| The United States, unlike other civilizations, has never experienced the adolescence of a Medieval Age. In the brief two hundred and twenty-seven year old span of its existence as a political entity (it is by far the youngest country in the civilized First World), it has gone directly from a rebellious childhood to an imperious, superpower adulthood. |
| It has been spared, for example, the state-organized public hangings at London’s Tyburn where bodies of criminals were hanged in the open and then left to be viewed by an inquisitive populace. It has never witnessed the brutal exercise of personal authority that the Mughal emperor Jahangir showed when he had his impudent son Khusrau’s supporters impaled on stakes outside the city of Lahore and kept there on display in the heat. And despite America’s support for the French Revolution, it did not have to witness its nationals’ heads being severed by the silent blade of a guillotine, and then be displayed aloft on spikes before a bloodthirsty crowd. |
| To some who have watched the gruesome images displayed by the American authorities recently of the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein (the sons of America’s former ally Saddam Hussein), first bullet-ridden and untouched and then shaved, shampooed and sutured like canvas body-bags, it would seem as if America is making a deliberate, belated attempt to compensate for that deficiency in its upbringing. [EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 4 Aug. 2003, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006) |
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