Blood (24 page)
Authors: Lawrence Hill
Boxing is highly ritualistic too. The combatants salute each other before the fight begins. Their gloves are monitored and controlled for size and makeup. They wear mouthguards. We allow one licensed boxer to draw blood from another. We even allow for the shedding of much blood, provided that it doesn’t hinder a boxer’s sight. You can aim for a bloody spot and try to draw out more red stuff. You can hit a weaker boxer over and over to draw out the punishment. This brings to mind Muhammad Ali, calling out, “What’s my name?” as he spent fifteen rounds beating the stuffing out of Ernie Terrell in 1967, to avenge Terrell’s insistence on calling him Cassius Clay — the name he had before becoming a Muslim. You can coax the blood to flow and you can beat your opponent so badly that he is thoroughly humiliated as a form of public entertainment, but you cannot hit a boxer when he is down. That’s outside the rules. Not permitted by ritual. They stop every three minutes for a break so someone in their corner can try to staunch their bloody wounds. If blood is streaming down the face of a fighter, the fight goes on unless the bleeding fighter begins losing badly — perhaps because he cannot see his opponent properly — in which case the fight ends with a technical knockout.
In the year 1997, boxing fans witnessed what later became known as the “bite fight” — one of the most memorable fights in the past two decades. Boxers Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield squared off in Las Vegas, Nevada. The previous year, Holyfield had won — by
TKO
— a match in which Tyson had been heavily favoured. When they met again, Tyson began once again to lose badly. In the third round, he bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear — a big enough piece to spit onto the floor. Several minutes later, Tyson did it again. Shortly thereafter, Tyson was disqualified. He was also fined and had his licence revoked for a year. I’m not countenancing Tyson’s behaviour. However, I do find it fascinating that the “bite fight” garnered such huge attention, in a sport where combatants — generally young black men from poor communities, who are watched by fans who pay thousands of dollars to attend championship fights — are regularly knocked out and concussed. Some sustain serious brain damage. Some die right there on the sweat- and blood-soaked floor, and others die far sooner than they should. It is a blood sport. And we love it.
Boxing has suffered in public popularity of late, because it is insufficiently wild and violent in relation to ultimate fighting. Fought in cages, using mixed martial arts, this sport seems more intense, savage, and varied. You can punch
and
kick. You can attack almost any part of the body. There are far fewer reasons for a referee to intervene, slow the pace of bloodshed, or impede blood lust. I’m betting that as time goes on, we will find even more savage ways to allow men — and women — to draw each other’s blood and batter each other senseless.
WITH RESPECT TO CAUSING
BLOODSHED
, ritual forms the dividing line between criminal and honourable behaviour. We license the spilling of animal blood every day in most parts of the planet, but rules govern us every step of the way. In most wealthy nations, for example, you can no longer walk into a meat store and ask to have a chicken (or a larger animal) butchered before your eyes. For reasons of public health, and perhaps to accommodate public squeamishness, animals are to be killed and bled in slaughterhouses. This is meant to be carried out behind closed doors, and it is also designed to minimize the spread of bacteria to protect consumer safety. You will not be alarmed or surprised to see a truckload of pigs travelling at 110 kilometres an hour on the highway. It’s a common sight. You know where they are going. But if the driver stopped to slaughter and roast a pig at a roadside picnic stand, it wouldn’t take long for someone to call 911. Bloodshed is permitted. Bloodshed is necessary. But to win public sanction, it must follow an intricate set of rules and rituals.
Certain forms of bloodshed are not permitted, and warrant the maximum penalty imaginable. If you shoot and kill someone in a state where capital punishment is allowed — in Texas, for example — you stand a chance of being executed. We are back to Biblical references — many people these days rely on the dictum “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” If you bomb runners and bystanders at the 2013 Boston Marathon, taking three lives and spilling the blood of numerous other victims all over the street, many will clamour for your death, and the American government may take the unusual step of calling for the death penalty, even in a state that does not have capital punishment on the books. Bloodshed is permitted only in highly controlled rituals of publicly sanctioned violence. In such moments, we drink it up.
The regulated, ritualized, bizarrely accepted bloodshed haunts me all the more because of its contradictions. The English gentleman hunter on his horse is taken as the epitome of class, civility, and good breeding. Yet his joy consists of encouraging trained hounds to rip the stuffing from foxes. A gentleman keeps his salad plate on the left and his wineglass to the right. He marries well. He ensures that his children learn to read and write. But on Sundays, he indulges his love of fox blood.
Bloodhounds pursue more than red-coated foxes. They also carry the scent of humans in their noses when they famously pursue fugitive slaves and criminals. References exist to bloodhounds chasing men in medieval Scotland. In 1673, the Irish (or English, possibly) philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle wrote about an incident in which a dog followed a man’s path over seven miles before locating him in a house.
The dog is, well, dogged in its pursuit of foxes and humans alike. In lore, the best way to shake him off your trail is to drag your body — blood included — through water. It takes one vital fluid to mask the scent of another.
The idea of dogs or monsters locking on to the scent of humans and then pursuing them with murderous intent is a terrifying thing to imagine. What avid child reader has not been captivated by the story of the giant’s blood lust in “Jack and the Beanstalk”? In this British fairy tale, the giant is unsettled when he enters his house in the clouds and detects the scent of human blood. Jack, as we know, has climbed the beanstalk and has been asking the giant’s wife for food.
The giant, sensing the story with his nose alone, roars:
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread
Blood, alas, can give us away by its very scent. This serves as a warning to child readers, and to adults who can extrapolate and imagine the senseless assault and butchery that has plagued mankind since the dawn of “civilization.”
