Breathing Nitrogen. Full stop.

 

Cross-Atlantic travel via Zeppeliner ended, ignominiously, with the spark, or the assumption of a spark whose existence now as theoretical as quantum events, and the merry joining of nitrogen and oxygen - that great harbinger of life - against a bright Jersey sky. 

The efforts for many years, which repeat with a number of decades between, to find a more tolerable or "humane" method of execution this weekend kicked into gear with Alabama's final call, in this call which never seems to reach finality until curves, as well as bodies, have been flatlined, to end the life of 35-year-in-wait Kenneth Smith by means of oxygen deprivation, as it might well be called rather than the seemingly more sinister nitrogen asphyxiation, putting emphasis on the substance which, while not toxic, best not be enjoyed with 100 % purity (as so many things). 

This effort, to find the medicalised, painless death . In Utah, the longstanding preference for blood - the cleaver, or the bullet, compromised by the quotidian hanging, but only as an option - was rekindled with the medical profession's unwillingness , and the decidedly inhumane, but questionably in-

The Scourge of Time

Age, as the dreaded, and sometimes perhaps admired, senator Cato put it, may well be considered dreadful, but it beats the (apparent) option. Although the same sentiment has not always been shared by those edged between the two precipices in experiencing dear old age, its gradual wear and tear and the sense of impending doom which may - psychologically at least - seem more tormenting than the actual thing (which, by definition, is not). But to transcend this Scylla and Charybdis dilemma, to stare into the inflexible yet seeming never immediate gates of time, is to hold the sentence of Cato in one's mouth, and psyche. 

Of the people I have most commented lately regarding to this endurance, apart from Henry Kissinger, is the not yet late 39th president of the United States, the first to achieve the feat of reaching 99 years of age - and thus to live in his hundredth year, if not a full century - and 

The Sins of the Son

 

"The sins of the father", as the saying goes, but in this case perhaps better put by the late, great Paul Newman in Sam Mendes' under-appreciated Road to Perdition; "Sons are put in this world... to cause problems for their fathers." Also well phrased, and moderated, by the great, living, acting James Cromwell: "You don't choose your parents... but you don't choose your children either." Both these truths seem eternal as well as alive in the person who is 

Be Absolute for Death

 

The debate over capital punishment has exchanged blows upon blows at the back of my mind for more years I can count clearly, . It is, at the fundamental, a question of How does one put 

I have myself not, yet, lived in a country where a neck was judicially broken, a heart or head perforated by a marksman's bullet by a court's decree, nor where an injection was delivered to abort life where it could have been, however miserably and for whatever purpose, sustained, even though I have walked streets and slept in beds where far more death and destruction have rung out between men and women. 

The Experts

The relation between the elites and the hoi polloi - this term so ostensibly fashionable, in who it designates as speaker, not in who it refers to - has defined the analysis of political power and its exercise (and non-exercise) throughout human, and not least, Western scholarship, if it's not throwing oneself through an open arc of an observation. 

More interesting, if one is interested in language or rather, how language is shaped (and not primarily shapes) the institutions of power and their constant regeneration (or eventual lack of the same) must then ask how these elites are perceived. In the current date, it seems more dangerous to cry out elites, 

Dangerous, I say? 

Who are then, these elites, and - to echo Tony Benn's question, which likewise seems dangerously unfashionable - how can we get rid of them - apart from the obvious answer (la lanterne; again the echo of blood and cruel and dysfunctional mob violence muffled by the supposed gentleness of the tongue)? 

A member of the dreaded "elite"? Now or in the cherished, or perhaps blemished, '89? 

His Majesty

 

Among the many stories of tyrants - or let's say autocrats, since it gives a more technical and less judgmental flair; this one, by any measures, do not fit the classic term tyrannos, no matter how many contemporary politicians supposedly do - is the story of the benevolent ruler, not holding back on spending and taxing his own powers (and properties) to benefit a supposed "whole" of society, in the line of Hobbes' Leviathan, narrowly interpreted as believing the . 

Notre Mons(e)i(gn)eur

 

The French. Has there been, within the ostensible "Western alliance", a partner so fraught with, well, difficulty?