美記者“自殺網站”成模板 21世紀絕命書令人堪憂

Suicide is, generally speaking, a tragic and hideously hurtful act. Martin Manley, a 60-year-old former sports writer and statistician for theKansas City Star, seems to have been at least vaguely aware of that. But he did it anyway—and left behind a meticulously detailed website explaining virtually every aspect of his decision.

The case is noteworthy not so much because Manley was a semi-public figure—though he was credited with popularizing the NBA’s standard efficiency rating—but because he used technology to intentionally blow open the wall of privacy that typically surrounds suicides. More than 100 people die by suicide on an average day in the United States, and a significant portion of them leave notes for their stricken friends and relatives. Some are vengeful, some apologetic, some maddeningly cryptic. Regardless, most are read only by a small circle of authorities and loved ones. For Manley, confronting friends and family with his death wasn’t enough. He wanted to confront the public at large. He wanted desperately to justify his own life and death—to the world, but perhaps above all to himself.

So, according to his website, Manley prepaid Yahoo for five years’ worth of Web hosting, built a sprawling suicide website, and put up one final post on his sports blog Thursday morning linking to it. Then, according to theKansas City Star, he killed himself in front of an Overland Park police station. It was his 60thbirthday.

On the website, which quickly began to circulate widely via social media, Manley wrote that he intended to create “the most detailed example of a suicide letter in history.” He explained:

After you die, you can be remembered by a few-line obituary for one day in a newspaper when you're too old to matter to anyone anyway... OR you can be remembered for years by a site such as this. That was my choice and I chose the obvious.

Next he began to explain the reasons for his suicide, seeking—at least initially—to portray it as the highly rational decision of a man who lived his life “content up to the last minute” and simply wanted to leave the world in his own way. “The major reasons adults commit suicide—health, legal, financial, loss of loved ones, loneliness or depression… none of those issues are relevant to me and, for the most part of my life, have never been,” he wrote. His No. 1 reason for killing himself: He was terrified to face old age.

In dozens of separate essays on the site, Manley went on to reflect on everything from religion to gun control to his romantic history to his affinity for fedoras. Some of his thoughts are profound, others mundane. I haven’t read them all. It would take hours. But I read enough to see that he was lonelier and less secure in his decision than he wanted to let on. His parents were dead, he had no children, and he didn’t want to “die alone.” A bizarre passage in which he posted what looked like GPS coordinates to a stash of gold and silver coins—setting off a macabre and ultimately fruitless treasure hunt on Thursday—reinforces the impression of a man starving for importance. Many of the pictures on his website appear to be selfies.

I won’t pass judgment on Manley’s decision to kill himself, except to say that no one should romanticize it. An evidently thoughtful and intelligent man is dead, those who knew him are almost certainly stricken with grief, and the fact that he published a website rationalizing it isn’t going to change either of those things. But I will say that his elaborate self-memorial raises a disturbing specter in the social-media age: the transformation of the suicide note from a private document into a public sensation. Without Twitter, Facebook, and a Web full of page-view-driven blogs, Manley’s writings might well have remained obscure.

Manley’s desire to say all that he wanted to say to the world before he died is understandable. But it seems clear that his ability to do so—the chance to go out with a splash and to make himself known far and wide—eased his decision to end his own life. The risk is that it will do the same for others, including many people who are not as sound of mind as Manley claimed to be. Manley notwithstanding, suicide is rarely a rational act. In a 2003New Yorkerarticle about people who commit suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge, writer Tad Friend interviewed several people who had survived the leap and found a heartbreaking commonality: Jumpers tend to regret their decision in midair.

One of Manley’s goals in publishing a suicide website was to assure everyone that he didn’t regret his decision. Whether that changed at the moment he pulled the trigger, we’ll never know. But it’s safe to assume that at least one of his final wishes will go unfulfilled: “What I hope will happen in the long run is that my life is remembered and the suicide is just an asterisk, a footnote,” Manley wrote. Sadly, the reverse is far more likely.

UPDATE, Saturday, Aug. 17, 11:55 a.m.:On Friday night, Yahoo took down Martin Manley's website. A spokesperson told me: "After careful review, our team determined that this site violated our Terms of Service and we took it down."

