If only I could lose my head, I thought, I’d be mindless-a happy camper at last. Nonetheless, there is such a thing as too much critical distance, and the little me inside my skull, the garrulous homunculus that insinuated its hyper-intellectual interpretations between me and everything I experienced, made me want to take a load off my shoulders with an axe, sometimes. To be sure, a Marcuse-ian critical distance was all that stood between me and the intellectual horrors of being mellowed to death, in the real-life Margaritaville of San Diego where I grew up. In the SoCal of my youth, brooding existentialists in black turtlenecks were sentenced to re-education in Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth. It was alienating, this internal voice, turning me into a neurotic loner from a Bergman film who had somehow ended up in laid-back Southern California, harshing everyone’s buzz. Solipsism is a singleton’s birthright, and I lived with a nonstop monologue inside my head-an ever-present voiceover that converted the world (the Not-Me) into the Me through an act of philosophical data-processing: the instant, reflexive categorization and critiquing of everything around me. My status as an only child compounded such problems. Twilight Zone comics, read by flashlight, under the covers, and the Aurora “Monster Scenes” model kits in the hobby shop window (among them a working, 1:15-scale guillotine whose plastic blade stood poised to decapitate the little victim that came with it) provided the raw material for imaginary beheadings whose symbolism was groaningly obvious: what better pain reliever for a loner who practically lived at the local library and whose grade-school head was already a wasp’s nest of hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities, not to mention the fascinating factlets I was gleaning from all the books I was reading? Sometimes, it felt as if my skull was about to explode from the hyperbaric pressure of too much thinking. When I was truly depressed, bummed by a life grown way too complicated in the midst of what was supposed to be the endless summer of a California boyhood, I’d daydream about decapitation. Such scenarios were all in good, mean fun. This suggestion was rejected some accounts describe the Doctor being laughed, albeit nervously, out of the Assembly.Although (or maybe because) I grew up in sunny Southern California in the late 1960s, I was a morbid child, much given to Poe, Hammer horror films, and lovingly embroidered visions of a premature death-revenge fantasies in which my grief-crazed parents had to be physically restrained from hurling themselves into the grave as shovelfuls of earth thudded on my little coffin (“Bury me with him! Why, oh, why, sweet Jesus, didn’t we get him that Mattel Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker he begged us for!?!”). The machine was also hidden from the view of large crowds, according with Guillotin's view that execution should be private and dignified. Guillotin presented an etching that illustrated one possible device, resembling an ornate, but hollow, stone column with a falling blade, operated by an effete executioner cutting the suspension rope. This was to be carried out by a simple machine, and involve no torture. Guillotin proposed six articles to the new Legislative Assembly, one of which called for decapitation to become the sole method of execution in France.
On October 10th 1789 - the second day of the debate about France's penal code - Dr. The legal system was reviewed immediately. A meeting called an Estates General transformed into a National Assembly which seized control of the moral and practical power at the heart of France, a process which convulsed the country, re-shaping the country's social, cultural and political makeup. The French Revolution began in 1789, when an attempt to relieve a financial crisis exploded very much in the faces of the monarchy.