The connected but detached roles of the media, of celebrity, of Las Vegas in Lamar Odom’s third act

Found last weekend overdosed on a cocktail of cocaine and performance enhancers in a brothel 70 miles outside of Vegas, former NBA star and Kardashian-in-law Lamar Odom is hospitalized with a prognosis uncertain. Personally, I hope he pulls through because nobody, beyond fictional characters, deserves to have their narrative stitched into the fabric of the saddest of all American clichés.

By Andrew Pridgen

Like an old dog who crawls under the porch, Lamar Odom went to Vegas to die.

It’s not an unusual thing. In Las Vegas, death by suicide happens twice as much as anywhere else in the country. One recent study revealed that 600,000 suicides have have taken place in Vegas over the last three decades and that doesn’t include the “accidental” overdoses, collisions, falls, chokings, drownings and failure to simply wake up.

Within the construct of our American Life, until we make physician-assisted suicide the law of…