AS A YOUNG BOY,
I was particularly frightened to read that the wolverine was such a nasty, bloodthirsty mammal that it would kill other animals for no reason. The biggest member of the weasel family, not generally exceeding fifteen kilograms in weight, this particular carnivore had a reputation for attacking much bigger animals. But the no-reason thing troubled me. Why would an animal rip another to shreds for the fun of it? I doubt that it is true that the wolverine acts, or kills, merely for its own entertainment. But the image of killing for its own sake haunted me.
Others too have been upset to the very core by the idea of senseless killing.
In Cold Blood
, the 1966 account by the American Truman Capote, explores the true story of two ex-convicts who invade the home of a wealthy Kansas wheat farmer to steal his money. Not finding any, they slit the throat of the farmer, shoot him in the head, and go on to murder his wife and two of their children. The crime, which took place in 1959, shocked and riveted Americans, and Capote’s subsequent account became a bestseller. The bloodshed that seems irrational and inexplicable is the kind that frightens us the most.
Another form of murder sits much more easily with us: killing for entertainment. This is the central theme of Suzanne Collins’s bestselling novel
The Hunger Games
. The story’s sixteen-year-old protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, like most citizens in the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, is subjugated by the ruling class of people in the capital city. Every year, as punishment for having once risen up against the ruling powers, each of the twelve subjugated provinces must offer up one boy and one girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, for a ritualistic bloodbath in the woods. The fight to the death is televised for the entertainment of the people in the Capitol, who are caught up annually in the orgiastic pleasure of viewing the participants, finding ways to assist or hinder them during the battle, and salivating as they die in the most hideous, gruesome ways. Only one survivor can normally win. Since the novel features a sixteen-year-old who has volunteered for battle to save her younger sister from having to do so, it is not hard to imagine how Katniss will fare against her opponents, many of whom are bigger, stronger, better trained, better equipped, and more bloodthirsty.
The Hunger Games
is an adventure story, but it can also be read as a condemnation of a society that lusts to see blood spill.
The novel indicts reality television for its exploitation of human suffering, and offers a futuristic version of the
munera
— gladiatorial combats — witnessed by the masses from the comfort of their gathering-places. As early as the third century
BCE
, thousands of Romans began to congregate in arenas for these spectacles. Prisoners of war, criminals, Jews, slaves, women, and others were offered up for the amusement of those who would come to watch, and cheer, and perhaps roar in favour of sparing the lives of those who fought valiantly in defeat. The spectacles were enacted to confirm the rulers’ power, to warn others about the dangers of opposing the state, and to entertain Romans. The thrill was about the spill, but not all were seduced by it. The Roman philosopher and orator Cicero, for example, wrote about the Pompeii Games of 55
BCE
: “But what pleasure can it possibly be to a man of culture, when either a puny human being is mangled by a most powerful human beast, or a splendid beast is transfixed with a hunting spear . . .”
Humans do like the sight of blood. We don’t permit murder, but we certainly have no problem planting the idea in the public psyche. At a National Rifle Association conference in Houston in May 2013, delegates visiting the vendor displays could see a life-sized, three-dimensional, female target for sale. It was called “the Ex.” When “the Ex” is shot, she bleeds.
It is not difficult to imagine why the National Rifle Association has had such an enduring influence in the United States, and has been so successful at opposing efforts to curb the use of guns by American citizens. The Second Amendment to the American Constitution invokes “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” although the specific meaning of those words is contested. People who believe that citizens should have the right to carry guns argue that the Constitution backs them up. Others, however, say that the Second Amendment does not offer a blanket right to all civilians, but rather to those who form part of a state-organized militia.
Regardless of constitutional interpretation, violence does beget violence, which is exactly what underpins some objections to capital punishment. With its long history of state-sanctioned shooting, hanging, gassing, electrocution, and lethal injection, the United States is the only G8 country that continues to carry out capital punishment.
For a country where bloodshed was wantonly and publicly celebrated as part of capital punishment, though, one must look to France and its use of the guillotine.
During the French Revolution, a violent movement during the last decade of the eighteenth century to overthrow the monarchy and institute republican government, the use of the guillotine rose as part of the so-called Reign of Terror. In less than one year (1793–94), it is estimated that more than sixteen thousand enemies of the revolution were guillotined in France. That works out to forty-three beheadings a day. The guillotine symbolized the Reign of Terror. Maximilien de Robespierre, one of the key revolutionary leaders, stated that “terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” Robespierre, who had successfully advocated for the guillotining of King Louis
XVI
in 1793, and who as part of the so-called “Committee of Public Safety” had vastly increased the number of public executions, eventually fell out of favour with his co-revolutionaries and was guillotined himself, in 1794.
Among the many victims of the Reign of Terror was Louis
XVI
’s wife, Marie Antoinette, who was guillotined in Paris on October 16, 1793. Asked at her trial if she had anything to say about all the allegations against her, Marie Antoinette said, “
I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.”
Marie Antoinette spoke with the same dignity and composure as her late husband, Louise
XVI
, whose last words before being executed were: “People, I die innocent! Messieurs, I am innocent of all I am accused of. I hope that my blood may cement the happiness of the French people.”
Marie Antoinette
was thirty-seven years old on the day she was beheaded, some nine months after her husband was killed in the very same way. Louis
XVI
was given the opportunity to prepare for his trial, as well as a goodbye dinner with his family. Marie Antoinette had been detained in a dungeon at length and had no such privileges before she was hauled through the streets in an open cart en route to meet her executioner at a scaffold in the Place de la Révolution. She had been persecuted in a sham trial over two endless days (sixteen hours one day, and fifteen hours the next), and accused of charges including but going far beyond treason. Today, it is widely believed that the allegations were bogus, but the dethroned queen was also vilified for aberrant sexual behaviour.
