this is what the bad guys do. they have always done it. it's the sign by which the bad guys are known. they amble into town and gun down the innocent and the good. and then a hero must rise to avenge those innocent deaths. and that hero - in the truest tales - also pays a price for his work because he has had to become just a little bit like the bad guy in order to do that work. and the ordinary folks in the town pay a price, too. but when it's all over the good guys get together and say: somebody had to do it... and say: this was a necessary evil... and say: this was just recompense... and say: bad guys always end this way.

and this is a useful, simple tale. when bad guys kill, the good guys get to kill the bad guys...and...they get to sleep at night and feel alright the next day.

too bad jesus never told this tale. we who profess his divinity could use some help. instead, we get "love your enemies." we get "be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect." we get what seems to be a pretty clear call to set aside "an eye for an eye". and we get his own brutalized flesh nailed to a cross. leave it to god to hand us something so puzzling, so not simple.

still, all this killing, seems in my most childish heart to be what the bad guys do. what the bad guys do. and have always done. all this killing. so.

There's always some kind of killin' you got to do around the farm.

Tom Waits

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one-you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at the mercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

James Baldwin

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

Albert Camus