The Special Relationship
The bombs go off ...
The legs go off ...
The heads go off
The arms go off ...
The feet go off ...
The light goes out
The heads go off ...
The legs go off ...
The lust is up
The dead are dirt ...
The lights go out ...
The dead are dust
A man bows down before another man ... And sucks his lust
Harold Pinter, August 2004
Thoughts on yet another public execution:
Just want to make the point that the death penalty is no more about the person put to death than elections are about the candidates. The important thing is the agent, the one who acts, not the thing or person acted upon, whether its killing a convict or marking a ballot.
Of course, in the case of the death penalty, the agent is doubly wrong because the victim of the execution isn't even the real target of the act. The real target is the American public which is supposed to be impressed and intimidated by the execution to behave itself and hopefully avoid a similar fate. And, since most individual people who kill don't think of the consequences for themselves, the "deterrent" value is practically void. But the example of official killing may well give license to those deranged individuals whose sense of super importance leads them to identify themselves with the power of the state to execute those who disagree with them, and go and do likewise. Which may well account for why those countries, in which the penalty of death is an official prerogative, tend to have a higher illegal execution rate than those that don't.
The public execution of a miscreant is really symptomatic of a bigger problem--the notion that the appropriate response to a killing is more killing.
That's actually the logic on which Iraq is based. Three thousand people were killed on one day in New York and Washington and as a response the US sent off thousands more to kill and die in another land--one that did not actually have a hand in the first event.
But, even if it did, the logic that the appropriate response to a killing is more killing seems particularly flawed.
One could say that this pattern reveals a sort of blood lust--that the sight of people bleeding and dying provides a rationale for seeing more of it. And perhaps that's a basic predatory response, but predators kill to eat. The sight and smell of blood alerts them to a convenient meal; it doesn't prompt them to go on a rampage of killing.
So, if the human exhibits blood lust, then it would seem reasonable to conclude that, as in so many other instinctual response behaviors, there's been a perversion of the natural in man. That in this case, as in many others, man, instead of substituting brain power for hormone driven instincts,perverts the natural intent.
It's common to define bad human behavior as animalistic, though we know that's wrong, and that judgement is usually made in the context that human behavior ought to be morally superior to the rest of nature. But human blood lust isn't at all natural; it's perverse.
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What does it tell us that the German meaning of "Lust" is playful desire?
Is it the object (in this case blood) that makes it perverse?
Posted by Hannah at December 13, 2005 04:57 AM