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Americans Kill, so What is the Kindest Way to Kill?
By John Bessa (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: John Bessa - Writer
And, also, what is the most scientific way to determine who should be killed, if in fact we are so comfortable with killing?
Preamble
Before getting to the hard issues,
such as what kind of equipment to use, or the historical issues, such
as the development of the French guillotine, let's look at killing
itself, and how we relate to it.- This flips the generic viewer around
180 degrees, and approaches the American conscientiousness from a
purely critical and negative perspective, an accurate perspective I
believe--especially when compared to the conscientiousness of the rest
of the world.- A quick look at the historical and even psychological
reasons Americans have such a brutal approach may be helpful.
The General Environment
My
general view of America is that the American peoples of the West and
South are friendlier than those of the Megalopolis of the Northeast,
but that the governments of the South and West are far more brutal than
the Northeast.- The South appears to seek to preserve slavery as
closely as it can; I read in a compilation written by Southerners in
the late 1950s that "slavery is the only proper economy for the
South."- That was the 1950s, not the 1850s.- The West traces its
brutality to the extermination of the Natives, which seems to have
happened as much during the 20th
Century, as in the previous three of four centuries of new world
culture.- In closely-related Canada, there are said to be the mass
graves of hundreds of thousands of young Natives, exterminated, through
all things, an educational system called the Residential Schools that
was closely related to religion.
The supposedly Liberal Northeast
The
Northeast is viewed as liberal by the rest and the most influenced by
Europe, and it would seem to make sense then that East would resist the
death penalty, but no!- Supposedly liberal New York saw it's death
penalty reintroduced by none other than the Liberal party of NY!-
Despite national perceptions, along with the economic reality that life
is much more livable in the Northeast, institutionalized America
killing is a national desire.- Canada seems to be affected as well, and
of course to the south in Latin America, killing is component of life,
but Latin political culture diverges so far from American that I feel a
comparison is unfair -- though clearly threatened Latin annexation
desires empowered by the indiscriminate acceptance of the spread of
corruption by multiculturalists might indicate that much of American
killing lust may have migrated over the Mexican-American border along
with much of the Mexican population.- Texas has in fact the most
"killing-est" official culture in America and is a Mexican-American border state; perhaps there is a connection.
Christianity and killing
As
a nearly logical extension of my study of Constructivism I joined a
backwoods Methodist Church.- A nutty ex-girlfriend of mine dragged into
this church (and a few others), and here I found a text-book example of
constructivist culture, human culture the way it is meant to be
according to social scientists.- Carefully preserved in this church are
the two basic Christian concepts: love and forgiveness.- Also key to
this church is the basis of Christian success: the simplification of
religious ideas into those two concepts.- While nationally the
Christian church provides citadel strength to conservative values, such
as killing here and abroad, Christ opposed killing, as well as bias,
and the many negative aspects of life.- He opposed them with his life.-
Another church I visited with this ex-girlfriend supported nearly
violent bias against Wiccans, and a state police officer sat in a front pew.- Deliberately bypassing for the moment a discussion of possible Wiccan
violence, let me state from my church-based learning that Christ's
approach was always non-violence and forgiveness even for the most
heinous crimes, and he and his ministry followed these moral values to
a nearly suicidal degree.- Violent Christians may be bad Christians,
but they are none the less Christians, and they are forgiven.- (Maybe
this statement will help non-Christians understand Christian paradoxes.)
Christ's revolution
Christ's
revolution was psychological and radical, and the many others who
followed him also proposed radical departures from the "way things
are," such as Wesley, the founder of the powerful Methodist church.-
Prayer, I found, is powerful; I am saying this as a part-time Buddhist
who meditated often.- Prayer differentiates from meditation in that it
pulls together the congregation on a neural level, tapping all the
powers of emotional communication.- One can find many non-supernatural
reasons why this "neural pulling-together" can produce desirable
results!- And it feels good enough to be addictive -- just ask my crazy
ex, a bi-polar prayer addict.
The psychology of killing
So
there really are different components to American killing and
punishment, and they are spread throughout the official culture and
appear in differing manifestations so much so that there must be a
single influence acting as the killing and punishing agent that can be
isolated at environmental and psychological levels.- Bias absolutely
has to be one of them, and we know that bias has a psychological
foundation, or perhaps "lack of foundation."- We know that
psychological distress is not caused by something we may have, such as
in a bacterial or viral disease, but something we don't have:
specifically healthy neural constructs.- This approach helps narrow the
scope of critical inquiry.- Also helpful is a "layered approach" that
has been adopted from the abstraction of technological network
communication called the "network stack."- The layered approach implies
that every outward event hits upon every other layer of inner or
outwards neural or emotional communication, and that negative events
occur because of missing neural or communication faculties.
So what is wrong?
