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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

... The aberration continues... embarrassing poor writing style continues

Eng. 101-17 “Modest Proposal” Optional Final essay - Apr 30, 2004

I believe this was the last essay within which I was allowed to get away with such an awful, foolishly childish writing style and voice. Mechanics and such are okay, but the style is just abhorrent. I sweat with self-embarrassment as I read it over...

A Modest Proposal and Crime Deterrent

These days, it would seem that all anybody can find to do with their time is cause trouble. Every headline, every news story, every magazine, is chocked full of new stories about crimes and victimization and all sorts of mischief. Now a new trend has reared its homely head: the overcrowding of prisons. We all know that prisons do not grow on trees, and prisoners sure as hell do not pay rent. You know I still can’t afford cable television, yet I recently saw a program the other day showing a man in his cell watching cable TV in his minimum security prison. You know what? I want cable TV! I want someone to cook my meals! I don’t want to have to go to work! And dammit, I want conjugal visits! Overcrowding in prisons? Well of course, every mouth-breathing miscreant with half of a brain would stand in line to go into some prisons! HEY EVERYBODY!!! COME LOOK!! I do believe that I have found our grandparent’s social security money! Is this what we all work our whole lives away for? While the government goes further into debt and the economy floats belly-up in its’ bowl? Something is decidedly fishy in Denmark, and I think I have an air freshener.

Okay, so how many times have we heard the old shtick that corporal punishment is inhumane? And how many times has it been said that a lot of prisons are too? Okay, obviously these things are not inhumane enough, because they haven’t put exactly brought crime to a screeching halt. The idea of being pumped full of toxins in a cold, hospital-like chamber of death until your cells explode does not seem to slow anybody down when they are shoving a pistol down the throat of a 7-11 clerk at 1:00 in the morning who just wants to make their car payments. And fourty-thousand eye-popping, pants-soiling volts seems to instill little fear into psychotics who capture and toy with little girls until finally killing them. Or how about the man who killed his ex-wife’s kids and one of his own just because he was a bit down in the dumps? I believe the grieving mother whose life was shattered by this imbecile would agree that suicide was too easy a death for that one. Sorry, call me crazy, but if some lowlife ever tried to cut into my slice of life, I would want to hire a surgeon to bring the sucker back to life after each time I offed him just so that I could do it again. That’s right, I would not only want him dead, I would want to do it myself, not just once, but several times. Think about it, imagine with all your power for a moment that somebody puts into jeopardy the one person you love or the one thing for which you work the hardest, and then call me a sociopath.

Now, my ‘modest proposal’ does not necessarily apply to all offenders and is not meant to be a hypothetical ‘catch-all’. Sure, keep some prisons for the lesser offenders, or those for which there is some shadow of a doubt as to their alleged guilt. My proposal is meant to be applied to those who are undoubtedly nefarious, psychotic evildoers with no respect for human life. Those guys who take pot-shots at little kids, or capture and mutilate scores of women. Torturers, murderers, and the one thing that enrages me the most: rapists. Perhaps my own code of chivalry helps to aggravate this, but I despise rapists. I must say that rapists are the ones who sit in the back of my mind as I conjure up this proposal. In each of my little sick examples, I am imagining a rapist, or perhaps a child molester as the test subject. In this way, it is for them that I write these next passages.

All right, first of all, if you are going to kill someone, lets make it fun. Forget quick and painless, did the woman who drowned all of her children in a bathtub give a damn about painless? NO. So should we? “Well, yea but she was--”. NO! forget it! Let these sickos see what this is like! First of all, we are going to invent a few new devices, tools are most important and are a necessity. Now in my opinion, the torture/killing devices commonly used lack…pizzazz, they are just not entertaining enough or humiliating enough. The more entertaining, the more humiliated the accursed is before transitioning over.

Lets make a few newer, more interesting mechanisms for the delivery of death. First of all how about a slingshot? A tall, solid stone wall maybe 40 feet in height which attached to it are four giant rubber bands. Each band is attached to the criminals appendages and the criminal (in a five-point harness) is drawn back with a cable and ratchet assembly thereby achieving maximum tension in the bands. The subject is then released in such a manner as to snap them into the wall at a great velocity. Repeat as needed. (and bring a poncho.)

