Hanging Harry

Warning: This website made me nauseous, so if you get a little bit squeemish you may not want to click this. But the following website is of several off-colored toys related to death:

http://www.perpetualkid.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2350

For the first time in a little while, I’m speechless. Hanging Harry? Hanging Harry. That’s what our world has come to, a toy meant as a joke about someone who committed suicide?

The fact that we can joke about suicide like this I think says a lot about our death culture.

I’ve been analyzing our death culture for the past few months and honestly I’m a little bit surprised by this Hanging Harry character. Like funeral director John Pantoja said in the podcast, I think we largely live in a death denying country, where we try to avoid death at all costs and prolong lives through medical treatments and death is not casually discussed in conversation. But then that concept of death denying is counteracted with the proliferation of zombie and death-related movies out there, which maybe shows that Americans deal with death to a certain extent but its primarily in an imaginative, non-realistic way. But now, Hanging Harry, a plastic little man with a light cord around his neck, crosses both realms of the realistic and the imaginative, I think.

Americans need to talk about death more and we need to bridge the non-realistic with the realistic, but I don’t know that Hanging Harry was the right first step that we needed to take.

 What do you think?

~ by anz203 on December 5, 2007.