A season in hell

Going back to the impunity question, what would the opposite of impunity look like? What would the appropriate penalties for the executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially in view of reports that the latter company's CEO brushed off internal warnings that it was buying too many bad loans? (The officer who gave the warnings testified that the executive, Richard F. Syron, "said we couldn’t afford to say no to anyone.")

What penalties should be imposed on people who took out mortgages they had no realistic hope of ever paying? What should happen to the companies that not only sold such mortgages to such buyers, but shamelessly trolled for them?

What punishment would be adequate to the officials who authorized a policy of torture?

Or for the ones who ginned up the evidence justifying the invasion of Iraq?

A few years ago, I had the idea of updating the Inferno with a view to providing circles for crimes that Dante hadn't thought of-- and, to be frank, for the pleasure of depicting my enemies blistering on the devil's tanning bed.

I imagined one circle in which George Bush and Dick Cheney and all their subalterns are made to crawl eternally across a desert that might be the desert of Iraq, an infinity of white-hot sand and white-hot sky in which the only landmark were the charred carcasses of automobiles, tanks, and Humvees. They are crawling because on their backs and around their necks they are bearing corpses. They are hung or bedizened with them like ancient dowagers hung with pearls. There are the corpses of American soldiers and the corpses of Iraqi ones, the corpses of terrorists and insurgents, of unlucky motorists who drove too close to an armored vehicle or failed to stop at a checkpoint. There are the corpses of old women and children.

It's a little known fact that the corpses of children weigh much more than those of adults. At least this is true in hell.

Part of the war-makers' punishment is that the bodies that hang from them talk. Actually, they won't stop talking. This is true even of those bodies that no longer have anything recognizable as a mouth or head.

And what they say is "Why am I being hurt?" They say it over and over. Although their killers explain to them, sometimes brusquely, sometimes shamefacedly, why they had to be killed, although they offer the same explanations they once gave us, their patsies and accomplices, still the dead ask, "Why am I being hurt?"

This may be because they don't believe the killers' explanations. Or simply because they cannot hear them. Who, after all, expects the dead to hear?

Of course, this is my fantasy of punishment. In the spirit of participatory blogging, I invite guests to contribute their own ideas of appropriate punishment, for these or other crimes, public or private. In the interest of humanity-- and in accordance with the Bybee memo (see previous post) punishments that cause death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions are not permissable.