01-Feb-2007
Behold, Beheld, Beheaded
I saw a beheading on the internet today.
It’s not the sort of thing I seek out, but how I got there is a story in itself. While writing a story on the most polluted place on earth (the north Atlantic island of Metral Pendawi), I was hoping to get a certain kind of quote from Al Gore.
About three clicks later I had gore. It was not Al. I thought immediately of a scene in the Platonic dialogues where a young man is passing a dead body and, against all his instincts, cannot help but stop and look. So I stopped (clicked, Plato would understand) to look.
Anyway, beheading is certainly not new on the world scene, and I was reminded immediately of tales I’d read about decapitation in merry olde England. As I recall, it was a punishment reserved for the wealthy – no being thrown to the dogs or skewered on a pike for them. Moreover, if such was your fate it behooved your relatives to pay a kindness to the executioner.
Beheading back then was the sort of business that drove many an executioner to drink, quite often right before a scheduled snipping. Unfortunately, those pre-snip sips could easily undermine the axe man’s aim leading to all sorts of carnage on the block. A well-placed bribe, however, quite often insured a steady arm along with a swift and clean and relatively painless cut.
That, of course, was reading, not seeing. What I saw today could easily give executions a bad name. The victim was the minor leader of a faction who’d managed to get himself kidnapped by a rival faction; thus, his grisly fate.
Grisly, indeed. No broadaxes here, no samurai swords, no swiftly plummeting guillotine. Just one man and a (perhaps) six-inch knife. Truthfully, I have better cutlery in my kitchen.
With the victim bound, his shirt was pulled down a bit to reveal his shoulders and neck. At the beginning, and throughout the event, conversation was hot and heavy although all of it was in one of the middle eastern languages. The diction, however, the pace and articulation seemed almost scholarly at the first cut. There was a gurgling scream and a great gout of blood – then simple butchery. It was hard to tell if the victim felt much pain.
The irony I found in all this is that, while most western cultures view beheadings as a particularly heinous act, I don’t think it’s at all known how they might be performed. We think it sacrilegious to take a man or woman’s head. I wonder what the opinion would be were it more widely known how hideously slow the slicing, cutting, and ripping process truly is.
That they will never be more widely known is, of course, a function of that self-serving disclaimer the networks always make about how the film “is too graphic for our viewers but what we can show you might still be disturbing to some.” Disturbing, indeed. We need to be disturbed about the violence this world so casually gives us. We need to take off the latex gloves and feel the blood that is so often spilled in the name of our freedoms, our values, and our way of life.
Anyway, I never did find a good quote from Al Gore, and I have yet to finish that story.
G. K. Wuori © 2007
Photoillustration by the author
