Solitude’s Despair

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Article Reprintsolitude

When the tabloids splash a gruesome crime across their pages—”Suburban Lawyer Stabs Children, Eats Wife”—I yearn for the days of justice dispensed cruelly and unusually, not as a corrective hand but a lick of purifying flame. Put a gallows in Times Square, a crucifix on Capitol Hill, bring back what the philosopher Michel Foucault called “the gloomy festival of punishment.” The awesome power of the state revealed in fatal violence upon sinful flesh, the citizenry frightened into probity as a felon is disemboweled, pulled apart, hanged, burned, just as in medieval Spain.

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