Henry Allen of the Washington Post hocks a big ‘ol loogy on Ken Lay’s corpse.
Many people had looked forward to knowing more about Ken Lay, especially how he liked prison.
But now that he’s died of a heart attack in the luxury of his Colorado getaway while awaiting sentencing for his crimes, none of his victims will be able to contemplate that he’s locked away in a place that makes the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel look like Hawaii; that he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands; and long days in the prison laundry or jute mill or license plate factory, gibbering with anguish as fire-eyed psychopaths stare at him for unblinking hours while they sharpen spoons into jailhouse stilettos.
He will not be ground into gray jailhouse paste by listening to the eardrum-scarring symphony of 131-decibel despair that is the Muzak of penitentiaries, by gagging on the dead prison air, by choking on the deader food, by watching the blue sky taunt him with freedom over the exercise yard, and by feeling his nervous system rent by the cruel grenades of memories — explosions of nostalgia for the days when he knew he’d be swanning forever through the comfy laps and cool lawns of luxury and infinite possibility. Sweet Gulfstreams through sweet skies, the pools, the jewels, the Maybach limousines, a life in which he didn’t just pimp his ride, he pimped the entire world as he knew it.
That’s just mean.
But can you really blame liberals like Henry Allen? They have no God, and without him, there is no final judgement. There is no eternal punishment. Lay’s untimely death is nothing more than an easy escape from consequence. In their mind, by dying, Lay got off scot free.
What’s amazing to me is, Allen’s sermon from the pulpit in the Church of Liberalism makes sense to millions of people. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live life with that world view.