« Who’s Laughing Now | Home | The Secret Decoder Ring »
05.05.11
Heads On Pikes
posted by Absinthe | 7:23 AM
You see them – and, on a day when the stench of the city’s offal is mild and the wind is right, smell them – on your way through the city gate. They rest on a tall shaft of wood, a mockery of the body that carried them in life. Their stare is empty and unwavering, if the crows haven’t got to their eyes yet. Some are fresh, their features still recognizable to those who knew them. Some are not fresh.
They are there as a warning. Or a taunt. In times of siege they might have been enemy soldiers, or criminals who had the misfortune to sufficiently resemble the invaders. Chew on this before you cross us, is what they say. The practice is barbaric, but when the heads are displayed in sufficient numbers, startlingly effective.
Otis got me thinking, as he is wont to do. About whether I want to see a picture of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse. And, probably more important, about whether I want anyone else seeing it.
I don’t need to see the picture. Not to know that he’s dead. There are people out there who could stick their fingers into the oozing bullet holes and still not believe; I’m not one of them.
I want to see it, though. To satisfy that morbid curiosity, to give my brain a little jolt of a reminder: This is what we are capable of. There’s a part of me that wants the head on the pike, for both sides to see. But wanting isn’t the same thing as needing; wanting isn’t the same thing as deserving.
Otis’s oldest son recently asked him why people are willing to kill for what they believe in. (And here I am thankful that my own son does not yet grasp such concepts.) I don’t have the answer, nor do I think it that simple. Not everyone who kills in the name of a cause necessarily believes in it all that strongly, not even those who are willing to blow themselves up for it. But what I do know is that moral certainty is the deadliest human condition by far. Rage and greed aren’t even in the same league with zeal. Believe the wrong thing and you can justify the death of every single person on this planet, including yourself.
(Sidebar: I had a conversation with a noted attorney once asking about an amusing hypothetical: There are people out there right now who are trying to hasten the Rapture by artificial means. Genetically engineering some signs from Revelations, stuff like that. And so, I asked, since they’re trying to bring about the end of the fucking world, which would kinda mean my death, would I be legally justified in killing them? As sort of a, you know, precautionary measure. The answer was a carefully parsed examination of the necessary intents, available avenues of retreat, etc, all of which boiled down to “Yes, but the jury’d still hang you.” So that kinda borked my summer plans one year.)
There’s a long list of things that we, as a species, are going to have to get over in order to have any kind of peace other than that of the grave. Scarcity of goods and energy. Stewardship of the planet. But none of those things will matter if we can’t get past tribalism. If we can leave the head on the pike in the past – if everyone agrees that yes, this was something we did once, but no more – that’s one infinitesimal step toward a resolution we can all live with.
And it doesn’t work if you insist that the other guy go first.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Topics: Poker | No Comments »