This past weekend, Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning informed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is fighting pancreatic cancer, that she has just nine months to live. Undoubtedly the Senator felt he was doing Justice Ginsburg a favor by giving it to her straight, and probably expected her to immediately resign from the Supreme Court and try cramming a lifetime of experience into her few remaining months. In fact, as he delivered his diagnosis to the Hardin County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner, it’s likely Senator Bunning paused for one poignant moment to envision the former Supreme Court Justice traveling the world like Ben Gazzara in Run For Your Life, jumping out of planes, driving race cars, and getting involved in the problems of guest stars Suzanne Pleshette, Fernando Lamas, and Mel Tormé.
But there was an unexpected twist to the story, when it turned out that the very same actuarial tables Bunning relied upon to calculate the speed at which sand was pouring through Justice Ginsburg’s hourglass proved that the Senator himself has been dead for over two years! According to the latest figures, life expectancy for a white male in the U.S. is 75.7. In Kentucky, it’s 75.2. Bunning, who was born on October 23, 1931, is 77.4 years old. Like Edmund O’Brien in the noir classic D.O.A., the Senator is a dead man walking, with only days — perhaps hours — to track down and bring to justice the statistician who killed him.