Quote:
Originally Posted by Rad_Hazard
Incredibly sad story and thanks for doing the footwork. Regardless of the crimes involved, carrying a piece of lynching rope would only bring bad mojo in my book. I don't really care for Anson and his racist past so I don't collect his cards, but I also collect cards I like that are morally bankrupt in other ways, so I don't really have a leg to stand on.
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Carrying a piece of lynch rope for luck is, of course, not as bad as actually doing said lynching, but it is such an odd thing to encounter. Rough street justice or perceived justice, racial and not racial, has been a norm for the vast majority of human history, but this little anecdote surprises. An all-around tragedy, the mechanism of it's sad and bloody conclusion turned into a good luck charm. History is often more strange than any fiction.
I do not mean this in a personal or negative way to anyone, but I find it endlessly interesting that today we see and treat racism (Anson's crime of thought, after the fact) as in many ways worse than even murder itself, that most absolute and final of all things (Simpson's crime of action, and a crime when committed). Anson is more objected to than Simpson, a statue of Semmes is pulled down for a memorial to a fellow who apparently committed a homicide without any dispute that he did. It dots our culture in many ways and places, and it surely says something about who we are as a people today, but I am not quite smart enough to put my finger on exactly what that is.