Читать книгу Dispatches from the Race War - Tim Wise - Страница 17

THERE IS AN especially trenchant scene in the documentary film Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead, in which Blecker—the nation’s most prominent pro-death penalty scholar—travels to Tennessee’s Riverbend Prison for the execution of convicted murderer Daryl Holton. Blecker is adamant that Holton, who murdered his children, deserves to die for his crime. Yet, when he gets to the prison on the evening of Holton’s electrocution, Blecker is disturbed not only by the anti-death penalty forces but also by those who have come to cheer the state-sponsored killing. He agrees with their position, but can’t understand why they feel it necessary to celebrate death, to party as Holton’s life is taken.

The event is somber, he explains. Human life is precious, he insists; so valuable, in fact, that occasionally we must take the lives of killers to reinforce respect for it. But, he notes, there is no reason to revel in the death of another. His pleas for solemnity fall on deaf ears. His ideological compatriots cannot comprehend him. Even as he tells them he is on their side of the issue, they presume that his unwillingness to cheer the death of one as evil as Holton means he must not care about the children Holton killed. Ultimately, Blecker walks away shaken, not in his support for capital punishment, but by how others on his side seem to glorify death, even need it.

I was reminded of this scene while watching coverage of the celebrations around the country that began last night, when it was announced that Osama bin Laden was dead. In front of the White House were thousands of affluent, mostly white college students from George Washington and Georgetown Universities, partying like it was spring break. Never needing an excuse to binge drink, the collegians responded to the news of bin Laden’s death as though their team had just won the Final Four. That none of them would have had the guts to go and fight the war they seem to support so vociferously—after all, a stint in the military might disrupt their plans to work on Wall Street, or get in the way of their spring formal—matters not, one supposes. They have other people to do the hard work for them. They always have. In New York, the multitudes may have been more economically diverse, but the revelry was similar. Lots of flags, chants of “USA, USA,” and an attitude akin to what one might experience at a BCS Bowl game. Once again, all of it was led mostly by guys who would never, themselves, have gone to war, to get bin Laden or anyone else.

You have to wonder—actually, you don’t, because the answer is so apparent—would such throngs pour into the streets to celebrate if it were announced that a cure for cancer had been discovered, or a cure for AIDS? Would thousands of people be jumping up and down belting out patriotic chants if the president announced that our country’s scientists had found a way to wipe out all childhood diseases, malnutrition, or malaria in poor countries around the world?

Though these maladies kill far more than bin Laden ever dreamed of, there is almost no chance that such an announcement would be met with drunken revelry. Partying is what we do when we kill people, when we beat someone. It is not what we do when we save lives or end suffering.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not a pacifist. I know there are times when violence may be necessary, either in self-defense, in defense of others, or to prevent greater violence. If you were to break into my house and attempt to harm my family, I would be willing to kill you without so much as a moment’s hesitation. But I would not, upon taking your life, crack a cold one, invite friends over and dance around your bloody body. I would not be happy about what I had done. Taking a life, even when you have no choice, is no cause for joy. It is a grave and serious event, and utterly unnatural, such that militaries have to dehumanize their enemies and work furiously to break down their soldiers’ natural human tendencies not to kill. The fact that violence may be necessary in some instances, and even in the case of stopping bin Laden, cannot, in and of itself, justify raucous celebrations of his death at the hands of the United States.

Saying that bin Laden deserved to die is the easy part. Beyond what one deserves, whether they be terrorists or just street criminals, there is the matter of what society needs. And it may be that what we need is less bombastic rhetoric and jingoistic nationalism, even if that means that we have to respond to the news of bin Laden’s death by being thankful in private, but not turning the matter into a public spectacle. When we do the latter, we cheapen matters of life and death to little more than a contest whose results can be tallied on a scoreboard.

It may prove cathartic that bin Laden is dead. But that doesn’t render it the proper subject of a pep rally. Ultimately, the mentality of human disposability is what historically connects settler-colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and war. Such a mindset perpetuates itself without end, and serves to ratify the same in others. We should strive to do better, even when, for various reasons, we can’t manage it and are required to take life for one reason or another. Most soldiers, after all, are not happy about the things they’ve done in war. For many, killing even when you have no choice, is life-changing. It scars. It comes back in the middle of the night, haunting the soldier’s dreams for years and sometimes forever. We do not honor their sacrifices by treating the mortal decisions they have to make as if they were no more gut-wrenching than those made while playing a video game.

Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than the celebrations unleashed in the wake of bin Laden’s demise was the cynical way in which President Obama suggested his killing proved “America can do whatever we set our mind to.” If this is the lesson of bin Laden’s death, it means we must not want to end child poverty, excess mortality rates in communities of color, or food insecurity for millions of families. After all, we don’t address these with nearly the aplomb we manifest in killing our adversaries.

We are, if the president is serious here, a nation that has limited its marketable talents to the deployment of violence. We can’t fix our schools or build adequate levees to protect a city like New Orleans from floodwaters, but we can kill you. We can’t reduce infant mortality to anywhere near the level of other industrialized nations, but we can kill you. We can’t break the power of Wall Street bankers or jail those who helped orchestrate the global financial collapse, but we can kill you. We can’t protect LGBTQ youth from bullying in schools, or ensure equal opportunity for all in the labor market, but we can kill you.

Somewhere, I suspect, there is a young child—maybe the age of one of my own—who is sitting in front of a television tonight in Karachi, or Riyadh. And they’re watching footage of some fraternity boy, American flag wrapped around his back, cheering the death of someone this child believes, for whatever fucked-up reason, is a hero, and now, a martyr. And I know that this child will likely do what all such children do: forget almost nothing, remember almost everything, and plan for the day when they will make you remember it too, and when you will know their name. And if (or when) that day comes, the question will be, was your party worth it?