Crime and Punishment
While I have your undivided attention, let me just say that I don’t think the Big Guy upstairs really appreciates how difficult this whole ‘Eternal Punishment in Hell’ project can be for us down here in the celestial cellar.
Oh, I know it sounds nice and specific. You know how long it’s going to last: basically, forever. You know where it’s going to take place: right here in the basement, where you can wake up and smell the sulphides. But what really gets my goat (if you’ll pardon the expression, what with my cloven hooves and all that!) is being made to guess what the Boss meant by ‘punishment’. When I asked Him, back in the Fall, all He said was to make the punishment fit the crime. Which is… not as helpful as it could be, don’t you think? What the hell (as it were) does He want from us?
Of course, we learned a lot about the running of Hell, as it happens, from you humans. Yes, we did indeed. Over the centuries, you’ve dreamt up any number of ideas that we could shamelessly copy; torments that you’ve preached or written or painted or fantasised or just spit-ranted about. And I have to say, Bravo: you chaps really seem to have thought long and hard about what Hell might hold for the damned, with a lot of good suggestions (and some frankly weird ones; I’m looking at you, Hieronymus Bosch).
In fact, and you probably don’t realise this, but there’s absolutely nothing that we’ve ever dreamt up that mankind hasn’t already field-tested on one another out of an excess of religious enthusiasm, judicial expediency, or straightforward sadistic curiosity. You folk are incredibly inventive when it comes to finding ways of making one another suffer. I don’t need to tell you that, though, do I!?
But of course, I don’t want simply to torture you lot. That’s easy enough, we just hurt you one way or another: beating, whipping, kicking, biting; stinging, scratching, stabbing, slicing; flaying, burning, freezing, drowning; shocking, twisting, squashing, dropping; stretching or (when we let demon Kevin have a go) tickling. (Yeah, I know; not our best idea. Still, it was worth it to see demon Kevin’s happy little face light up when his victim laughed so much, she choked on her own puke! Happy, happy times.)
No, fun though it most definitely is to torture you, it isn’t what I want to do ‘professionally’, as it were. No, I want what He commanded of me: I want to make the punishment fit the crime. And I have to confess it, we simply lack the imagination to come up with the answer ourselves. So… I decided to turn to our readily available source of creativity: your lot, the humans themselves!
So, then, I asked myself who are the most likely people available to help us in Hell? Well, all I had to do was look around the place and the answer was obvious: Management Consultants. The place is seething with the buggers, more than any other group apart from the blasphemers and the fornicators. I know, right; you’d think it would be lawyers or priests or politicians or advertising executives, and we sure as shit have a few of those about the place, it’s true. But there’s just something about the temptations of an expense account, a mid-range four-door saloon, and a cheap, off-the-peg suit that is guaranteed to lead your average delusions-of-adequacy, over-promoted business school graduate astray.
As Saint Peter says to them when they start to protest their innocence at induction screening, the Commandment says ‘Thou shalt not steal’; fiddling an expense claim is a sin every bit as much as having it away on your yacht with the company pension funds. The Boss didn’t say, Thou shalt be allowed to get away with it for chump-change. No, pure and simple: Thou shalt not steal, Though shalt not covet, etcetera and so forth. Hence, we have fat Bobby Maxwell over there on the rotisserie; and we have Barry or Barbie from Supply-chain Management on the rack. Both of them damned: one for blowing his way through a shit-ton of old folks’ money; the other for a few bits of fiction and forgery attached to an occasional expenses-claim form.
Hence, my little human play-thing, there are a lot of greedy, needy, weedy clever-clogs about the place that I realised we could maybe use to help us with a little ‘business re-engineering’ (or whatever waffle-speak term is fashionable up there this season). I had demon Kevin round up a dozen or so of the more creatively inspired representatives of the species and demanded to know what their advice would be: how could I find a way to ‘make the punishment fit the crime’? To find the answer, they claimed after a bit of a discussion and waving of hands, I would have to set up a “McKinsey-style free-form team-brainstorm wipe-board SWOT analysis session.”
