Dear Dirty America

Dan Rudy

Embedded Behind a Desk in  Portland

Found dort…

But I take solace in the twitscape disgust shared by twolks like @ggreenwald and @wilw over the recent execution of Troy Davis.  And though it’s quite another case altogether, I’d like to likewise throw in the instance of recent executee Lawrence Russell Brewer in Texas.  Heinous archetypes of humanity Charles Manson and Anders Breivik, or in the case of the late Mr. Davis a dubious catch at worst; who amongst us has the right to order the death of another?  Isn’t that notion why we reprovingly lock these folk away to begin with?

Yet I’m a hedonist of principles.  As I likewise believe it is every egg-producing American woman’s weighty and heartbreaking right to choose whether it stays or goes, I think perhaps the death penalty should be likewise allowed… provided there’s a similarly revolting spectacle to be had by the process’ beneficiaries.  As Nebraska’s newish abortion legislation tightens the emotional noose about the necks of would-have-been mothers, executioners and upset onlookers should have to partake in the desecration of the heretofore disenfranchised.

Perhaps an anointing of blood, a stomping of the corpse, a goddamned bastinado mayhap, or rather a Texas-style barbecue of an inmate’s tenderloins.  Maybe we should just get rid of lethal injection altogether and make it a community stoning, where each and every unhappy cit gets to take a very real stock in this monstrous practice.  It’s one of several (not many, we can proudly say) sterilized takes on death our Dear Dirty America embraces.  Drone strikes, lethal injection, death by lack of health care.  Everything in its easiest and most inconsequential place.

Even Brewer, the tearful yet decidedly loathsome bigot convicted as part of the vile ménage à trois that murdered James Byrd in 1998, by dragging him to death behind their pickup truck.  Many people remember where they were on 9/11.  Hell, I do!  Likewise I remember where I was when a teacher brought up that astoundingly horrific case during a current events session, aeons ago in an American school in Germany.  It was middle school geography, and highlighted by a bandy-legged effeminate North Carolinian who inspired in me an interest in the news (rather than the past); I was twelve at the time.  But even Brewer deserved to live, if only because nobody really deserved to end his life.

Perhaps if we bred subhuman super-apes, or else developed anthropomorphic dogs to do our dirty work (executing felons and working fast food).  But then, I’d be eating crow trying to defend that rigmarole of madness.  As we can only hope some will be forced to feast mightily upon as these generations go by.

As said by the @wilw…

I hope that a future generation of Americans is as appalled that this country executed people as we are that it once endorsed slavery.

Dan Rudy is an awful sot who, when not rolling drunks for quarters, maintains a blog

at the Rudian Days; a place for short stories, furcht, and the occasional bit of recipe.