Where to begin here?
I’ve been glued to the screen all day watching the very dramatic saga of Troy Davis unfold. He was executed just a few minutes ago for a crime (fatally shooting a police officer) that he, just perhaps (which, unless I’m mistaken, is supposed to be enough), didn’t commit.
It should not come as a surprise that, as a dirty stinking liberal, I find the death penalty to be one of the most regrettable accessories of American citizenship — for obvious reasons, and absolutely, but especially in cases where there’s even a slight chance that our country is about to commit an unspeakable crime. I hold my tongue sometimes when it comes to these things, because I really do respect and am often interested in opposing viewpoints. I have plenty (too many?) conservative and Republican pals, who are pretty clever and can enlighten me as to why they hold fast to their cockamamie ideas. I hated the arguments over drinks during the 2004 election, sure, and I certainly hate when people try to make decisions on Jesus’ part regarding my reproductive organs (I especially hate the fact that the HPV vaccine has come under fire: Hey, people! HPV affects men too, and can lead to gender-neutral cancers in the northern hemisphere of your corpus. Whether or not (I think not) getting this vaccine would push some would-be fast tween into the blowjob arena, this is a life-saving medicine). But the point is, I like a little debate. I do.
But look up there at Ann Coulter, reigning antichrist of the right. “Murder!” she twat. Are there really people who think that this is an acceptable response to anything more serious than a bad episode of reality television, this kind of snark and weirdly misplaced glee? Are there really people who get pleasure from the idea of justice in the form of an execution, even when they don’t qualify as a witness or even someone who was directly affected by the crime? I imagine that if someone murdered my husband or my parents, I would go crazy with grief and need the bowels of the earth to open up and swallow whoever was responsible. I would wish pestilence and disease on that person, I would want them to explode in the most horrific and painful way, with biting bugs and poisonous spiders; these are the normal responses of a human being whose loved ones were taken from him or her by another individual. You go to the dark place. You want a Stephen King novel written especially for the criminal, like a cross between Thinner and Cujo. Anorexia with a side of rabies. Yes, you want that person to die, not only to die but to perish. This is human. This is not government: government moderates the human impulses we try to pretend aren’t within each of us. Our court system says, “Cool your jets, man. Think about it.” If I thought about it, I could not will the world to swallow anyone, even (this is hard) Ann Coulter. But Ann Coulter should be some stupid woman in a bar, ranting to a revolving door of comparatively-reasonable people who catch a whiff of her crazy and leave midway through their Coronas. Instead, she had an audience of nearly 74,000 people who caught her tweet. How can this be?
Normally, words like “heartbreak” and “sadness” are reserved for more intimate, personal problems, at least around here (by which I mean: in my head). But I felt heartbroken to see the execution unfold in real time; I felt helpless, and I know a lot of other people (mostly stinking liberals, I love our corner of the web) felt that way. Maybe you get to an age where your focus shifts outwards. You see the patchwork quilt of a country with Ann Coulters and Tea Partiers and the war on Planned Parenthood as you used to see your own little staged dramatic plays: deeply important, a reflection of you as an American and a person, and almost unbearably depressing. To disagree is one thing; to disrespect is another thing entirely. It should all upset us — not too deeply, of course; that’s dangerous, you can’t live that way — because the victim was one of us, just as the accused was. The whole thing was horrible, but now it skirts the epic word that has been unfortunately reappropriated to describe unflattering miniskirts: tragic. Whether or not you think justice was served tonight, a body count which was one is now two, and as deeply embarrassing as Coulter’s response was, what’s worse is that (zooming out, polishing the lens of your glasses) there are people who agree with her. So many, you could fill whatever hell’s answer to Madison Square Garden is with them. Take a look down there and try to incorporate that into your cultural identity: they’re cheering because of something for which we share a shameful responsibility. The only spoonful of sugar that’s an acceptable chaser to this reality is a kind of faith in what your version of humanism is: to respect and protect human life, even when a deep and dark part of you, a victimized part, says fuck it. That’s all there is, when you’re hovering up there staring at your country down below and wondering what’s going to happen to all of us.
