Alexander Pushkin.
Dick Spaight.
Button Gwinnet.
The Button Gwinnet!
These great men have not merely their ridiculous names in common (really, Alexander Hamilton?!). Each one died of the exact same cause: the bullet of their dueling opponents. Yes, even those as famously moral as Button Gwinnet on occasion gave into the enticing urge to snuff out human life, which did not always end well. People have never seemed to take kindly to being killed, even by their social betters. Those of us who enjoy watching the lights in the eyes of our fellow man slowly slip away into the Void have been reduced to watching for Larry King's death every night at eight. This has taken 113 years.
At the same time, our country is filled with those who would fill up our civil courts addressing more frivolous issues. Who's my baby's daddy and which one of us gets to keep the Subway franchise in Milwaukee have supplanted why are you looking at my wife's a** and will you be busy at high noon as the premier legal quandaries of our day. Too much money goes into the hands of lawyers who facilitate frivolous civil conflicts that have no need for a court case. Divorces and custody battles can be handled by couples, not judges. Juries do not need to be moving money from stupid corporations who do not put labels on their chainsaws to stupider people who need "Do Not Put Genitals On Chainsaw" labels. There is enough legitimate crime and constitutional discussion in this country that we cannot afford to divide our judicial forces.
These crises may seem at first unrelated. But I believe their solutions are one in the same. I propose to re-legalize the practice of dueling, and to broadcast it as a form of entertainment to satisfy mankind's natural blood-thirst.
This provides three primary benefits. Firstly, it eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming civil court cases. I believe the civil court system should be permanently dismantled; private issues, whether inter-familial or between a wronged citizen and a group from which they seek damages, may settle their disputes in a duel. Secondly, it allows for increased government revenue. Local governments will need to purchase only an hour of nightly programming, and perhaps rent out a suitable dueling location. These expenditures would be more than covered by product placement and sponsorship deals for plaintiffs. Thirdly, it allows the average citizen to release their pent up desire to murder in a healthy environment. One can only assume the number of murders by the relatively sane will go down, when every night Joe Sixpack sees exactly what murder means: a naked, elderly man beating his much younger wife to death with the esophagus of a probably-once-a-gardener.
Perhaps it necessary to explain how these duels would work. Let us take an example: William and Elizabeth Carmichael have been divorced for thirteen years, and Billy (as William's boyfriend calls him) wishes to have an additional day a week added to his time with their eleven-year-old daughter Susan. Elizabeth refuses. If Billy wanted to press the issue, would file papers with the local Presidential Death Panel, summoning the defendant (Elizabeth) to come before a small branch of the PDP. There, a date would be set for their duel. They would use the time beforehand, not by spending money on unnecessary lawyers, but by honing their bodies and minds to take another's life, and courting corporations for sponsorships, a portion of which goes into the combatant's pockets, or those of their next-of-kin. When the date was reached, Elizabeth (reapin' for Reebok) and Billy (maimin' for Melvin Shuberman, D.D.S.) would arrive at a local renovated warehouse. The nature of the arena and the exact rules of the engagement are up to the local PDP and the hired producers of the television program, but one rule would remain the same. Combatants would always be naked and unarmed; any weapons or clothes might provide advantages to one side over the other (beyond those given to them by God, Writer of the Constitution of Our Souls). Beyond this, decisions may be made by the government and the show's corporate sponsors, in the finest American tradition. Mel Gibson, for example, may choose to purchase a minor municipality's arena and theme it around his seminal action-adventure film Mad Max II: Beyond Thunderdome. He would do this, because he is bat-s**t insane.
Finally, Billy and Elizabeth would meet in combat. For the purposes of this example, let us say that the producers decided to test which parents loved their child more, by placing Suzie in the middle of the arena, and letting lose a gaggle of starved hyenas. Whichever parent managed to save the child, by either killing the hyenas or feeding them the corpse of the other parent as a substitute for Suzie, will win the custody battle and bring honor to their corporate sponsors. This unique situation might even allow the parents to reconcile in the face of death, and team up to feed Suzie to the hyenas. This is but one of many positive outcomes that would be unimaginable in a conventional court.
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