Everyone was called back for the 2nd week, and then that same Monday I was called in again to the courtroom as a potential juror for a murder trial, although I wasn't called up into the box for the first round of jurors or even for the second round, where they finally got enough people to sit and enough alternates.
Since last time they had been so interested in content overlaps with what I've studied at the graduate level, I sat there and started collating a list of everything related to killing and death in my head, for if I was asked that again:
- I've taught on why cults go violent, which includes not only self-directed violence (the mass suicides of the Heavens Gate UFO cult), but also cults that kill (e.g. the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system), for which I assigned students victim testimonies.
- One of the most moving experiences in my life was meeting Peoples Temple survivors at an academic conference and looking at personal photo albums from Jonestown and before, the photos of which certainly included the dead, and everyone who died at Jonestown wasn't a suicide (a common misconception about that mass casualty event).
- For academic writing, I've covered stuff like ISKCON killings (the Hare Krishnas).
- For popular writing, I've delved into why Luigi Mangione snuffed a CEO (radicalization through stuff like self help literature).
- For the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively since the pandemic, I read about stuff like enculturated corpse mutilation and display during warfare and retainer sacrifice and I have even attended an online conference where retainer sacrifice was covered... A local animator who got cancelled who I'm friends with has gotten interested in this topic, too, so like over the past couple months we read an Open Access academic book about human sacrifice and ritual killing in Antiquity, and just that past week we discussed things like evidence for Phoenician child sacrifice (a lot of early excavations were mishandled, but it seems that they did indeed sacrifice babies and infants), as well as headhunting in the more-recent past.
- For the one ancient language that I've been studying since the pandemic, I've been regularly reading through an ancient text corpus over the past couple of years, and it includes stuff like spells to help the king ascend in the afterlife through his slaughtering and consuming the gods.
- For the one ancient language that I've been studying since the pandemic, a major theme is magic that threatens the gods, and I have a recent article where I translated some magic words and it turns out to be a magician's threat to hunt down and knife and kill a deity, if he doesn't do what you want.
That is like so much stuff, that you could easily forget to list it all out in the moment. And I mean, if they want to know if you watch Law and Order and have been a victim of a crime or if you've seen gunshot victims when you're a nurse at work, I'm sure they'd want to know academic work around murder and killing and whatnot.
I wonder what would have happened if I had been called up and if I actually listed all of that off from the jurybox, in like an extended monologue: "Peoples Temples survivors," "ritual killing," Luigi Mangione... Some (black) family members (of the victim?) were in the back observing jury selection, so they probably would have been like wtf, and maybe the defendants too.
I would have stressed after all of this that I was being serious and that this occurred in formal syllabi and in peer-reviewed publications etc. and that it was only a small part of my work over the course of like 20 years, but I still wonder what they would have thought about me, probably that I was a freak or something.
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