The Last Prison
There was a spate of killings in the ghetto parts of town. What was unusual was that the victims were white. They each had been chased down and beaten by a crowd of men, left for dead where they lay, with no one person to blame. Then, as suddenly as they began, the killings stopped.
It was my good friend who was the last to die. I had meant to discover the reason for the killings, and was not disappointed once I entered the City to discover the truth. I awoke bloodied and slumped in a chair. I had wanted to fall to the floor, but was propped up, my body agonized by its wounds. I was soon to learn that there had arisen a sort of sage out of the community. She’d urged the people to elect a kind of Monarch, a peculiar sort of election to be sure, and by such outrageous and singular means. It seems I’d shown determination where others had succumbed, my not having died in the brutal capture. Therefore, I was elevated to the honored but dread rank of Monarch enslaved. For just what service I was intended, not even the fiery old woman could predict; she said that only time would tell what my value would be to the people, and judging from this response I felt inclined to trust this unprepossessing witch.
I was a kept man from this point on. Uncertain even of my whereabouts, I was clothed and housed, sexed and fed. My needs were amply, although not lavishly met. I continued unaware of my eventual purpose and worth. To my unwarranted surprise, and by way of my warders’ arrangement, I had managed to sire more children in the first twelve months of my captivity than anyone would think likely or wise.
Events continued routinely and lustilly for a time, until suddenly I’d begun to be moved and removed with alarming routine, and I felt even less in control of my fate than I was in control of my burgeoning family. Still, I feared no treachery, for my seclusion from affairs left me at the pleasure of my captors, who kept my spirits calm and, for the time being, feeling secure. One might have expected that our habitual relocation was the product of some local factional strife, or the threat of gangland assassination. The reality proved much less romantic, but even more auspicious. As I had later been brought to learn, the civil authorities had come to suspect a consolidation of power in the community in one individual, namely the old shaman woman, who was continually at my counsel, and we moved as she moved through the underground, clear from the raids after her by police.
Her desire for a white man to guide the people derived from her conviction that the history of privilege was as that of servant to the humble and underpriviledged. To her, this reality had forever been true, despite appearances to the contrary. It was her further conviction that appearances - all worldly appearances - are merely inverted misperceptions of true, honest relationships, and within her was the constant recognition that who is first is last, and who is last is first. No person with such daily prescience, with a view of the world completely unveiled by common delusions, could seem normal or sane to the teeming masses, and so she kept herself in seclusion with her cherished and enlightened vision. Wild-haired, wild-eyed seer, her social program regarding her people, based on this idea of the servile nature of the priviledged class, had shown successful in practice as she worked for the succor of her people, whereas experiments from other postulates, like equality and fairness, and the doomed struggle to elevate oneself to the ranks of the wealthy priviledged, fail reliably. Needless to say, her desire to install a servant-as-ruler, which is not unknown in history, and has presided over many a successful state, in truth has provided a safe and controllable leadership to a people who have grown resentful and tired of servitude, which is the mantle which a leader must be willing, or at least compelled, to put on.
When the day came to shoulder the responsibilities of my station of leadership and to appear before the people, it was not left to any gratitude of my own to ensure my best efforts. My many new offspring were kept hostage against my failure, and my dedication to the training which the shamen woman had impressed upon me had better shine through my own fear. I was pleased, however, to return an initial, and sterling, success.
Until this time of my presentation, my jailors had been familiar with me…deferential, but close. Women were affectionate, and children were, of course, everywhere and oblivious to any taboo regarding contact with their Monarch. When, at last, however, we moved in procession through the throngs of common folks who demonstrated for the cause of real justice, I with my perimeter guard were a drop of oil in a sea of water, and they made way for us as if we were diseased. And as strange as it might seem, this respectful revulsion from me, dreaded mortally by me for so many years to come, would eventually wear me down to dejection for want of true companionship. Any successor of mine, if he were keen of this terrible curse, would court his initial proving beatings. If he could foresee this condemnable fate for himself, he might prefer a sudden death.
The rallies we had organized decried the perverse state of justice in the City. We’d tapped the swelling frustration between the two incompatible rationalities of the unsympathetic justice of the establishment, versus the common and taboo law of retaliation which the City witnessed on a daily basis. Rampant crime deserved - and had witnessed - swift and certain justice at the hands of the criminal courts. No consideration was being given, however, of convicts’ reintegration into civil society, no consideration, that is, apart from of the unbearable economics of humanely quartering convicts, resulting in their being set free unprepared and unwanted for civil participation. Clarity needed some statement regarding families and crime, about just how any good could come from this intolerable circumstance, about what point of view might catch the glimpse of reason. In a word, there needed a leader. Their new and chosen Monarch the sage introduced to the masses of free and hopeful folks. Thus did I embrace my new and gracious people….
Now armed gangs will run the streets, we concede out of obvious necessity and resignation, and within their controlling organization currently runs a clear system of violation and reparation. Disciplinary structure has evolved through the years which have seen the advent of THUG LIFE, and real administration is demanded and made thereby concerning gang members who stray from certain standards - standards of dress, of language, of habit, of conduct…. The contrast between this system of gradually prepared organization of urban soldiery with that of entrenched, torpid, wider legal society generates a friction too hot any longer to bear. It remains between these two bodies of law - one vibrant and flexible, and the other codified and strict - to be found some solution to the problems which we experience between the Code of Retaliation in the streets and the Code of Justice in the courts.