Perhaps
what is wrong is what we are trying to kill, but by using the ancient
methods of punishment, and often torture (the Federal Bureau of Prisons
is an entity unto itself with almost no accountability) we are simply
digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the hole of hatred we have
created with our endless punishment and killing.- We seek to avenge
wrongs but in-so-doing have become the agents of wrong, creating an
ever-narrowing cycle of hate.- Since this describes the conservative
approach, a shift to liberal approaches seems tempting as a way out of
the cycle.- But wait!- It was the Liberal Party of New York that
introduced the death penalty!- And the most killing-ist event of recent American history, the invasion of Iraq, was introduced as a Congressional bill by the ostensibly liberal
and independent senator from Connecticut: Lieberman.- His namesake even
sounds liberal and he supports all the liberal social and environmental
causes, except mass murder and genocide in foreign lands: domain of the
hard-line conservatives.- There certainly is a "liberal rub," and it
may even be helpful to look at one seeming liberal's
cultural background: Lieberman.- He is of course Jewish.- He introduced
the bill that legalized the blindly violent and exceedingly stupid
invasion of Iraq, as well as the equally sickening bill legalizing a
future invasion of Iran.- I think it is a fair assumption that he
introduced these bills on behalf of the nationalists of the nation of
his culture, right-wing Israelis, permanently throwing a blanket of
suspicion on his "liberal side."- As it happens he started his
political career as a hippie throwing mud at his conservative
opponents, much like the Yippies
Hoffman and Rubin.- In retrospect it appears from the left wing
perspective that Lieberman went bad along the way, as Rubin did.- My
view is that he never actually changed; he was posturing as a hippie in
his early days because hippie-ism was very popular and powerful at the
time--remember the power Woodstock had.- I believe that Lieberman never
had an ounce of free hippie love in his heart, he was deceiving the
people around him as part of a political development strategy. (During
my time observing the musical fringes I saw a lot of posturing: punk
rockers who were calling themselves anarchists were in fact fascist;
politics they had inherited from their families.)-
Lieberman on the death penalty: "I have long supported the death penalty.."- A killing former hippie?-
If
we follow the neurological example above, and assume for the moment
that something may be missing from Lieberman's "heart," then I think it
is important to assume for the moment that Lieberman, as a poser and
hence a liar, is missing an important neurological construct:
morality.- And judging from the endlessly duplicitous behavior of
politics (not to mention the fundamental back-stabbing nature of
corporate life), he isn't the only narcissistic leader.
Lieberman
is interesting to me at the moment because his Jewish cultural
background is the Judaism that Israel has used the rational for the
extermination of the natives residing in what is now Israel, and that
it formed the background of Christ's revolution.- This Judaism is
pumped into my brain every Sunday, and events thousands of years ago in
the Old Testament seemed to be played out daily in real life right up
the very day a man with the middle name "Hussein" became president.-
That very day the fighting ceased, implying a strong connection between
departing right wing president and the hawks of Israel.- In church they
tell me I am a Jew by way of being a Christian (though my church
secretly sympathizes with Palestine), and Lieberman appears to have
attempted to cement this conservative Christian-Jew relationship by
closely supporting "Hussein's" opposition for the presidency, the
military right-winger McCain, almost as if he was running for the
vice-presidency himself.
Lets get to the nitty-gritty of killing
Killing
is nasty business, and I really don't see any reason why the majority
that supports it should necessarily want to see kindness mixed with
it.- But the constitution outlaws cruelty--firing squads and hangings
seem cruel--and public displays are considered barbarous so a curtain
is pulled just before nasty moment.- First there was gas, cyanide, and
then lethal injection.- As every junkie knows, the easiest way to go is
a opiate overdose, but the killers of the government, unassisted by
medicine because of the Hippocratic oath, use some weird injected
mixtures that are show to be fairly sadistic.-
Killing is wrong
Obviously from
my writing you have to assume that I think this all psychotic to the
Nth degree, but this arrangement is our national policy, and seems to
be supported by the majority.- It is rationalized and because it is
rationalized yet insane (from my and most of the world's perspective),
there must be some other mental disorder, specifically a thinking
disorder, that is propelling this as well as much of the other killing
madness of this world.- The study of narcissism is a fair place to
start looking for a thinking disorder as modern psychiatrists and
psychologists give the label "malignant narcissist" to the big-time
killers such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Adolph Hitler.- Narcissism
seems to be a requirement for political success, and hence may be an
indicator was to why politicians support brutality, either at home or
abroad.- If so, and if you accept for a moment the layered abstraction
approach to social behaviors and social functions, the there is a
neurological basis for narcissism and associated brutality, and hence
an identifiable neural construct that can possibly be identified
through medical processes such a functional MRI machines, or even
chemistry.- Since we know that these violent afflictions are passed
down through the generations, they are hereditary--they may even be
found in DNA.
The death penalty is so dragged out with appeals
that there is obvious psychological cruelty built into it, especially
for the condemned innocent.- No modification to the present killing
process will change that.- (Polls show that only
a minority of Americans are concerned with the
suffering of the innocent condemned.)- This dragging out of justice is
also a violation of the Constitution's Bill of Rights, which requires
swift justice.- The public spectacle aspect of executions is likewise
hypocritical to me since observers view the condemned just before and
just after the executions; and often executions appear on television, as
happened with Saddam Hussein.
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