A Modest Proposal (was RE: Guthrie to Maggie and Max)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Mar 5 20:22:18 PST 1999


Max writes back to Woody Guthrie & Carrol:
>> Did you ever see a hangman tie a hang knot . . .
>
>I would require executions to be public and
>televised, so the public could see what they
>were doing, rather than it being hidden away.
>Also, I don't go for this lame injection
>stuff; hanging or electrocution would be
>better. (My understanding is that firing
>squad and guillotine are actually pretty
>humane since death is so sudden.)

Why stop at hanging and electrocution? You have a very impoverished imagination for 'retribution,' don't you? If you want to be reactionary, why not go mediaeval?

Why not drawing & quartering? Burning at the stake? Skinning? Gouging the eyes out? Cutting off the nose and ears? An Iron Maiden? Branding? Boiling? Disemboweling & forcing the condemned to eat his own entrails? Cutting off the cock and balls and stuff them up his ass? Leaving the tied-up body to be eaten alive by hyenas or sharks?

If I had my way, the pro-death penalty individuals would be forced to not only become executioners but also clean up the mess after each execution.

Max again:
>The key thing about this song and all the other
>stuff like it is that the victims of whatever
>crime was committed do not exist. Even the
>question of a crime is not broached. Much
>like abortion, where the fetus (whatever its
>state of development) does not exist,
>hence has no question of rights, which allows
>us -- by definition, rather than by argument --
>to define the rights of the woman as exclusive.

It is a melancholy object to those who pay taxes to walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see prisons filled up with shiftless criminal negros and white trash, women & abortionists walk unmolested after their murders of the innocent, and poor children--many of them orphaned by criminals--go hungry for want of food & food stamps.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of criminals in & out of gaols is in the present deplorable state of the republic a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these criminals sound useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have her statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for murderers, rapists, and abortionists; it is of a much greater extent, for as the wise Mayor of the City of New York has discovered, the only policy to be adopted in the war on crime is _zero tolerance_, so it shall take in the whole number of criminals, including jaywalkers, pregnant smokers, turnstile jumpers, and somdomite [sic] adulterers & adultresses who have oral sex out of wedlock.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my cyberacquaintance in Washington, D.C., that the working people of America are presently dismayed by the lack of retribution and vengeance in criminal justice, and that if there be an auction of rights to retribution and vengeance, a great demand thereof is quite assured. I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that direct and indirect victims of any crime and criminal be given a chance to purchase the body of the condemned, to dispose of as they please, at prorated prices set within the reach of even modestly paid laborers. Those who are utterly destitute may be easily subsidized by any one of the great private charities that grace this land of liberty & generosity. In the event that victims & their kin wish to waive their preferential invitations to private retribution, the state may put them on sale again, this time inviting the public at large to consider a purchase of a very precious opportunity to exercise their moral principles and at the same time doubly improve the country's fiscal health, by disburdening the state of the prison upkeeps while yielding an additional revenue. In the case of women who abort & abortionists, it is only reasonable to consider, from the beginning, the public at large, especially the sex who are not in possession of wombs, to be indirect victims unjustly deprived of fruits of procreation--to be more exact, lost labor time of the murdered innocent; therefore, for this, the most heinous crime against the future of the free enterprise system, all men, subsidized by captains of industries, ought to partake in the punishment of those members of the Fair Sex who revolted against Nature & Masters of Nature and those who assist them in this treason.

Yoshie



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