Manley's site lives on, for the time being, on various mirror websites not hosted by Yahoo.通常來說，自殺是一個悲慘傷人的行爲。60歲的馬丁·曼利（Martin Manley）是《堪薩斯城明星報》前體育新聞記者和統計員，他似乎對自殺的悲劇性有所瞭解，但還是選擇了走向悲劇——而且還留下一個網站詳盡解釋了這個決定的各方原因。

該案件沒有得到大力關注是因爲曼利是個半公衆人物——他因普及NBA標準效率評級而大受讚譽——但是他用科技揭開了自殺背後的隱私。美國每天有逾100人自殺，而且大多數人會給受傷的朋友和親戚留下遺書。留下遺書的目的也不盡相同，有的爲了報復、有的爲了道歉、亦或是字裏行間暗藏玄機。但不管怎樣，這些遺書只會被小範圍權利機關和親人看見。但對於曼利來說，只是讓家人和朋友來見證他的死亡並不夠。他希望將自己的死亡面向廣大羣衆。他瘋狂地向世界爲自己的生命和死亡辯護，也或許只是向他自己辯護。

根據曼利的網站可知他向雅虎（Yahoo）預付了五年定金來做網站託管，隨後他建立了一個龐大的自殺網站。，曼利週四早晨在自己的運動博客上發佈了最後一條博客。據《堪薩斯城明星報》報道，曼利在奧弗蘭帕克（Overland Park）一警察局前自殺，那天是他60歲生日。

通過社會媒體該網站開始廣泛傳播，曼利試圖創作出“史上最詳盡絕命書樣板”。他在網站上解釋稱：

年紀太大了會被所有人忘記，死後只有報紙上的幾行訃告總結一生……或者可以在多年以後通過像這樣的網站被人記住。這就是我選擇這樣做的原因。

隨後曼利開始解釋自殺原因——對於一個“生命最後一分鐘都充實”的人，曼利稱只是簡單地想用自己的方式來離開這個世界，而他也試圖將其描繪成一個高度理智的決定。曼利在網站中寫道：“成年人自殺的主要原因有健康、法律、經濟、失去愛人、孤獨或絕望……但是這些因素和我的生活基本不相干。”曼利自殺的首要原因是對變老感到恐懼。

在網站上10多篇獨立文章中，曼利紀錄了每一件事，從宗教到槍支控制再寫他的浪漫歷史最後又提及他對淺頂呢帽的喜愛。曼利的有些思想很具有深度，有些卻又十分單調乏味。我沒有全部讀完他的文章，因爲這畢竟要花好幾個小時。不過從他的文章中我認識到其實他比他想象中要更孤獨、更缺乏安全感。曼利的父母已經過世，他沒有孩子，而且他不想“獨自死去”。在他發佈的文章中有一篇很怪異。這篇文章就像是用GPS尋找金幣和銀幣的存放點——最終在週四進行令人毛骨悚然無意義的尋寶活動——這些表達都加強了曼利對個人重要性價值的渴求。曼利網站上的很多照片也都體現出自我的觀點。

我不會對曼利選擇自殺的決定作出判定，但是我想說任何人都不應該將自殺浪漫化。這位有思想的智者去世後讓認識他的人悲痛不已，而曼利建網站將自殺理性化的做法並不能改變逝者已去，生者嚐盡傷痛的事實。除此之外曼利個人的詳盡記敘仿若將一個令人不安的幽靈帶入了社會媒體時代：一份屬於私人文件的絕命書一夜之間在全社會流傳轟動。如果沒有推特、臉書以及充滿個人評論博客的網站，曼利的自殺網站可能仍鮮爲人知。

曼利想在死前向全世界述說知心話的慾望可以理解。而且顯然他通過成爲關注點，使自己廣爲人知減輕了他自殺結束生命這一決定包含的傷痛。而這樣做的風險即可能會引起其他人的效仿，其中包括無法像曼利一樣擁有清醒頭腦的人。曼利並不瞭解自殺也很少是理智的行爲。2003年《紐約客》（New Yorker）曾刊登過一篇文章，該篇文章作者泰德·弗瑞德（Tad Friend）採訪了幾個曾經企圖從金門大橋（Golden Gate Bridge）跳下自殺但倖存的人，而這些人都有令人心碎的共性：即在半空中自殺者會後悔這個決定。

曼利建立這個網站的另一目標是爲了向世人保證他不會後悔自殺的決定。而他是否在扣動扳機後後悔我們也無從得知。但是我們至少可以確定他最後幾個願望中的一個是無法實現的：“我希望很久之後我仍會被人們記住，而且我的自殺可以被加註星號作爲腳註。”可悲的是，他的這個願望基本不會實現。

8月17日11:55更新報道：雅虎在週五晚關閉了曼利的網站。雅虎以發言人告訴我：“經過慎重考慮，我們團隊認爲這個網站違反了我們的服務條例，所以該網站會被關閉。”

曼利的網站暫時還會在各種網頁上流傳一段時間，當然，這些網頁並不是雅虎旗下網站。

記者威爾·奧瑞姆斯（Oremus）2013年8月16日19:16報道