God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (11 page)

experience was a real honey! I interviewed John body lies

in the grave,

but whose truth goes marchin'

One hundred forty

years ago, come October

he was hanged for treason

against the United States of America. At the head of a force of only eighteen other anti-slavery fanatics, he captured the virtually unguarded Federal Armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. His plan?To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.

Law-abiding citizens opened fire from all sides, killing eight of his men, two of them his sons. He
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self was taken prisoner by a force of United States Marines, sworn to uphold the Constitution. Their commander was Colonel Robert

Lee.

John Brown wears a hangman's noose for a necktie up in Heaven. I asked him about it, and he said,

"Where's yours? Where's yours?" His eyes were like glowing coins. "Without shedding of he said, "there is no remission of sin." It turns out that's in the New Testament, Hebrews I congratulated him on what

said on his way to

be hanged before a gleeful, jeering throng of white folks. I quote: "This is a beautiful country." In only five words, he had somehow encapsulated the full horror of the most hideous legal atrocities committed by a civilized nation until the Holocaust.

"Slavery was legal under American law," he said.

"The Holocaust was legal under German law," he said. John Brown is a Connecticut Yankee, born in He said there was a Virginian, Thomas
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