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Grab
your necks and dance with joy.
There
is a problem in Saudi Arabia and no longer will you have to fear
that you will have to go to your maker without a fine set of
pearls draped around your neck. Instead of having to
take them off for fear that your finest would fall off your neck
and into a pool of blood, you can stand proud on your final
moment as gunshots pierce that dress you were going to donate to
the Red Croissant (!) anyway.
In
Saudi Arabia, they've chosen to remove heads the old fashioned
way - with one stroke of a sword and the whole moment lasts
about half the time an average man does.
Gone
will be the splendor of the event where parents and the whole
family gather round the courtyard as the victim is placed on a
very nice (though likely stained) Persian rug and made to kneel
for his final moment. It should be noted that in Saudi
Arabia, they are equal opportunity head choppers and they'll
remove a woman's head with just as much glee as a
man's. This whole affair tends to have a tension of
the obvious but with a flair of a sporting event.
But, this is serious business so there are no peanut or beef hot
dog vendors hawking their wares.
The
modern Saudi execution has lost some of the splendor of the old
time ones - now there are trucks and ambulances around the
parking lot and lots of police cars and police. You
just don't get that fun time like you used to when this was just
done on sand and an open box was nearby. The modern
rug does make it more comfortable for the victim kneeling, but
it also serves to contain the blood except when it starts as a
Vegas fountain. But the pooling is at least
contained. Damn.
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I don't see that there is a shortage of people who love severing heads in the arab/muslim world. Just go to Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan to see there is a ready pool of men who love removing heads. Heck, in Mexico there is a veritable cottage industry of head removers and I bet they'd work real cheap. I know it is pretty and special to watch a man in a white rob raise a shiny sword in the air to to briskly progress toward the point of no return and to see the fountain of blood arcing out of the beheaded body. And nothing is quite as touching as seeing the swordsman wipe his bloodied sword on the garb of the victim and then walk away.
Hiring the alternative head removers does pose a serious problem with showmanship quality. First, there is no one clean swipe nor is there a shiny sword to captivate the children in attendance. Instead you'll have guys with steak knives taking five or ten minutes to cut through the head. This is just not appropriate - when there was once a spectacle of the clean swipe, there is now a period of boredom as the audience murmurs "are we there yet" as the steak knife encounters the tougher cuts of the neck - and by that time all the blood is spilled - the victim is dead - all the protestation is no longer there - heck -you are carving up a corpse. Where is the sport in that?
Perhaps if a firing squad could be made more of a sport - like have the condemned run around and have marksman take shots nailing the condemned and dropping him in mid run. Now there is a spectacle that would create the entertainment that we would be missing with the steak knife gang. And if the kill shot was a head shot, oh, lawdy, lawdy, lawdy!
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