Why Not the Pike?

Okay, Mr. Obama, you’re right, we are not like our enemy—we are not savages, we are not monsters, we are not barbarians, we are not fiends, we are not beasts, we are not pigs: We do not shanghai cruise ships, assassinate wheelchair-bound men, and throw their bodies overboard; we do not bomb people taking buses to work; we do not intentionally maim and kill unarmed civilians doing their marketing; we do not target people eating pizza or sipping cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes; we do not massacre 20-somethings dancing at discotheques; we do not slaughter elderly citizens celebrating Passover; we do not scream Allahu Akbar! as we behead our captives and later broadcast ourselves to the world reveling in their blood; we do not burn, stab, lash, or disfigure our daughters and our sisters for sexual trespasses, alleged or otherwise; we do not destroy them in “honor killings”; we do not strap explosives to our children’s undeveloped bodies and send them out to destroy others and themselves in the bargain; we do not shoot anti-tank missiles at school buses; we do not remorselessly butcher eleven-year-olds, four-year-olds, and three-month-olds;  we do not hijack airplanes and use them as rockets to annihilate 3,000 people because our terror of modernity is so prodigious that we must devote ourselves to laying waste to it where we can; we do not choose to live as primitive animals in possession of advanced weaponry; we do not display photographs of our dead enemy—on the contrary, we confer upon him with all respect the traditional Muslim burial rites, bathing his body in perfumed water and wrapping it in pure white cloth, before tossing it into the sea because no country will have it.

No, we don’t roll that way, and of course that is all to the good. But every once in a while I wish we did. I wish we applied the ancient British custom of displaying heads on pikes along the pike now and then to that very special order of hominid—humanoid without the humanity—our foe: The sight of those decapitated crania might just serve as a deterrent to others with mass murder on their minds; and in any case we could most definitely use more of that rare, redolent, rose-scented pudding, Revenge—served hot.