The Scaffold
The Scaffold
Beginning with an outline as a young lawyer around 1960 and finally completed in prison as a tax resister 50 or so years later, J. Tony Serra has completed his first novel, THE SCAFFOLD: A Treason Death Penalty Trial.
Taking place historically during the Second World War in the South Pacific with U.S.P.T. Boats, Japanese zero attack planes, and on an island paradise, this court martial trial is filled with Serra's legal career experiences but is an example of life as absurdity, all aspects of life are metaphors of absurdity, thinking intellectually in the Theater of the Absurd.
The message, if there is a message, is that war is absurd; treason is absurd; the death penalty is absurd and that platonic love is humanity's only redemption. A native son of San Francisco, J. Tony Serra has dedicated his life to defending society's outcasts.
ISBN: 978-0-9839264-8-1
Excerpt from The Scaffold:
He recited, almost chanted, all of the poetry he could remember. He brought into his consciousness vast distances filled with butterflies and rainbows. He smiled buddhistically at the panoply of mixed colors and projected them, mind-funneled them into the courtroom. He saw the entire court setting, the judges’ area, the lawyers’ area, the spectators’ area of the court consumed, filled, brimming with floating flying fluttering butterflies, and invaded by hundreds of opalescent rainbows. He would be tried for treason in a domain of fanciful esthetic beauty. He smiled pensively, sitting cross-legged for hours unaware of the passing of time. He forgave everything that had hurt him and that which threatened him beyond his understanding. He forgave the death of Sava, he forgave the war, he forgave Serrata’s prosecution of him; he forgave the law of treason and the law of death penalty. He forgave the media for condemning him; he even forgave that part of himself that unknowingly had brought him to his present situation. He became the Buddha for a small but certain moment and radiated rays of light through divine mediums of empathy, compassion and forgiveness. He self-consummated. He was ready for the trial of his life.
