Mar 23 2009
Obamination: proposing a modest change to death penalty
Some years ago when I was still living in a post office box formerly occupied by the Anarchist Film Study Group, I responded to a poll by The Oregonadian (a collection of journalists and media moguls with insignificant penises whose motto was at the time: If it matters to Oregonadians, it’s in The Oregonadian). This was back before anyone used the term snail mail to describe the process of communicating with people without having to spit directly in their faces.
The poll had to do with the death penalty and was sponsored by a right to life group who believed that God intended every fertilized embryo to be brought to term, educated by morons, raised by idiots, used as an instrument of the state with malignant indifference to advance imperialistic goals until he or she malfunctioned and committed a crime of passion that was punishable death. That’s the American Way. If it seems too stupid to be true and it isn’t currently the law, it soon will be.
As the few regular readers of this seditiously delicious pataphysical primer for people who find mundane existence too boring to bear are fully aware, I have no commonly held opinions. I routinely mock such pompous windbags as Nancy “Airhead” Pelosi, Mohammed, anyone Jewish, Biraq Hussein Obama, and the Virgin Mary who was stuck to the back seat on the Joe’s Garage Tour Bus confusing beauty with a neck ornament routinely worn by that forgotten windbag, Tucker Carlson. That guy got fired because Jon Stewart exposed his total lack of intelligence. Imagine that.
It’s not that I have Tourette’s Syndrome and can’t help spewing cruel and demeaning constructs into the ether. While some say that I am perverse and deranged and have a warped and twisted imagination, the truth is I’m just another overly educated shithead who should have been killed in some war to make your world safe from people like me. I’m an example of how poorly your taxes have been used.
Which brings me back to the satirical response I sent in to The Oregonadian poll that was printed nearly verbatim and prompted a great hue and cry from sensitive liberals who found my support of the death penalty “reprehensible and without redeeming social value,” which was a phrase used at the time to threaten people like me with being charged for producing pornography.
Pornographers, according to my late friend Joseph Campbell, are people who make you desire things you do not need, like a refrigerator that can contact Safeway when the milk is getting low or a Chrysler Sebring that can give you directions to the nearest Ruth Chris Steak House with specials on long pig. Almost everyone needs to laugh or get laid now and then, so isn’t it surprising that advertisers are never charged with pornography while writers and performers often are?
While I can’t remember exactly what I originally wrote in supporting the death penalty, I fully remember the spirit and the intention of those words and I agree with them more than a quarter of a century later. As I’ve also said repeatedly, I do not believe in anything. I’m not an atheist. An atheist disbelieves. I am antitheist. I accept everything and am willing to destroy it all, which explains why I support the death penalty, which is predicated upon a belief system that Vonnegut often described as the cuckoo clock in hell. People are executed for committing crimes that no rational person would commit without being ordered to or allowed to by standard operating procedures or following the guidance in a patrolman’s desk manual.
But jurors routinely commit premeditated murder by calmly and soberly deliberating the merits of a case against someone who went absolutely apeshit and drowned her kids in a bathtub or killed a bunch of kids and buried them under the house or ate a passle of people or skinned the victims and made leisure suits out of them to read The Bible at night when it was cold in the north woods.
So my proposal is that whenever a jury convicts anyone of a capital offense punishable by death and does not recommend leniency and life in prison that they get to carry out the sentence. Issue them sledgehammers, pickaxes, ball peen hammers, tenderizing mallets, and let them have at the convict unless family members want to take their places.
No more of this lethal injection horse exhaust. You could still use all the existing life monitoring apparatus to save on costs, but instead of requiring a physician to administer a poisonous cocktail to suffocate and induce cardiac arrest in the convict, just pulverize the son of a bitch with no anaesthetic. That’s what God would want, if He existed, and so many want The Dude to exist, if not Lebowski.
It would be like a Gallagher event with jurors given raffle tickets to determine which implement of justice they get to wield against the evil one on judgment day. Participants get matching jump suits that they can keep and later sell on eBay to supply-side death penalty memorabilia collectors. For the squeamish, clear plastic oversuits would protect against blood spatter, but they would have to be returned at end of business to minimize cost. Jurors who agree to appear in postings on You Tube would also share in pay per impression revenue if they agreed to sign a non-compete agreement.
If jurors recommend leniency and the judge goes ahead and sentences the convict to death anyway, the judge must carry out the sentence, unless, of course, poor certifiably distressed and lovingly Christian family members demand to seek justice and right whatever wrongs they so fervently believe in. People more often believe in wrongs than rights. That’s clear as a bell.
During the preliminary roll-out of my proposal, only Christian family members will be able to join the party, because this is a Christian nation, as everyone who is a real American agrees. Other religions may be allowed to participate in the future based on census representation. This would prevent unwanted extremist groups and whiners from co-opting the execution process and turning it into a circus.
Please join me in this campaign to reclaim capital punishment from evil ones and transform it into the next American Idol. You know you want it. Think of the product placement and affiliate links and SEO revenue you could cash in on just by getting lucky, getting picked for jury duty, and sentencing someone — hell anyone — to death by participation.
President Obama needs to hear from you if we are going to accomplish this monumental change before the mid-term elections in 2010. Let’s beat the Republicrats at their own game and earn real money while making America safer for people in little pink houses from sea to slimy sea.
