decide to shoot someone like me on the street one evening and you happen to be relatively wealthy, there's a far better chance that you'll get off entirely or face a lesser charge than murder one. On the other hand, if you're a black man, and you were walking down the street where I was shot but you didn't shoot me, and you don't have the money for a dream team of legal eagles or anything else that rhymes, you could likely still go down for this one -- my assailant will be free, and I will remain unavenged.

The point here is also simple: as in the marketplace, so too in the halls of justice do various lives wind up being deemed worth less or more.

So what about in war? Can we find a standardized answer to our question in the maelstroms of Iraq?

As of this writing, just a few more than 3,000 American service men and women have been killed in The Bush-Cheney Memorial Sonic Barbecue in Iraq since March of 2003. Four years of a short and easy war, and 3,000 mostly very young Americans gone for good.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, a day after we honored the birthday of another American who was killed by a terrorist attack, 100 Iraqis -- a full one percent of the 1,000-day American death toll -- died in a single day of sectarian violence in Baghdad alone.

For the year 2006, according to the United Nations, 34,452 Iraqis were killed in the war's spiralling violence -- the total number of American war dead, times ten, and then throw another thousand-plus in for good measure. And that's one year of Iraqi casuallties against the full 47 months of American deaths. (Remember the UN? They're those wimpy pussies who actually had Saddam Hussein reined in pretty good before the neocons got their way.)

This represents the first time that the UN or anyone has been able to do an annual casualty count on the Iraqi side, and it's actually allowed us for the first time to find a way to standardize our currency of living breathing bodies. Don't believe it? Well, at first glance, I grant you, the disparity in raw numbers, when balanced with our own consciousness, makes you wonder if we don't consider our lives more worthy of discussion, of comprehension, or mourning -- just as a police officer's life might be more worthy of revenge than yours. Our media coverage and our bumper stickers might confirm this suspicion, might seem to indicate that one American soldier's life weighs more heavily in the cosmic balance than that of an Iraqi, when judged in column inches or special reports, when meted out in slogans and soundbites. But I want to lead you back to the cold, unbiased chalkboard to do some math with me, and try to answer this question once and for all.

There is one way to crunch these grim numbers that evens out the worth of all the lives lost, a standard like gold that all these bones and organs and all this blood can be pegged to.

Here's the formula: Add up the 2006 casualties in Bush and Cheney's war -- the 34,452 Iraqi and the 824 American deaths -- and you come up with 35,276.

Now let X stand for the dollar amount of Halliburton's total profits from the same period, calendar year 2006.

Divide X by 35,276.

We should all be worth so much.