Along the same lines, let us build an ancient catapult, like a trebuchet. And pull it up to perhaps a rundown old office building. The victim or family of the victim of the criminal in question will be given full control of the giant launcher in regards to aiming and release. Load with convict(s) and see how many windows can be knocked out! Fun/ultimate retribution for the whole family! (Leave the kids at home!)

Or how about this one? A large, very solid lot of concrete, say 50 feet square maybe. With a large mallet-like instrument powered by a massive pneumatic engine. Place convict in shackles in the center of the platform, activate and BAM! (Ever watch Gallagher?) Or for a slight carnie twist, make the giant mallet mobile and place several convicts on recessed platforms which raise at random intervals and you have “Wak A Lowlife!”.

While we are making a carnival out of it, here is a relatively elementary device. Take your run-of –the mill dunk-tank and replace water with carbonic acid. Go ahead and let them climb back up onto the chair. Then take another shot! Or whatever happened to good old torture? How about sawing off a leg- or two and having them swim laps in the worlds only Olympic-sized lemon juice pool? Or a few lashes on the back followed by a nice sunbathing on a small salt beach?

Or try this one: an obstacle course. Beginning with a 100 yard dash through a sparse minefield. Then, on to the wasp nest relay race. Then the wall climb…of fire! Next is the tire field, complete with a few nasty bear traps in random tires. You get the picture, and to finish it all off, just in case anybody is lucky enough, a finish tape backed by razor wire and a couple-hundred volts. (I can hear the bookies coming, it’s a new market!)

Come on people! If we are going to have retribution, what is the point of half-assing it! The bottom line is: Killing is inhumane. That is it! Killers are not concerned about being humane when strangling your grandmother while she is doing a crossword puzzle, so why give a hoot about humanity in their punishment. If we are going to insist on violent retribution, let’s go for the gold! If you think about it, think really, really hard, we would not be the first, not even the second.

To illustrate to all the naysayers and doubting-Thomases out there, think back to the time of the ancient Romans. Does the word ‘gladiator’ ring a bell? Not just a Russel Crowe movie, the Romans really did hold huge death matches between groups of inmates, and the occasional wild animals. Their prisoners and slaves had it way worse, and the public loved it. Not to mention it put the fear of the almighty into the miscreants in the city. Now some would ask: “What sort of message would this send to the youths?”. Well you know what? The message wouldn’t be much worse than what the youths of America are doing today anyhow. You know, you never hear any history books talk about school arrowings or spearings in ancient Rome do you? HAH! Rediculous? Yes! Crazy? Not quite!

Admittedly, this is a radical new kind of thinking, and quite a stretch. But for those who still do not read me, my point is: why!! Why do we care about being nice to the ones who hurt us? Even the ancient leader Hammurabi[1] wrote laws into stone basing the ideas of criminal punishment upon the foundation of “an eye for and eye”. As for these so-called humanitarians fighting for the rights of those condemned to death by law; I would like to know just how many of these people actually know what it is like to be a victim of these psychotic yahoos. Being beaten and raped has a tendency to change ones viewpoint a bit. When you take away the rights of others, you lose your rights and, in my humble opinion, should be given the status of non-human. How humane is it to baby a victimizer in spite of the pain of the victim? How long will we lay down and let the sludge, the human waste, the lowest form of our species bully and trample all over us? How bloody long?


Work Cited

“Hammurabi”. Yahoo Encyclopedia. 29 Apr. 2004. www.Yahoo.com Keyword: Hammurabi.



[1] Hammurabi was king of Babylonia from 1792-1750. His code of laws is considered today one of the greatest law codes ever written. Carved into a column made of diorite, his laws were written in 3,600 lines of cuneiform in several different languages. This column was discovered in 1902 and is still considered a most powerful code of laws.(“Hammurabi”)

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