If only they were forced to be like Judge Dredd and do it themselves. Even the most rabid soldiers sometimes come home from war and turn against it, but judges so treasure their isolation from those they affect, they can always go home and fall asleep easily, thinking, "It all traces back to the pivotal passage in Smith v. Jones...zzz..."
Whenever someone is executed, you will hear talk of "closure." At the same time, those who demand closure insist there can never be any. How could there be? Their grief will never end. I believe them.
So what, then, is this closure they demand? Why can it not be satisfied with a guilty verdict and a lifetime sentence? But no, the grieving insist, it can't. They won't be satisfied with less than death. The continued existence of the convicted one weighs upon them.
It is one thing to hope for closure when it comes to your own life, as with the terminally ill. To demand the slaying of someone else so that it will bring you release — to kill as a form of therapy — is grotesque. Nowadays most people would say that human sacrifice is barbaric. If the death penalty isn't a human sacrifice, what is? It's ultimately not a legal but a religious ordeal. It certainly has an abundance of biblical precedent. To hell, though, with the bible as a law book.
I don't even understand how a guilty verdict and a lifetime sentence could give "closure." Otherwise, we're in agreement here!
Agreed on the ritual/religious aspect of the death penalty (Jack Crow and I have our differences, but he had a good post on that the other day), though I wish people would all of a sudden realize that neither the impulse to ritual nor the impulse to religion need result in violence.
To me, imprisonment and, to a much greater degree, the death penalty are simultaneously utterly banal and incredibly tragic, and result only in the waste of two lives where perhaps only one might have been wasted.
Ethan's working through his music collection in alphabetical order
The next five artists he'll be listening to:
The Clash The Clientele Jimmy Cliff Patsy Cline Clinic
(Project began May 29, 2010. Finished through the letter B on April 1, 2011 with 460 items catalogued on Rate Your Music.)
Ethan's reading
Samuel R. Delany Triton aka Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
Thoughts that aren't getting whole posts
- I just caught my cat licking one of my dirty shirts. When he saw I was watching, he pretended he'd been cleaning himself all along. -ethan 9/23/11
- I didn't know The Pixies covered "I've Been Waiting for You"! So on Heathen, David Bowie covered The Pixies AND a song they covered? Weird. -ethan 9/21/11
- Dangerous Visions is so goddamn macho. And like half the writers are military or "intelligence" or government or advertising dudes. It largely bites. -ethan 9/10/11
- I wish people would figure out that "HD" is not even close to "like you're actually there"--it's completely different from how we really see things. If they figured that out, maybe it would occasionally be used interestingly. -ethan 9/9/11
- Robinson Crusoe on Mars has its major problems, but it looks like a series of living Nicholas Roerich paintings. -ethan 9/3/11
- I just plain don't like Brian Aldiss. -ethan 8/31/11
- Here, at least, it was a good hurricane. I'm embarrassed by how happy I was when the electricity came back on. -ethan 8/28/11
- Is it my imagination or is IOZ way more open about genuinely caring about things since his return? -ethan 8/26/11
- Does Firefox constantly tell British people that they're spelling labour and programme and theatre wrong? -ethan 8/25/11
- There is a huge (and hugely important) difference between knowing that events a, b, and c happened between years x and y, and understanding that they were happening at the same time. -ethan 8/24/11
- Among the many things bugging me about the crappy novel I'm reading is that it keeps referring to a woman whose "late teens" were "forty years ago" as a "little old lady." Come on now, she's 59 at the oldest. -ethan 8/22/11
- Spending a day in the woods is the best thing in the world. -ethan 8/21/11
- Maria Mies: "Powerless groups, particularly if they are totally integrated within a system of power and exploitation, find it difficult to define reality differently from the powerful." -ethan 8/20/11
- The funniest sentence in Frankenstein: "I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition." -ethan 8/18/11
- Chumbawamba: "Nothing ever burned down by itself/Every fire needs a little bit of help." -ethan 8/18/11
- We'll see if I use this. Idea stolen from Davidly. -ethan 8/18/11
8 comments:
If only they were forced to be like Judge Dredd and do it themselves. Even the most rabid soldiers sometimes come home from war and turn against it, but judges so treasure their isolation from those they affect, they can always go home and fall asleep easily, thinking, "It all traces back to the pivotal passage in Smith v. Jones...zzz..."
Did you know that the cause of death written on the death certificate for a state execution is "homicide"?
Sheesh, Richard, I didn't know that. This is one fucked-up world.
I should say, it is for Georgia at least, according to an anti-death penalty activist who was on Democracy Now! last night. Fucked up is right.
"Homicide," or "man killing man," is not necessarily "murder," which has a built-in value judgement.
Words don't have connotations!
Whenever someone is executed, you will hear talk of "closure." At the same time, those who demand closure insist there can never be any. How could there be? Their grief will never end. I believe them.
So what, then, is this closure they demand? Why can it not be satisfied with a guilty verdict and a lifetime sentence? But no, the grieving insist, it can't. They won't be satisfied with less than death. The continued existence of the convicted one weighs upon them.
It is one thing to hope for closure when it comes to your own life, as with the terminally ill. To demand the slaying of someone else so that it will bring you release — to kill as a form of therapy — is grotesque. Nowadays most people would say that human sacrifice is barbaric. If the death penalty isn't a human sacrifice, what is? It's ultimately not a legal but a religious ordeal. It certainly has an abundance of biblical precedent. To hell, though, with the bible as a law book.
I don't even understand how a guilty verdict and a lifetime sentence could give "closure." Otherwise, we're in agreement here!
Agreed on the ritual/religious aspect of the death penalty (Jack Crow and I have our differences, but he had a good post on that the other day), though I wish people would all of a sudden realize that neither the impulse to ritual nor the impulse to religion need result in violence.
To me, imprisonment and, to a much greater degree, the death penalty are simultaneously utterly banal and incredibly tragic, and result only in the waste of two lives where perhaps only one might have been wasted.
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