Back in grad school, several of us as students sitting around, having a literary discussion, decided to come up with a quick list of authors who should be shot, and not – an impressionistic list based entirely on whether when you mention the guy’s name somebody instantly says, “he should be shot.” By now the “He should be shot” recollection has faded, but the roster wd probably include perennial candidates the older Wordsworth, who in his later years had trajected from lyrics about daffodils to sonnets praising capital  punishment; Hemingway, who started life photographed in a dress and ended as the Great White Hunter, even if you give him brownie points on grounds that at least two of his wives were lesbians; Robert Penn Warren, for his droolingly boring and overwritten novel shooting down a dead man who had already been assassinated, gunned down years before; and Proust, just on general principle.

The kicker, of course – aside from the fact that most authors we read were already in cemeteries anyway – was that none of us would have actually shot any of these figures, regardless of how we felt about grad school, some of our faculty, the academic job market, the top-down university system, or the canon. We wouldn’t even have ordered the executions, in some magical fantasy scenario. We wouldn’t have done it even for the sake of wasting time or procrastinating on writing our dissertations.

That memory segues into another, of a later discussion. Someone at a conference somewhere had been talking about “faceless economic forces” – a term not accorded much credibility; and another speaker rejoined that the “faceless” can be overestimated – that a hypothetical facelessness can be misapplied as a shortcut, a way to dodge useful specifics. His illustration -- not as a recommendation -- was something along the lines of, he thought that the history and the future of this country would change enormously if you could take out 10,000 specific individuals, line them up against a wall and shoot them.

Thinking about that line afterward, trying to sort it out aside from the ethics involved, I finally realized the problem in it – again, aside from ethics.

The problem is simple: who makes out the list?

Anyone who could make out the right list, so to speak – anyone qualified to pick out the 10,000 genuinely most destructive and unethical individuals in this country of ours – would not be willing to stand them up against a wall and shoot them.

Conversely, anyone who would be willing to do that – to execute 10,000 people in cold blood – is not someone you would want to hand your little legal pad and pencil to and say "Here. Start making out a list."

This is at root what’s wrong with Republican Party positions today – and by extension it’s what’s wrong with all Democrats who go along with the GOP: all the might-and-wealth angles of distributing wealth upward, aggrandizing American militarism at home and abroad, etc, basically concentrate both the list-making and the barrel-pointing powers, and concentrate them in a few hands at that.