Cordage company
Now it happens that in the first of the towns I grew up in, a town called Plymouth located on many maps at the edge of all land, there was on the north side of town a factory called the Cordage Company. Another factory that made sails was represented only by a stove-in-roofed building and a pit where a water wheel once spun by the side of the yard where I lived, on the south side of town. The Cordage Company sold to a broader market. I write today of a hanging
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The trials of occupation. Saddam Hussein's hurried execution
Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned - New York Times. Who's needs, what purpose was served here. I read it backwards from the undignified actuality, a jeering leering chaotic lynching. I ask: was this a perfectly good hanging ruined or was it what was intended, or at least allowed
A Scaffold's Dark Portrait of Iraq. Who cares, what of it? One is tempted to ask. I was sorely tempted. We all do, or ought to, because death is profound and that can not be taken away from it. "[f]or a hanged man is accursed by God" What occurred was not an execution in best practice, but a spectacle which admittedly is what public executions tend towards. I could point out that this was not intended as a public execution, but it obviously became one. A brief look the next few days through Megite and Tailrank showed that the usual assortment of right wing web logs were posting the uncut "cellphone" version of the execution and appeared to be intimately familiar with it. I read one comment I think from an Iraq official who characterized the hanging as a gift to the id of the nation It was unclear whether he meant it as the identity of the [Iraqi] nation or to the id in a Freudian sense - which it more closely fits - to all nations and those that need it.
I am not in favor of death penalties, though not passionately and my concern runs through the laws of Maryland and the other assorted and vaguely united states and their federal government. Capital punishment rests on three weak pillars. The first is the authority of the state by which aegis execution is penalty and not murder. But this presumes the validity that a states monopoly on coercive force gives it. This concept is refined but fragile and artificial, given the longer established regime of tribes and other alternate communities of interest through which vendetta flows. It risks validating what it proscribes. As well such punishment test the limits of human, that is imperfect, knowledge. Even in the old testament guilt seeks to know what is in the mind, what is in the heart what can be known. Just the facts ma-am. It comes to the edge of the subjective / objective divide, a core existential divide and mutely stands there. The third leg is the benefit, the practical. To prevent further transgressing acts by the executed. To communicate this message to a wider audience, prevention by example. To deliver satisfaction. the demand of the people. Somewhere at the back of all this is a further consideration: to achieve justice. There is a universal aspect to our ideal of justice, that it assesses and encompasses all things. This is in stark counterpoint to our mechanical imitation of justice. It is at end merely a committee vote, what actions does this allow us? The editorialist of the Washington Post would dispense with even this process and procedure of justice, jurisprudence. As long as the sense of injustice and presumption of guilt is felt strongly enough - carry on
A Death Sentence Affirmed - washingtonpost.com. What need for justice when you have fire. Another aspect of the universal nature of justice is the notion of universal balance of justice. That justice not made true is injustice, is metaphysical imbalance. There is an important point here in the grey between justice and vengeance, that of standing. There is a universal standing for true justice, it concerns everyone. This is not commonly held so for vengeance which is a private matter. We can be sympathetic with vengeance not concerning us, but not empathetic. Vengeance does not involve reason. At best it might be considered a primitive rigid rule-based approximation of justice. It is a trap. God as we have our sense of what God expects from us would have us give up, to God, our sense of being wronged, indignation, resentment. "You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people" (Lev 19.18). "Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip." ( Deut. 32:35) And reiterating this in the new: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the lord." (Rom. 12.19). Vengeance is said to possibly be part of justice, a facet of justice. I believe it is something apart. The farmer's dog may look a little like the wolf, walk like it, even sound like it. They may even be in the same yard together, but do not try to tell the hen or the lamb they are the same. After the expediencies of the moment have run through it there is little left of anything but the bare and practical. In this manner of death
Iraq Plans Inquiry Into Hussein Execution - New York Times Hussein grasped some meaning he never earned in his sorry life, something not entirely founded of sheer brutality. An axle to set a cycle of violence and vengeance on. To this wheel we turn and as always there's plenty of rope left.
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