by

JANSEN ESTRUP

A powerful symbol, the tree and noose are, and those who hang from them. We can envision rustlers, highwaymen, starving young natives off the reservation, or pirates swinging over cheering crowds. Authorities would like us to think that anyone who earns that fate deserves it. We are encouraged to believe that of Blacks, too, in their strange fruit guise. Long forgotten are the tree-like crucifixes which lined the roads which led to Rome. We'd like to call that ancient history.

Word of mouth and page promote the pairing, and film, too, immortalizes such scenes. Churches, before that, advertised on fliers that right after services a public hanging would be conducted, followed by a potluck dinner. Traveling executioners roamed the countryside during and after the French Revolution, bringing science with them. The Guillotine was much more efficient than the noose or ax. But Americans preferred the rope, an item part of every ship, farm and livery.

Song has been part of the mix, too.

We remember (or research) the folk song from my youth, Tom Dooley by the Kingston Trio, in which Tom awaits the noose for killing a lover in old Appalachia. Before that, Billy Holiday and Nina Simone sang of Strange Fruit hanging from Southern trees.

Yet, hanging had always been about wealth and power. Even the legend of Jesus roots it thus, equating him with thieves … the poor and powerless against the rich and esStated.

America's most violent attacks on African-Americans had been in Memphis, where consumers had begun to patronize more successful non-White markets, independent happy Rosewood, embattled Philadelphia and Tulsa where thriving Black communities were bombed and burned to the ground. Lynchings were public events and even those done under white hoods in the dead of night were left hanging for all to see and learn to fear.

By the early Sixties, Marty Robbins had given us The Hanging Tree theme for Gary Cooper's last film of the same name. In it Cooper plays a wealthy doctor who is able to buy his way out of the hangman's noose, and in doing so finds a 'new life' with love and freedom. Robbins' lyric vocalized a new trend; that wealth equates to freedom, love and happiness – a theme which would eventually dominate American ambitions. It was always so, but as a weapon against the civil rights movement, it flourished and by the '80s became a New World Order.

And it was not just minority communities which suffered the wrath of American officialdom. The vast White Underclass is also victim of the undeserving power structure. Happy to settle for crumbs, the cheapest and most damaging was the notion that their poverty, ceaseless debt and grind is their own fault. And in their suffering they had been 'chosen' as 'better' than those of darker lines and that of itself has proven them closer to this or that god. And they were promised a special place at the table when laurels rendered battlefield blood holy, and neighborhoods became abandoned, steps even closer to the deity but ever farther away from the wealth which would permit them to evade the noose. The rich and connected get tax free Enterprise Zones, the poor sections of cities, mountains, rust and bible belts are turned into ghettos, barrios and other ethnic terms for Sacrifice Zone.

And now we come to the latest installment of hanging, just when legal lethal drugs are scarce and executions are becoming fashionable (beheadings qualify because Saddam Hussein's head is reported to have 'popped off' as he dropped) again. Drug overdose may qualify because it allows those deaths to be listed in the 'out of their head/mental illness' category. And those in charge, who prefer mindless obedience to 'using one's head' employ choke holds, isolation cells and ever more seductive chemical dependence.

Suzanne Collins brings us The Hanging Tree from her Hunger Games books. Unlike recent variations of the hanging story, this one has elements of the ancient original, except that Jesus is not thought to have invited the pair of thieves to hang with him. The lyric she, Jeremy Fraites and Wesley Schultz published for the film version has Jennifer Lawrence sing this muted anthem to her disciples – Will you, will you/come to the hanging tree?/They say they hung a man/They say he murdered three/Strange things have happened here ...

Collins invites the White Underclass to join Minorities of Color as they gather in a CG forest like a Robin Hood band. This is revolutionary imagery as clearly as that of Spartacus and his slave army hanging on the 'trees' lining the roads to Rome in the Third Servile War. That was 71BCE.

Curiously, five years earlier in the fading Greek empire, an Essene 'teacher' named Joshua/Yeshua/Jesus was 'crucified' for rebellious activity. The Greek manner of crucifixion was to break all of the limbs of the victim (word used in its original sense – a religious offering) and lay him out for the Sun (Helios) until he died, became food for birds which carried the offering skyward and/or rotted. The body of this 'teacher' was rescued and buried in a garden by his followers, who rejoiced that he had been reborn like Helios himself every morning. Greek authorities went on a rampage, torturing any and all until his grave-site was revealed. The rebel leader was exhumed and hung in a tree (an actual tree) for all to see and feel the terrorist power of the state, and to prove that this political revolutionary had not ascended to 'heaven' as his followers had been claiming.

So what does this current rebellion envision? Demand? Shall we give them a name, these new Serviles, these born endentured/indebted young? Spartacus led the Third War. Was the Fourth inspired by another teacher, Lenin, and led to action by Mao?*

Is this one created by Collins and led by fictional heroine Catniss to be the Fifth? And how, with so much of these recent generations' talent absorbed by trinkets and electro-stuff, will they even communicate with each other, let alone fashion a complex solution to an insolvable dilemma? Are you, are you/yearning to be free/when we meet at midnight/in the hanging tree/Strange things are happening/no stranger would it be/if we met at midnight/in the hanging tree …

Did you, did you/come to the tree/where I told you to run/so we could both be free/... this time in a mile deep bomb shelter which more closely resembles a tomb.

Or is this the end, a modern-day Massada, a hopeless defiance? Will you, will you/wear a necklace of rope (hope)/side by side with me/when we meet at midnight/in the hanging tree ...

Fitting, isn't it, that controversy clouds these lyrics. The book has Catniss and her father hating this song, especially the necklace of rope. Movie goers want to believe in a necklace of hope, whatever that might be - one with a crucifixion tree dangling from it, perhaps - isn't that symbol what got us all in the tree to begin with? Most of the genre's fans are young, so hope is understandable. They do not yet know what Catniss knows, that she invites her friends and supporters to hang with her because she is acutely aware that it is the worshipers, the cadre, zealots, the exponential idolaters who will kill the three – three killing three is nine, is 81, is …

A chorus builds with others inviting everyone to hang alongside them.

Either way it is a losing scenario. Inviting others to your own, and their own lynching smacks of suicide by storm trooper or by one's own hand. There are never any winners in a death cult or a violent revolution.

Won't they, like every survivor band, any evolving species, have to disperse, adapt and remember?

* I have omitted the one begun by Thomas Paine and enacted by George Washington because that grand experiment failed almost from the beginning, substituting as it did one wealthy elitist faction, one empire – the Anglo-American - for another. Or perhaps it was an earlier attempt led by Martin Luther, which also failed.