Frankly, I hadn’t a scooby-do what any of those words meant individually, let alone strung together as a phrase. But on the off chance that there might be something useful to be learnt, I told them to bugger off and have a play. They all seemed happy enough (or at least, marginally less miserable) to waddle away with ever-enthusiastic demon Kevin into some quietish corner and give it a bash. I guess it made a pleasant change from having their toenails drilled, or their eyeballs electrocuted, or bullet ants put up their nostrils, or whatever entertainment was on the schedule for them that day.
Well, it didn’t take very long before I spotted Kevin skipping happily back over the lava lake towards my throne (made from the still-suffering bones and flayed skin of three or four dozen lucky winners in the ‘Who Will Satan Sit On?’ prize draw demon Kevin had suggested a few weeks earlier. Their groaning is incredibly restful, and their writhing makes it feel just like a massage chair. Lovely!).
“That mob have finished their Macintosh rainstorm arse-wipe snot session,” Kevin announced cheerfully when I beckoned him to approach. “Shall I take them back across to the queue for the torture pens now, Boss? We’ve just installed a ball-pit of scorpions and I want to see it in action!”
That’s our Kevin, as keen and lovable as a Labrador puppy; always eager to try out something different, gleefully bouncing around the place and giggling to himself. I must admit, I fancied seeing the scorpion ball-pit myself, I’d forgotten all about it; but I told him just to be patient as we made our way over to the group.
“Go on then,” I commanded, pleased to see how they quailed before me. “Report!”
It took a bit of scuffling and shoving, a few rounds of ‘you, not me’, before finally one of them agreed to be their spokesman.
“W-we erm,” he said (with a lot less confidence and poise than I would’ve expected of a ‘senior change management consultant’ with a pinkie ring and a bow-tie; how very satisfying). “We started by er, by looking at your organisation, determining what your most abundant resources are…”
“That’s the snot, I expect, boss,” demon Kevin interjected. “They said they were going to look at our snot. There sure is a lot of it around the place!” he added, proudly, hawking some up and spitting a demonstration. Loveable little rogue.
“Not ‘snot’, ‘SWOT’!” the human spokesman insisted. “We did a ’SWOT’ analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. SWOT.”
“I knew that!” I lied.
“Oh. Well, if it isn’t the snot then it’ll be the fornicators, then!” Demon Kevin offered confidently. “There’s billions and billions of them simmering nicely over there in the deep fat fryers.”
“Well, no, not really. S-sorry,” said the human, cringing away from us; so nice to see good quality cringing. Makes you proud of your team’s work, it does! “No, your most abundant resource are the victims of all the people down here. Th-think about it,” he continued, looking at his nodding fellows for support. “Every crime has a victim; some of them have loads. And some of the people down here have committed hundreds or thousands of crimes. You have an enormous pool of victims available to you as a resource, your honour. And that’s your biggest opportunity… S-sir. Your lordship. Use those victims as a resource to punish the offenders.”
“So, what we thought, yah,” interrupted one of the other humans, her accent that ridiculous LA Valley-girl drawl that just makes me want to electroplate a kitten or tear something apart. “What we thought, like, was that instead of it being all ‘Let the punishment fit the crime’, our advice is that you should instead be, like, ‘Let the punishment be the crime’! Yah? Do you see!?”
And that, my fine little human person, brings me to you; all trussed up and ready for my attention. Let the punishment be the crime, advised the eviscerated American over there (and there, and… way over there). It won’t work in every case, of course; but for you? Well… You’re responsible for the pain and suffering of millions of people, and so now you get the chance to experience every day of the suffering of every single one of them, one after another after another. An endless sequence of torment that your ambitions, your actions, and your words set in motion.
You’re going to be every beaten, waterboarded or electrocuted dissident; you’re going to be each terrified recruit cowering away from bullets and bombs, with the viscera of his explosively disassembled friends dripping into his eyes and mouth. You’re going to be all of the mothers burying their mutilated sons and their dismembered husbands; and you’re going to be those sons and husbands in their moment of extremity. You’re going to be the fleeing refugees gang-raped by the soldiers; and you’re going to be those self-same soldiers later, drowning in the mud, blood, and slurry…
All of it; every bit of suffering you set in motion, you now get to experience. You will know that it is coming and be unable to stop it or change a single thing; you will anticipate, and you will dread. For ever and ever. You will feel it all, every iota of terror and agony, and have no mouth with which to scream.
So, Comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, here it is: welcome to the hell you created!
