Martyrdom

Jesus went and got himself in trouble, and within days he was dead. The arrest, the trial, the scourging, the crucifixion must have been agonizing, but they occurred overnight and the next day. Not many deliberate executions can be much worse than crucifixion, but at least the Jews wanted their victims dead by sundown. The Persians had invented crucifixion to make the suffering last, the Romans had improved the cross to make it the more agonizing ... And Jesus wasn’t alone. Two other condemned suffered alongside him. And how many others had been crucified on the same spot the day before, the week before, the month before? After Spartacus the Romans crucified by the thousand.

The US Constitution promised swift justice. Ha! What trouble-maker gets dispatched in a single day? Even after a verdict a radical, a wog, some nigger ... might be on death row for a decade! (Remember what Mencken said: Kill the poor bastard the second the lawyers have taken his last penny.)

God wanted to torment his loyal servant Job. He spread it out, made it last: so Lucifer would be the more impressed. (Show off!) (How impressed was Lucifer when he orchestrates the nailing up of his own son?)

If life on earth is sometimes a trial and sometimes an amusement, an occasion for idle wagering among divinities, just concentrating on the trial part, why can’t the martyrs all just be tried, convicted, tortured, and killed as swiftly as was Jesus? Why do the majority of us have to linger, and linger: like Job? The Jews eventually (before Jesus) had a law that you couldn’t torture the guy overnight. If he was still whimpering at sunset, you had to stick him with a spear. Christians should have a law at least as humane: I mean a law they actually apply. How could we martyrs go on strike to limit God’s punishments of the just?

Me, I should have been dispatched by overnight-and-the-next-day of first standing up for myself. When my mother dragged me to kindergarten, I yielded (hell, I was only five or so). So the moralist could say that going to school was my own fault: when dragged, I yielded. (When Clarrisa got raped, it served her right: she gave her money to her family of her own free will, she corresponded with Lovelace ... None of them had a conscience, but she did: so she’s responsible.) But once I did resist -- got sent to the principal’s office for satirizing the lesson, why couldn’t I have been dispatched within the next thirty or so hours? treated no worse than a Jew under Rome? Why am I still here, suffering, well more than a half a century later?

I accept that the earth is hell, that the inhabitants are the damned ... (the insects, the wolves ... must be damned too to come under human impact). I accept that. But why are some of us martyrs still lingering? The earth-hell should house only the damnded.

Or am I damned too and am just too stupid to know it?

Either way, my culture is too chicken to give me a nice, fair, dispatching trial.