The Spammer Sword of Justice

The topic for today is: Why Spam should be outlawed.

Before you load your Mini-14 and start looking for me, calm down. I’m not talking about Spam, the food. I’m talking about Spam, the junk e-mail. It’s every bit as common here in the CNMI as it is in the big city. And it’s getting worse. A lot worse.

I used to pride myself on good e-mail hygiene, keeping the addresses of my serious working accounts away from bozos and dingbats, who always manage somehow to get every address they’ve ever encountered on a Spam list of some sort. Now I’m in the process of changing my accounts around, and have redoubled my resolve to keep things clean. Thanks to the world’s spammers, handing out your working e-mail address is every bit as risky as broadly circulating your home phone number.

Spam is the ultimate weapon of scoundrels and cowards. Any loser with nothing but lint in his wallet can flood a zillion email boxes with his lame advertising, which nobody wants to see. Spam is an invasion of privacy, big time, and one in which the victim is the one who bears all the costs.

It is, therefore, an imperfection in the free market, and one that I’d be happy to see eliminated. I’m not usually one to call on government to solve the world’s problems. However, when it comes to Spam, we need an elite squad of police computer commandos to hunt down the offenders.

I’m thinking death penalty here, or, at the very least, a public flogging and Arab style amputation of both hands. We could do all this on the spacious grounds in front of the Nauru building. Let’s make an event of it. We could even sell tickets to tourists.

The amputated hands could be donated to science, or, better yet, parted out and sold as souvenirs. It would add new meaning to the term giving someone “the finger.”

For the Spammer flogging event, I will happily preside as emcee and High Executioner….

…The fires of sacrifice are lit. Two virgins will bang the Gong of Vengeance. I will take center stage–-shirtless, with the brutal and bulging muscles of my honed physique drawing loud gasps of admiration from the crowd-–and draw the Sword of Justice. Several hooded DPS computer police commandos will bring the convicted Spammer up to the chopping block. His panicked pleas for mercy will be drowned out by the yelling of the crowd. Then I’ll chop his hands off, we’ll sacrifice the virgins, a Filipino guy will sell raffle tickets for a 1972 Chevy Vega, and we’ll all call it a day.

Such is the plan. This will, of course, require immediate and enlightened action from our legislature. I hope they act soon. If they don’t, I know what to do. I’ll start Spamming them.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”