Chapter 3: Page 15: Lines 21-26 (112-117)

 Mason shrugging, palms up, "I'm serious. Worse than that, I'm sober. A man's first time in town, he simply can't miss a hanging. Come, Sir,— what's the first thing they'll ask when you get back to County Durham? Eh? 'Did ye see them rahde the Eeahr at Taahburn?' "

* * * * * * * * * *

Lines 112-117 Vulgarized:
Mason: "What? Really! I mean it! And I'm not even drunk! The first thing a tourist should do when visiting London is go see a public execution. What do you think the rubes back in Durham are going to ask you when you get back there? 'Yeehaw! Did y'all see 'em ride the air at Tyburn?!' "

Subtext:
Death is a spectacle and a cultural fascination, especially to an audience who thinks the person they're watching hang deserved to. A public execution celebrates punishment. It's an embrace of acting punitively, of vengeance attained. As I noted in the last entry, the tone is projected onto the scene by the viewer. A criminal being hanged is cause, for most of the public, to celebrate. It's a chance to revel in primal bloodlust. But if the same person celebrating the public hanging were to walk into a hotel room with a body hanging from the rafters, or find one of their loved ones hanging, death would suddenly not appear fascinating or amusing or celebratory. Death by public execution is irreal because the victim has been othered, becoming simply an object onto which justice is projected.

In a time when death was more visceral, and daily reminders were all around you, public executions might also seem comforting to the audience in that it's a way for humans to have some seeming control over it. Death can come at any time in any number of random ways. But what if we apply it, on schedule, to those whom we are keeping from possibly causing more death in the future by hanging them? Might that be some comfort? I wouldn't know because I live in the modern era where we deny our mortality for seventy to eighty years before truly grasping the reality that science isn't going to come up with a cure for death "just in the nick of time" for ourselves. It's possible that death became so abstract for Americans that many of them have decided killing other Americans isn't that big a deal. Because what is death other than a few points in a video game or a bunch of criminals shot in the face by various action movie stars?