Welcome to the Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. This Sunday we target: Hanging

  • Are we in a time of trepidation, and yet, fascination, as the spectacle of “being hung out to dry” is very much in the news?
  • Does this latest declaration of partisan warfare disturb, or should disturb, the body politic?
  • Do some, in or wanting power, rejoice and smile weakly after tepid remarks and tottering withdrawal applauded by a compliant media?
  • But, does this circumstance, a very problematic, proposed, public hanging, require quick and successful appeal?
  • Is the green new dealer government, crowing bogey man science and climate change, advocating hanging?
  • Is the proposed “death to clothes dryers,” both gas and electric, and the mandate that everyone, forevermore, must hang out to dry to save the planet the real subject today?
  • Or, is it something else?
  • Is there a conflicting, mordant fear of, but fascination, with public execution?
  • Doesn’t history show exactly that? Has human nature changed or have sensitivities been supposed and imposed?
  • Given the last U.S. public hanging in 1936, with more than 20,000 gathering in a Kentucky hamlet to watch the swing, are we missing some instructive entertainment, however gruesome yet gripping?
  • Like abortion, is the death penalty a matter left to the states with 23 rejecting and 27 approving, however tedious the process (average death row time nears 13 years)?
  • While public versus private execution is largely a matter of discreet invitation and hanging (now rare) replaced by lethal injection (though often botched, so much for being humane), lethal gas (new), firing squads and electrocution, do legitimate questions remain as to the value of public execution?
  • Do many nations, totalitarian and/or Muslim offer such an opportunity adding beheading to the mix and a broad category of offenses that merit the blade?
  • What do they know that we don’t?
  • Do we prefer torture–death by a thousand cuts cruelly inflicted in public by pontificating pundits and prostituted process that make us cry for our beloved country?
  • Trepidation and fascination, fear with fancy, ready for the hanging?
  • Hang around and see or be?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. The answers and actions are yours.