“Off With Their Heads!"

One wonders if the higher ups in ISIS got their inspiration from Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll has the Queen of Hearts continually decreeing “off with their heads!" The ISIS militants are avid beheaders, not only in terms of the now infamous hostage videos, but in terms of how they keep their captive populace at bay. CNN aired some shots of a boulevard lined with impaled heads, taken by intrepid inhabits of the Syrian city of Raqqa, which is now considered the ISIS capital. Children sometime have nightmares from fairytales, but this is a nightmare come to life and thus is almost hard to conceive. One’s first reaction to the footage, which included some crucifixions, was to think of Halloween. Such an association is naturally a tragedy in and of itself since it makes the world into the interior of a tormented child’s mind. Think of the child soldiers in the Kony 2012 video that came and then vanished from the world’s stage. Shock can be like an endorphin rush and the barbarism is so extreme that the only way to process the information is to distance your self from it by relating it to fantasy literature. "Walking the plank" is even worse than waterboarding when you come to think of it. Captain Hook threatens this form of painful death in the Disney version of Peter Pan. But it’s just an animation, played in the background as screaming kids quaff down ice cream and chocolate cake at a birthday party.