It is an axiom of social life that there cannot be two systems of justice at work amid one people, and in fact there is only one. Ultimately, that one system renders out, and it leeches naturally from basic human contact in the merciless demands of survival. Some form of justice will always prevail, and it is when that system is recognized and codified as New Law that progress is allowed to take place. The Law cannot be left to squeeze people into a box of our own making; rather, we describe the box wherein we already live. This is the right province of Law: to express in words how the state of justice in the City exists in its true and actual nature, and not what we desire that nature to be, bringing our hopes into being through force.
The question of penalties for breaking the Law is of vital concern today. It is not a question of whose law is being broken, ours or theirs, but what is the purpose at all of punishment for any infraction of an existing code, stated or not. Rehabilitation is a long-lost dream; penance through the penitentiary proves false and cruel; purification, in the sense of the old taboo structure, comes nearest to describing our needs.
Yet, in a modern environment, in which we must admit we live, it is not enough to rely on human nature, with its need for spiritual purity before allowing criminals to return to social interaction, for that is sufficient only in local tribal culture, while ours is, or must become, a great civilization. For while, in the tribal taboo structure, the dread of contagion from sacrilege against taboo guarantees its recognition in the breach, since no one in the tribe can mask one’s identity, and the people of the tribe all share an awareness of its member’s taint from taboo, and will shun or kill the offender, our modern life, on the other hand, requires verifiable penance to proof the citizen like dough. There must be a system of widespread, popular revulsion from the nearby presence of an offender of social order. There must be reassurance from local groups that its members are not left to continue in society without having undergone a thorough pacification. By the same token, and importantly, the purity of the offender against order, once properly endured, must be accepted as total and perfect and guaranteed against prejudice by all members of the community. Not only God, but the community must embrace the absolved, and we welcome and respect the return to our society of those who have paid their debt in true penance.
In suffering the natural exclusion from familiar contact which any Monarch experiences to his horror, he becomes sensitive and respectful of the power of human resentment. Those persons with whom fair citizens dread simple contact, either from their unpurified state from their offense to order, or else from their position of enforced segregation which affords your leadership that perspective and distance from society which makes for wise decisions, these persons all must live removed from the secure interactions of the people as the people work to invest in the future, and provision us all with the things which we need to live free and with contentment, and so we build for these outcast persons prisons and palaces. The same dread must be felt against contact with both unpurified criminals and soldiers as against the guarantor and protector of Order, your Monarch.
It becomes clear that any war-like attitudes must be removed from civil society, whether held by soldiers or by the leaders who guide them, and ample occasion and physical space must be sought beyond the confines of the City for the resolution of lethal conflicts. The modern warring state finds soldiers trained to kill commingled with citizens trained to peace. Barring the purification of the soldier or leader returning from the prosecution and commission of war, this confusion of the unpurified with the purified cannot be left to stand within civil society, for the human psyche cannot bear it. And the humanely conceived penitentiary can only be used for the truly penitent, otherwise there is committed a further crime. Soldiers who war out of duty to their people and to their ideals must undergo a more compassionate purification before they are readmitted into civil society, but purified they must become. Death shall overcome whomever despises peace. Condemn the unrepentant criminal to range beyond the gates, outside that protection which he knows that his City gives him. Throw him to the wolves who roam and prey on the outskirts of the City, and let him feel the wrath of the heartless and cruel monster beyond, who can never change his ways for the sake of peace and honesty, goodwill and community. Throw him to the gaping jaws of the ravenous, bloodthirsty Man, or compel him to the rigors of purification for the sake of the freedom and the peace of his own people.
After a time, all power to the city was lost, or cut off. From the modicum of order which we’d managed to accomplish againt such a foreseeable outcome resulting from the efforts of the people of the City to organize themselves for their own protection, we had arranged community houses where the desperately cold might huddle around hearth fires, keep warm, and cook. The old European arrangements of yards with fences, and garages which said to one’s neighbor, “This is mine, that is yours,” were torn down. The yards and homes were made safe by the community which left the streets barren and ventured out from the entombment of their houses and turned to the open spaces of the yards, where children were tended to, food was prepared, and community was celebrated in the peace which people of unified purpose and respect for self-determination and government naturally show. The appearance of deprivation continued, but out of providence, some order survived, and culture advanced in grateful worship of the spirit of community, peace, and art. Lives were saved, together with a dignity more true, though not as outwardly apparent as before, due to the lack of means which were withheld in punishment for our nerve. An aging city was patiently remade to accommodate a new people under a new circumstance and new desperation. Years were to pass before the awesome responsibility and skill in economic provision gained the urgent respect which the people had over time come to neglect. We had learned to “recruit” members of the privileged class who had wandered too near to our province, and who possessed the skills at organization which we needed to ensure our future. Our mantra has become at last to “act, act now, and before too long.” It shall serve us into an uncertain and terrifying future.