Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Wednesday with Ward (and much more)
As promised, another excerpt from Ward Churchill’s new book, Since Predator Came:
“One of the more perplexing problems confronting contemporary socio-political theorists concerns the persistence of genocide, both as an overt instrument of state policy and as an almost incidental by-product of the functioning of advanced industrial society. While it can be said with virtual certainty that genocide today exists on a widespread and possibly growing basis, it cannot be correspondingly contended that the phenomenon is understood. At the most fundamental level, it may be asserted hat we presently lack even a coherent and viable description of the processes and circumstances implied by the term ‘genocide’.”
Order here: http://tinyurl.com/bf7h3
“The point at issue is that whole cultures, whole peoples, are being forced to cease to exist as such. The result is genocide, whether such elimination is accomplished in the name of racial/cultural superiority on the one hand, or on the basis of technological/economic development on the other. Until the principle is accepted that the essence of genocide is to be discovered in the coercive elimination of humans groups per se, by whatever means and under any rubric, the term will likely not only remain ill-defined, but largely devoid of any practical meaning at all.”
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Herman Hesse sez:
“We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing.”
Other stuff:
FBI put peaceful protesters in terrorism files
http://tinyurl.com/c736h
E-Mails Expose Katrina PR Woes
http://tinyurl.com/72wlf
(Thanks, Linda)
For Rexroth fans:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth
Sneering at Redemption: Why Arnold Killed Tookie (by Dave Zirin)
http://www.alternet.org/story/29497
I have another op-ed in the free NYC newspaper Metro today, re: the death penalty. Again, since it’s not on-line, you can read it by clicking on the word more at the end of this post.
Last but certainly not least: A big congrats to my wife Michele. Yesterday, she finished her Masters program in pediatric physical therapy.
That’s Michele (one L) in the blue shirt at Barnes & Noble last week. With her is Michelle (two L’s)...one of our dearest friends. (Photo by Michelle’s husband, Sacha Lecca.)
That’s all, folks...
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Thoughts Inspired by Tookie
Mickey Z.
Stanley “Tookie” Williams is dead. The co-founder of the Crips was executed yesterday, despite an astonishing turnabout in his life. Now that the country-wide protests and countless appeals to the Supreme Court and to Gov. Arnold were for naught, can Tookie’s death provoke a deeper discussion about capital punishment?
Roughly 3300 human beings languish on death row all across the land of the free. Some are guilty, some innocent, some mentally disabled...but all await a taxpayer-subsidized death. Why? Nancy Reagan proposes: “I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.”
The most common justification given for capital punishment is deterrence: fear of death will deter humans from taking another life.
“Deterrence?” asks Mumia Abu-Jamal, perhaps America’s best-known death row inhabitant. “The March 1988 execution of Willie Darden in Florida ... should have had enormous deterrent effect, according to capital theories. But less than eleven hours after two thousand volts coursed through Darden’s manacled flesh, a Florida corrections officer, well positioned to absorb and understand the lessons of the state ritual, erupted in a jealous rage and murdered a man in the maternity wing of a hospital. Seems like a lesson well learned to me.”
And whom is this lesson geared towards? Forty-two percent of the death row population is African-American, an ethnic group that constitutes a mere 12 percent of the nation’s people as a whole. As Abu-Jamal muses, “You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else.”
A second rationale, one that could only exist in a society conditioned to accept monetary value as a viable barometer, is cost. In purely dispassionate financial terms, an execution is cheaper than long-term incarceration, they declare. However, State-sponsored murders are rarely swift (although Bill Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act did eliminate some of those pesky constitutional protections and sped things up a bit). In fact, the Dallas Morning News once calculated that the average execution in Texas cost $2.3 million, compared to the cost of $750,000 to keep a human behind bars for 40 years. When you factor in new technology that may eventually make it possible to monitor prisoners in their own homes, that figure may drop even further. Hence, even if we insist on putting a price tag on life itself, it still falls short as a justification for capital punishment.
Finally, we have the retribution crowd. “An eye for an eye,” they bellow. “Let the punishment fit the crime,” is the rallying cry.
If this is truly our idea of justice, we are obviously living in a society that is not held to a higher standard than that of its “worst” criminals-a State that is no better or more civilized than the murderer it chooses to punish. We do not rape the rapist nor do we burn down the house of the arsonist, why then do we murder the man or woman charged with taking a life?
A State that wishes its citizens to respect human life must lead by example. How can anyone expect the increasingly superfluous masses to lay down their weapons and be pacifist when our own elected leaders solve all their problems through violence and our own government is the largest arms dealer the world has ever known?
Capital punishment is not the way a humane, civilized society based on solidarity, justice, and freedom operates.
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
