My septuagenarian friend M. is fond of repeating a quote from the movie Sling Blade: "some folks just needs killin'." 

It's not that the world is more nuanced than a Hollywood movie.  Increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion that if anything these days it's the other way around.  It's just that, it's not always as easy to find a developmentally disabled executioner with a heart of gold willing to off the bad guys with a lawn mower blade, alas. 

Where's central casting when you need 'em, y'know?

Sling Blade gave us a happy ending (a rural Arkansas kind of happy ending, at least), but real life is not all rainbows and mullets.  Still, even to the tortured conscience of a liberal, the truth that "some people should die" is "unconscious knowledge" (as Perry Farrell once put it in a pop song).  

This primordial knowledge should make us squirm.  Our history of violence is part of our genetic and social inheritance.  And while recent scholarship by the likes of Steven Pinker shows that in many ways we are getting kinder and gentler (believe it or not), the violence that we have found so many ways to sublimate is still just barely submerged, and in some ways actually right there on the glittery surface — our entertainment is awash in it. 

Our genius as a species is in finding new ways to live - and even to die — vicariously.  First by human proxies (think: Gladiator, but all spectator sports tap into this yen for projecting ourselves into the action).  And nowadays we have the option of cyberproxies. 

Our entire popular culture is built on the undeniable appeal of virtual sex and violence, which are often intertwined.  It is remarkable, in fact, that at least in the West we find ourselves living in relative peace when our collective fantasy is awash in such violence.  Maybe there's a correlation.

I mean, is this a modern way of managing an ancient urge?  Because we do seem to be managing it, as Pinker points out. 

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

Has reason tamed violence? 

The virtual violence of our culture is a violence without consequence, or almost.  At least not for us.  At least until, as with the increasing use of drones in warfare abroad, The Virtual colonization of The Real is complete and the tables are turned. 

We really may have mastered violence to an extraordinary extent — that's what the history of civilization is about, and we expect it of civilized adults as well.  But the urge is there.  Studies suggest (Pinker reminds us) that "at least 80 percent of people"— obviously some liberals among them —"have fantasized about killing someone they don't like."

Most don't get around to doing it in reality, it seems.  Like most things we daydream about, we're too clever by half to carry them through.

It's the logistics of the thing that prove especially daunting. 

The fact is not killin' folks that just needs killin' is one of those painful sacrifices we make to live in a civilized society.  It's probably just as well, if you want to know the truth.  A lot can go wrong with killin'.  Turns out it takes coordination, and tends to carry a lot of inconvenient consequences. 

But people and ideas can be pernicious, and tolerance may not seem, in the short-term at least, a very satisfying approach to either. 

I'll admit I have had a couple "some folks needs killin'" moments this political silly season, especially with the GOP airing its heirs apparent.  And for the worst reason — ideology. 

None of these folks have done anything too awful themselves (no matter how you feel about Perry's role in the execution of 230 people — you have to admit he didn't strangle them bare-handed himself, although I'm sure he'd have liked to) but it sometimes seems the only way to stop their patent and oft-repeated inanities and their shameless fanning of sectarian flames is for them to choke on a boiled egg, or something.

Now, if only there were a video game for that.