The agony of da feet: When everything is for sale

Perhaps one of the best things about university life is the widespread availability on most campuses of high-speed Internet access. Within moments, without so much as clogging up a phone line, students and faculty alike can download anything from the original German text of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" to the original German scat-masterpiece "Also Sheisste Zarathustra." But perhaps the most obscene video coming soon to an Ethernet connection near you is to be found at http://www.cutoffmyfeet.com. There, for the low price of just 20 dollars, one can watch Paul "Freck" Morgan send the blade of a specially designed guillotine straight through both of his ankles. As Slate's Steven Landsburg recently observed, that's just 10 dollars per foot — surely one of the best deals in cyberamputation available today.

The live webcast, originally scheduled for Nov. 30, has been delayed until Jan. 5, allegedly for technical reasons. The delay may lead some to suspect that this is just another Internet hoax. One thinks of the pair of alleged virgins who collected the credit card numbers of many a lustful Humbert last year by offering to deflower one another live on the web, only to be exposed as hardened hard-core professionals who had merged flesh many a time on the countless lovers' lanes off the back roads of the information superhighway. But no, "Freck" Morgan swears on the characteristic birthmarks that gave him his odd nickname: This one's for real.

Assuming, then, that Morgan is not just a conman with a very perverse imagination, what are we to make of his bizarre business plan? His site's webmaster insists that we think of his client's unusual act of amputory exhibitionism as a political statement. Freck's feet, it seems, have been out of commission since a 1986 car accident, but newly developed prosthetics would allow him to walk again. Unfortunately, the combined price of these high-tech gizmos and the amputation necessary to install them is too much for the economically disadvantaged Morgan to afford. Medicaid/Medicare refuses to foot the bill (no pun intended), claiming that the only procedure capable of freeing Freck from his wheelchair isn't "medically necessary." Rather than fighting what the site describes as "a no-win battle with the insurance and medical communities in the United States," Morgan has chosen paid self-mutilation. He sees his deed as a "way of saying that even though corporate America has refused him, he will get his new prosthetics and improve his quality of life," one which he hopes, moreover, will improve the chances of "much needed insurance and medical reform in the United States." Some might feel that no decent society should allow someone to maim himself or herself for money. But Morgan's point is precisely that no decent society should ever put its citizens in a position where, in order to access decent health care, they have no other choice. As long as America remains the only industrialized nation without adequate public health insurance, and as long as the powers that be continue to pursue a policy of economic redistribution that shifts wealth from the poor to the rich and not vice versa, any argument against Freck's decision therefore seems downright hypocritical. Even as the nation comes together in a time of war, remember, the greatest sacrifice the wealthiest Americans have been asked to make continues to be the receipt of massive tax breaks.

Say what you will about Marx, but old Karl certainly had one thing right. Any society that makes each of us look in the mirror each morning and think about what of ourselves we can sell to the highest bidder that day has something rotten at its core. Most of us here at Princeton will probably never have to sell anything more than the products of our prodigious minds. Most others have to sell the labor of their bodies, and the countless starlets who are employed in the only remaining profitable sector of the dot-com economy sell their bodies in even more direct ways. One Internet denizen, however, has nothing to sell but his feet. Let's hope that he finds enough buyers. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.